The Ford government has backtracked on ending indefinite leases for tenants, which would have effectively ended rent control, but its new housing bill will still make renters’ lives more difficult, tenant advocates say.
“There’s a lot of garbage in this bill,” Chiara Padovani, co-founder of the York South-Weston Tenant Union, told tenants on an organizing call Sunday, Oct. 26.
More than 550 tenants from across Ontario joined the call, which was billed as a chance to organize against Premier Doug Ford’s move to end indefinite leases. The government walked back the move just hours before the call, but Padovani urged tenants to fight the other measures in the bill. “Not a single one of these changes that the government is calling ‘common sense changes’ benefits tenants,” she said. “Every single one is directed at landlords.”
If passed, Bill 60, or the Fighting Delays, Building Faster Act, will:
- Allow landlords to move to evict tenants only seven days after they miss a rent payment, instead of the current 14 days;
- Bar tenants from raising new issues like harassment and maintenance at a Landlord-Tenant Board (LTB) hearing about non-payment of rent, unless the tenant can pay 50 per cent of what the landlord says they owe;
- Remove a requirement that landlords compensate tenants when they evict them from a unit that they want for themselves or their family members, as long as the landlord provides 120 days’ notice;
- Reduce the amount of time that tenants have to ask for a review of an LTB order from 30 days to 15 days;
- Give the government the power to limit when LTB adjudicators can postpone evictions, which currently happens when tenants have children or a disability;
- Hire eight new temporary enforcement staff to work with eviction sheriffs.
“These changes restrict tenants’ access to justice and will lead to increased evictions and displacement,” the Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario (ACTO) said in a press release.
The requirement that tenants pay 50 per cent of their arrears before they can raise their own issues at an LTB hearing for non-payment of rent is particularly unfair, ACTO explained.
“When units are in serious disrepair with impacts on tenants’ health and safety, withholding all or part of the rent to trigger an arrears hearing is often the only way to have these issues heard at the Board in a timely manner. Wait times for tenant applications at the LTB are twice as long as landlord applications, which these proposed reforms fail to address. Furthermore, requiring tenants to pay 50% of their arrears to raise their issues assumes that tenants actually owe these arrears before the matter is even heard.”
Padovani also points out that the rule assumes that the landlord’s accounting is correct. “The amount of just bad accounting that landlords do is actually quite surprising,” she said.
But Padovani also told tenants on the call that the government’s reversal on indefinite leases is a sign that renters do have power. “They’re on the retreat,” she said. “It shows that we are powerful, that they are afraid of the organizing [that] tenants have already done.”
Padovani urged tenants to call Ford and their members of provincial parliament to demand rent control on all buildings, a ban on above-guideline rent increases, and vacancy control, which would prevent landlords from jacking up the rent between tenants.