Ontario’s landlord-tenant dispute system is broken

With its apparently single-minded fixation on seeing 1.5 million new homes built across Ontario over the next 10 years, can the provincial government spare some time and thought for the people who are struggling right now just to keep what they have?

People like Tabatha Thomas, of St. Catharines.

This week, Niagara Dailies told the story of Thomas, a woman living on limited income who recently learned she has two weeks to vacate the apartment she has lived in for the past nine years.

There are many like her across the province also in jeopardy of losing their homes. Their circumstances vary — job loss, illness, an unexpected rent increase that will stretch their tight budgets too far.

Meanwhile, the government’s attention has been focused on Bill 23, the More Homes Built Faster Act. It was approved on Monday after only being introduced in the legislature in late October.

The government bulled ahead despite protests from municipalities, conservation authorities, environmentalists and opposition parties.

It may get the government to its goal of 1.5 million new homes in the next decade, but there is little if anything in it for people like Thomas.

In a nutshell, she lives on $1,212 per month from the Ontario Disability Support Program. Her landlord wants her out of her apartment so he himself can move in.

On Monday, she learned the Landlord and Tenant Board ruled in favour of the landlord; she has two weeks to go.

She has no good options: She can leave, but where would she go?

As Zumper, an online rental platform, reported in September, the average rent for a one-bedroom unit in St. Catharines was $1,620, up more than 13 per cent from the year before.

Thomas’s monthly ODSP payment is about $400 less than that, and there are few vacancies anyway (especially, as she says she has found, when landlords learn she is on ODSP).

Or she could stall eviction by filing appeals, working the system to buy herself some time.

But that’s not fair to her landlord, who is not a wealthy corporation, just somebody who says he wants to live there so he can move other family members into his old place.

Ontario’s landlord-tenant dispute resolution system is broken. In fact, it has been broken for a long time now and isn’t working for anyone, not the landlords or the tenants.

Is there anything in Bill 23 that will help Thomas and others like her? Very little, unless you believe home builders and developers will suddenly start building small homes and affordable apartments and townhouses.

In fact, Bill 23 will make it more difficult to get those lower-end developments built.

Until now, many local governments have levied development charges on new housing to generate revenue they’ve used to fund the building of affordable housing.

Bill 23 prevents them from doing that; it eliminates some development charges and slashes others based on the belief developers will pass those savings on to homebuyers. How and who will pay for the infrastructure those charges also pay for remains unknown.

Premier Doug Ford and his government have devoted a lot of time and energy to changing the landscape so middle class and upper-class income earners can get into new homes.

We wish they would turn their attention to helping people at the other end of the spectrum — the ones who will still be renters after those 1.5 million homes get built a decade from now.

They too need a roof over their heads and the security of knowing if they follow the rules, they won’t lose the place they call home.

Will Ford steamroll a system to put a plan in place for those people, as he did with Bill 23?