In just under 30 days Doug Ford has rammed through Bill 60, a sweeping omnibus bill which makes it easier for landlords to evict tenants and raise rents.
An attack on rent control
The bill removes the obligation for landlords to provide one month of rent compensation when evicting tenants for “personal use,” provided they give 120 days notice.
“Personal use” evictions are a well-known trick used by landlords to increase their rent prices. Usually rental units in Ontario are subject to a 2.5 per cent cap on year-over-year rent increases. However, empty units are not subject to any rent control. Landlords are thus incentivized to evict their tenants under the pretense of “personal use”, then later re-list the same unit with a hugely inflated price.
The number of “personal use” evictions in the province has risen by 85 per cent since 2020. But with Bill 60 there are going to be even fewer barriers to landlords using this loophole to massively increase rent.
The astounding thing is that the bill that passed was actually a toned-down version. The original proposed to convert all rental agreements into fixed-term leases, after which landlords could evict their tenants without reason, and re-list the now empty unit for whatever price they see fit. This would have effectively ended rent control in Ontario.
This original proposal faced significant criticism and Ford was forced to back down. However, the intention is clear: Ford is targeting the limited protections that renters have that stand in the way of landlords maximizing their profit.
Speeding up evictions
Bill 60 also includes measures to help kick people out of their homes faster. Landlords can now file for eviction after just seven days of non-payment, down from 15 previously. Tenants have just 15 days to appeal an eviction order, down from 30. And tenants can no longer introduce evidence of landlord harassment or lack of maintenance during their eviction hearing to the Landlord and Tenant’s Board (LTB).
Scandalously, the bill also introduces a requirement for tenants to repay 50 per cent of rent arrears before they can challenge an eviction order. For the half of Canadians who are living paycheque to paycheque, this means that a missed paycheque, an unexpected bill, or an injury that kept them from work could rob them of legal recourse against eviction.
To make evictions easier, the bill also permits the hiring of an undisclosed number of eviction “sheriffs”; enforcement officers used to force tenants out of their homes.
This will obviously further exacerbate the homelessness crisis by throwing people onto the streets. With municipalities across the province declaring states of emergency due to the homelessness crisis, one must ask: is the most pressing issue in Ontario housing how quickly we can evict people from their homes?
Worsening the housing crisis
Doug Ford’s government has claimed that this bill will encourage landlords to list their units, which would otherwise be kept off the rental market. He says the measures taken in Bill 60 will unlock hundreds of thousands of rental units.
This argument does not hold water. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives estimates there are fewer than 20,000 empty residential units in Ontario. A figure far from the 1.3 million units that need to be made available by 2030 in order to restore rent affordability.
In a way, Ford has pointed to a problem: some particularly greedy landlords are withholding rental units until they have conditions in which they can more easily exploit their tenants.
But passing a law to help them will obviously make the situation far worse. Private landlords, by definition, are the main culprits of the rental crisis.
Doug Ford, basing himself on private ownership and capitalism, has no solutions. This is because the only way to solve the rental crisis would be to expropriate these delinquent landlords, greedy developers and Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) and launch a massive public plan to build hundreds of thousands of rental units. This socialist solution is the only way to create more affordable housing. Bill 60 is a reactionary bill that will make the situation far worse and in the process line the pockets of Ford’s landlord friends.
