The Green Party of Ontario focused on freezing urban boundaries to fight sprawl and pushed for higher-density zoning so more residents don't need to rely on cars.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
The main parties vying to unseat Ontario’s government are promising different flavours of rent control, while the ruling Progressive Conservatives are offering little in the way of new rules to protect people who don’t own their homes.
The latest Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) data for Ontario shows rent increases slowing in most urban areas in 2021, but the cumulative effect of recent hikes has meant that many households are still spending an increasingly large share of income on rent just as high inflation is hitting almost every other consumer category.
Renting is just one part of the housing affordability picture (about 35 per cent of Ontario residents are renters), and all the parties have pledged to increase the supply of homes by boosting new construction. However, the PCs only used the word “renters” once in their pre-election budget, in an unspecific promise to “protect homebuyers, homeowners and renters.”
The Ontario Liberal Party’s platform includes a pledge to reverse the deregulation of rent increases for units built after 2018, which was introduced by Doug Ford’s government. Liberal Leader Steven Del Duca was in cabinet in 2017 when then-premier Kathleen Wynne expanded rent controls to all units built after 1991, ending a longstanding market loophole introduced in the 1990s by the PC government of Mike Harris and maintained through 12 years of Liberal governance.
“Were in the midst of an affordability crisis in general, but nowhere more so than in housing, particularly around tenants,” Mr. Del Duca said at his platform kickoff event. “We’re well past the moment when half-measures and being grudging about this will work.”
The Official Opposition New Democrats promise to go much further, pledging not only to regulate annual rent increases but to end the system known as “vacancy decontrol,” in which landlords can reset rents to any level once a tenancy ends.
Both tenants, landlords exasperated by delays at Ontario’s rental dispute resolution tribunal
“Vacancy control is the single most effective way to address rental affordability. … It’s a cap on how much a landlord can increase the rent after a tenant leaves,” said Jessica Bell, a New Democrat who is seeking re-election in the Toronto riding of University–Rosedale and a prominent housing critic. She said the party would introduce an allowable increase closer to the rate of inflation and would seek to mirror vacancy control policies in Manitoba and Quebec.
“We need to make rental a stable and affordable option for the 35 per cent of Ontarians who rent,” she said.
Mr. Del Duca declined to critique the NDP policy but did not agree that it was necessary to rein in rents. “Moving forward with rent control would build in significant protection for new tenants,” he said in an interview.
Harry Fine, a paralegal who works on landlord-tenant disputes, said ending vacancy decontrol is critical, noting that only the NDP is promising to do this.
”It’s been the holy grail – and with good reason,” Mr. Fine said. “The incentive for landlords to replace even very good tenants has never been higher.”
He said he has seen a stark rise in abusive “own use” evictions, in which a landlord falsely claims they will be moving into a unit, and “renovictions,” in which a landlord forces a tenant out under the pretext of doing extensive work on a unit. Such evictions can be issued in bad faith as a way to kick people out and jack up rents for the next tenants.
“The fear of missing out on that higher rent that their brother-in-law is getting for the same-sized condo in the same building is just too much. When rent inflation outstrips general inflation by, let’s say, 6 to 1 over 15 years, something’s got to give.”
For its part, the Green Party of Ontario released a comprehensive housing plan almost a year ago. It focused on freezing urban boundaries to fight sprawl and pushing for higher-density zoning so more residents won’t need to rely on cars.
With its updated election platform, it joins the other opposition parties in reimposing rent controls on all units and is offering to build 182,000 affordable and supportive housing spaces as part of a pledge to end homelessness. Like the NDP, the Greens promise to end vacancy decontrol. And the party is proposing a provincewide registry of short-term rental accommodations, to codify the piecemeal approach many municipalities have taken in recent years as Airbnb hosts converted long-term rental homes into more lucrative hospitality businesses.
CMHC published its annual rental report in February and confirmed that rental inflation remains a growing problem in the province. CMHC has a metric that looks at how many hours of labour, at a city’s average hourly rate, it takes to pay for affordable rent – defined as 30 per cent of a full-time worker’s income. If it takes more than 150 hours of work to meet the 30-per-cent threshold, that’s an unaffordable market for most.
In 2021, Vancouver and Toronto topped the unaffordable list with 198 and 178 hours of work needed for the 30-per-cent rent-to-income ratio, but there were nine other Ontario cities – the most in the country – that have either crossed the 150-hour threshold or come very close since 2020. Peterborough had the steepest rise, needing an extra 36 hours of work to afford rent, while Windsor and London jumped by 18 and 15 hours, respectively. “This data indicates that rent growth has exceeded wage growth in most centres over the same period,” the report said.
On the surface, it may appear that some things have improved for renters in Ontario in recent years, with higher vacancy rates in the biggest market. According to the CMHC report, Toronto was one of only three cities in the country that saw its vacancy rate rise in 2021 – to 4.4 per cent, double the historical average – thanks in part to new purpose-built rental apartments being added to the market. What troubles renter advocates, though, is that some of those new units are sitting empty as landlords avoid discounting inflated rates to fill them.
While having more apartments sitting empty typically pushes rents lower, data compiled by the website Rentals.ca shows average rents were still rising in the city in March. Toronto saw a month-over-month increase of 0.4 per cent, while its surburbs saw prices drop between 2 per cent and 5 per cent.
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