Reducing rent prices was the plan and to be honest, the obvious outcome when demand goes down.

I live in a small CA mountain town that was "the only town open" during COVID, and as such, Airbnb went apeshit. Well the market got oversaturated and now with people trying to offload these properties or rent them out to long term residents , and shocker, rents are coming down (along with home prices). We still have yoyos trying to get $4k/mo for a 2/1 piece of shit because I'm guessing they're upside down on their mortgage, but those properties have been sitting on the market for at least 6mos. I have zero empathy for the people that bought high and losing their asses because they wanted to make it rich at the expense of our local population.

But the land lords told us Airbnb doesn't effect rental prices and actually let's people afford homes!

What happened is the province made short-term rentals only legal for primary residences and secondary suites.
That sure helped some, but you can still find airbnb/vrbo listings in Victoria.

Was there tourism in Victoria and what happened to it after the ban? I'm not clever enough to predict what exactly the consequences might be, but I was always interested in what could happen from banning all short-term rental (although maybe that's not the case?)