NDP promises to save tenants from evictions
Horwath eyes ‘loose ends’ in law about kicking out renters for renovations
In her bid to evict Liberal Leader Kathleen Wynne from the premier’s office at Queen’s Park, Andrea Horwath is promising to protect tenants from being evicted from their homes.
With one week until the June 7 election, Horwath was campaigning in Toronto on Thursday and vowing to strengthen Wynne’s rent-control rules.
“There are still a lot of loose ends around rent evictions,” the NDP leader told reporters on the rooftop deck of a posh con- do on St. Joseph St., steps from the Ontario Legislature.
“So we’re going to go into the legislation and we’re going to rewrite it and address the ‘renoviction’ piece,” she said, referring to the practice of landlords evicting tenants to renovate their units, then renting them out again for higher fees.
Horwath said an NDP government would institute a “rent registry” so tenants would know how much a landlord had een charging in the past. “We also know there is no way of a tenant knowing what the previous tenant was paying and so, in order to ensure that rent controls are effective, we need to have a way of reporting and keeping a database of what the rents are,” she said.
Horwath said tenants should be able to know “when they’re applying to a vacancy what the rent was previously so that the rent controls will actually be efWynne, fective.”
The NDP would also sign on to the national housing strategy and would build 65,000 new affordable housing units, many in not-for-profit or co-operative housing buildings.
who has been premier since 2013, extended rent-control provisions to all buildings last year, so increases are limited to the rate of inflation as long as it is 2.5 per cent or lower. Prior to that, only units built before 1991 were subject to such curbs.
But the legislation maintained allowances for landlords to pay for renovations.
As of April 30, most landlords must now use a standardized 13-page lease agreement that the government hoped would close any loopholes.
Harvey Cooper, managing director of the Ontario arm of the Co-operative Housing Federation of Canada, praised the NDP leader for proposing a rent registry.
“It would give renters a better idea in terms of what type of unit they’re renting,” said Cooper, adding renovictions appear to be on the rise.