Tenants and landlords are anxiously awaiting more information about the federal government’s promise to introduce more protections for renters in the upcoming budget.
The proposed measures aim to amend the Canadian Mortgage Charter to allow tenants to count on-time rent payments toward their credit score, and allocate $15 million in new funding to provincial legal aid organizations to better protect tenants against unfair rent payments, renovictions and “bad landlords.”
The government is also proposing a new Canadian Renters’ Bill of Rights, which would require landlords to disclose the history of a property’s pricing so renters can bargain fairly.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Wednesday that the reforms would “make the playing field fairer for renters” amid an affordability crisis making homeownership out of reach for many.
Nichola Taylor, chair of tenant advocacy group NB ACORN, said they’re pleased the federal government appears to be taking some steps to address tenant concerns.
“Many tenants have been suffering right across Canada,” she said. “But, as you know, the devil’s in the details, so it really does depend on what’s going to be written exactly in the bill of rights.”
While many of those details have yet to be announced, Taylor said she would like to see more to address “rent gouging,” tenant displacement and unfair rent increases.
“We’ve seen rent skyrocketing huge amounts over the last few years, and to the point when people are really worried about what will happen with their next increase,” she said.
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Taylor noted that housing is normally a provincial responsibility, so it will be interesting to see how the two levels of government work together.
She also said allowing on-time rent payments to contribute to a tenant’s credit score is a “positive move” and would help tenants who apply for mortgages.
More legal aid funding ‘sorely needed’
Angus Fletcher, an organizer with the NB Coalition for Tenants Rights, said the idea of making landlords disclose a unit’s pricing history is “interesting.”
“One of the ways that rents can be so high is this imbalance of information that tenants have versus what landlords have,” he said. “Landlords have much more information about the business and about their own circumstances than tenants tend to.”
As for how useful that pricing information would be, “it’ll come down to how it’s implemented,” Fletcher said.
Mark Culligan, a community legal worker with Dalhousie Legal Aid in Halifax, said more transparency is always good, but he doubts it will have much of an impact on high rent prices.
“The success of that is premised on the idea that tenants have equal consumer power,” he said. “For most of the folks that I work with, there is little to no (consumer power) because the vacancy rate is so low.”
Culligan said he was “very pleased” to hear about additional funding for legal aid clinics, which is “sorely needed.” The Dal Legal Aid Clinic, for instance, has seen demand increase “tenfold” in recent years, but its number of legal aid workers has stayed the same for decades.
But he said it’s unclear how much money individual provinces would get, or if the money would go to community clinics in addition to provincially run clinics.
He said $15 million “sounds like a lot” but he would be “surprised” if that “works out to more than a few hundred thousand” for Nova Scotia.
In general, he said more is needed to improve tenant rights in Canada.
“We really need stronger legal protections. I think we often frame this, as a society, in terms of a lack of information, or a lack of people being able to access their rights,” he said.
“But … the rights that people do have are not strong enough. In particular, there’s not meaningful penalties for bad actors, especially people who are engaging in the same pattern of behaviour over and over again.”
Landlords ‘caught off guard’
Willy Scholten, president of the Apartment Owners Association of New Brunswick and the owner of Colpitts Developments, one of the province’s major landlords, said his group is opposed to oversight from another level of government.
“We thought all of the regulations related to rental housing in New Brunswick was provincial jurisdiction,” he said. “So adding another layer of federal government involved with provincial regulations, for us, doesn’t seem like it should happen.
“It will just add another layer of administration, another layer of costs … that need to be added to rental rates in the province.”
In terms of requiring landlords to disclose rental pricing history, Scholten said he’s “not sure what that’s going to help.”
“If you have, for example, a six-unit property and the roof collapsed and you have to completely replace a lot of capital items, the rent is not going to be the same as before because of all the additional investment in the unit,” he said.
“Every tenant turnover that’s going to have to happen, that’s an additional administration.”
Kevin Russell, executive director of the Investment Property Owners Association of Nova Scotia, said he was “caught off guard” by the announcement and landlords are worried about how this will impact them.
“We’ve been operating under a rent control jurisdiction since 2020, and a lot of rental housing providers have been exiting the business,” he said.
“So there’s concern that this is another layer of bureaucracy and costs that will come down, and we think that it will accelerate the sale of rental properties in Nova Scotia, particularly with the smaller rental housing providers.”
While there’s overall a “lack of details” with the announcement, Russell said there’s also concern over the proposed renters’ bill of rights.
“Nothing was mentioned about the protection of rental housing providers’ rights,” he said. “We deal with a lot of situations, and just as there are bad landlords, there’s also bad tenants, and there’s nothing in there that says they would protect the rental housing providers from these tenants.”
He said he is writing to Nova Scotia’s members of Parliament with his concerns.
Provinces respond
Landlords weren’t the only ones caught off guard by the announcement. Colton LeBlanc, minister of Service Nova Scotia — which oversees the Residential Tenancies Act — said Thursday that he learned about the proposal through the media.
“There hasn’t been any reach-out or engagement from the federal government to work with the province, so we’re eager to hear more to learn more about the details,” he said in an interview.
LeBlanc also said he’s concerned the federal government is “swimming in provincial waters.”
“But of course, (we’re) happy to hear what they have to say and how we can potentially collaborate to improve the existing program here in Nova Scotia.”
Service New Brunswick Minister Jill Green also said they were happy to work with the federal government, but shared LeBlanc’s concerns about jurisdiction.
“I do have some concerns that some of these initiatives step into provincial jurisdiction. I will need to see further details of the proposed plans before I can make more fulsome comment,” Green said in a statement.
“In the meantime, our government will continue to invest in tenant protections, affordable housing, public housing and other initiatives that are directly addressing the housing crunch here in New Brunswick.”
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