Ontario passed a law to shield tenants from such evictions back in 2023, but the rules haven’t kicked in yet. Which provincial party will enact them?
It’s election season and I have one request: that the province enforce regulations already passed by the Ontario legislature to deal with bad faith renovictions so we at the municipal level don’t have to.
Bad faith renovictions happen when landlords falsely claim they need a tenant to move out so that extensive renovations can be done to the unit, which then allows landlords to rent it out anew at a much higher rate. This often results in pricing economically vulnerable tenants out of housing altogether.
There are necessary renovations that require vacating the unit, and there is a process for that. But evidently the process is not stringent enough to discourage bad faith actors from throwing people out of their home to make more money.
Somerset Coun. Ariel Troster successfully got Ottawa Council to vote in favour of a motion directing staff to look, again, at the feasibility of a renoviction bylaw, and she is passionate about this issue. In an interview, she said more than 3,000 people in Ottawa are in shelters or are unsheltered right now.
Not every unhoused person has been renovicted, to be clear, but renovictions happen and Troster says we have to do something about the crisis. “The easiest way to tackle homelessness is to stop it before it starts.”
Under existing legislation, landlords need an “N13” notice to evict a tenant for major renovations. Troster says Ottawa saw an increase of 500 per cent in N13 evictions between 2020 and 2023, “and that included a year when there was a moratorium on evictions.” She adds that official numbers don’t represent the whole picture since some tenants either don’t know the extent of their rights, are intimidated into leaving, or are offered cash for keys.
“The profile of the kind of person that we’re seeing who’s being most often renovicted in my ward (is) senior women, often women who live on fixed incomes, who’ve lived in their apartment for 20 or 30 years and suddenly have nowhere to go. It’s not a dignified way to age,” she says.
In the summer of 2023, legislative amendments to tighten tenant protection against bad faith renovictions (part of Bill 97, Helping Homebuyers, Protecting Tenants Act, 2023) received royal assent in Ontario but have yet to come into force. You can see, at the very bottom of the bill, that the part addressing renovictions is set to come into force at an unspecified date to be proclaimed by the Lieutenant Governor. This has yet to happen.
Ideally those amendments could be proclaimed into force and the province could deal with what is, as per the Constitution, an area of provincial jurisdiction. That would please Troster and her fellow council members, too. “The ultimate goal is that (the recent motion by the city) pushes the province to do what it’s supposed to do. But it’s another one of these scenarios where huge problems have been downloaded on cities and we don’t have the tools to solve them.”
Apart from the human cost of renovictions, there is also a huge financial burden imposed on the city every time someone is evicted and ends up in shelters or worse. Those are reasons why the cities of Toronto and Hamilton recently enacted their own renoviction bylaws.
Troster’s second motion passed in part because councillors, including those representing wards very far from downtown, are aware of the costs imposed on everyone by provincial inaction. “That’s where I actually get along with economic conservatives,” Troster says with more than just a hint of a smile, “because they know, and I know, that the cost of homelessness, allowing it to continue, is more expensive than solving it at the end of the day.”
I do not know a single person who’s against protecting tenants from abusive evictions. The provincial legislature has already adopted amendments to that effect. We just need to proclaim them into force. How hard can this be? This election, ask the provincial candidates in your riding for their commitment to ending bad faith renovictions.
Brigitte Pellerin (they/them) is an Ottawa writer.
