The Decibel - Why a new Ontario law has renters worried about more evictions

Episode Date: December 1, 2025

Ontario just passed Bill 60, officially named the “Fighting Delays, Building Faster Act.” It’s a big omnibus bill, but it’s garnered the most attention for reforms to Ontario’s rental system. Doug Ford’s government walked back the most controversial part of the bill, but critics are concerned that what remains will still lead to more evictions and worsen the homelessness crisis.Today, Shane Dingman, the Globe’s real estate reporter, is on the show to talk about why these legislative changes are so contentious, and what impact they could have on people living in Canada’s largest rental market.Questions? Comments? Ideas? E-mail us at [e-mail] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The Ontario government just passed controversial legislation known as Bill 60, or the Fighting Delays Building Faster Act. It's a big omnibus bill that bundles together a number of major changes, but the thing that has spurred protests and backlash are the reforms to how Ontario's rental system works. Premier Doug Ford's government walked back one of the more contentious points that would have allowed for faster evictions of tenants. But critics are worried that what remains in the bill would still lead to more evictions and worsen the homelessness crisis. The government argues that the bill would restore balance to the landlord-tenant system. Today, the Globe's real estate reporter Shane Dingman is here to talk about what these legislative changes are, why they are so contentious, and what impact they will have on the people living in Canada's largest rental market.

I'm Cheryl Sutherland, and this is the decibel from the Globe and Mail. Hi, Shane. Thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. So, Shane, Bill 60 is a big omnibus bill that is making changes to a number of things from road use policies to infrastructure governance. But the big standout we're going to focus on today are the reforms to renting in the province. So top level, what does this bill change? This bill is a response to sort of the long-time backlog issue at the landlord tenant board, which is the tribunal that we use in this province to resolve disputes between tenants and landlords. And there was a time when, you know, there was like a, it would take a few weeks to get through the landlord tenant board. These days, it can take months.

And as that situation has persisted for years now, the government has incumbent on their increasing pressure to make changes to speed this up. They've tried to spend millions of dollars on fixing the LTP. Now they're trying to change some of the legislation to make it faster to evict certain types of tenants. And what they say is they're really focused on tenants who are bad actors who are not paying rent. So they've tightened up some of the rules around not paying rent and what you can do about that. And they've also sort of introduced this idea that they're going to create a new category of eviction sort of for the persistent non-payer of rate. They haven't defined what that means, but you can sort of get a sense of what they're after. Okay.

Okay. And so, you know, the landlord-tenant board, just to kind of like explain what that is basically it's like where landlords and tenants go to kind of talk about disputes they have. Yeah, I mean, there was something like 87,000 applications to the landlord-tenant board in the last year, you know, something like 70-some-odd thousand of those were landlord applications for eviction for not paying rent or maybe for they wanted to use it for themselves or maybe they wanted to renovate it. Sometimes these are called rent-evictions. So the vast majority are landlords applying to evict a tenant at the LTP. And it is a quasi-judicial tribunal. So there's an adjudicator. And then there's the parties, the tenant and the landlord, sometimes they're allowed to have counsel, although it's not required. So a lot of paralegals work in the LTP.

There's also a group called the Tenant Duty Council program, which is a not-for-profit, free legal advice that's there to give advice to tenants who oftentimes do not have legal counsel. That's kind of how it works. And it's all digital now. There used to be in-person hearings. Now it's all digital. So you can go in and watch some of these hearings if you want.

I've watched many, many hours of the LTP. A lot of very interesting human stories that come out of that. Okay. And we'll get into some of the changes in a bit. I just want to kind of lay out what we're talking about and why this has gotten so much backlash. And so one thing I want to say is I know that we're focusing on changes in one province here, Ontario. But this is Canada's biggest rental market. So these changes do affect a lot of people.

Oh, yeah. 30% of Ontario's population is renters. 48% as of 2021 in Toronto are renters. So it's a huge, huge number. Millions and millions of people are renters in this province. And the people who support tenant rights believe that this bill undermines the rights of almost every one of those people.

Even though the government says they're aiming at bad actors who don't pay rent and who are causing chaos at the LTB, the effect of these rules will apply to all of those renters. So, for example, one of the things that they're doing is that if you were late for rent, you know, used to be you got a notice and then 15 days after that notice,

the landlord could apply to evict you. Now they've shortened that to seven days. That doesn't sound like a big change. Fifteen to seven, what's the difference? But if you think about it in terms of a person who's actually like trying to afford their rent, if they miss a rent payment, seven days isn't even enough time necessarily

for like a paycheck to arrive. That's not, you know, a normal pay period is two weeks or maybe once monthly. So this means that people will not have an opportunity to what they call cure their non-payment, which is, you know, in the past, people have said this is more common than evictions.

If you're late, your landlord gives you a notice, you cure it. You find that money. You go out, you ask friends and family and you fix it. Now you've got less time to do that. And a lot of tenant advocates say this is going to actually increase evictions and not like sort of just go after people who are abusing the system. Yeah, yes. Because on paper, you know, like from 15 days to seven days, it doesn't sound like a lot.

But, you know, that is, like you said, it's a paycheck. So to find that money in seven days would be very difficult for some people. Yeah. I think sometimes it's important to step away from the policy and describe. how it actually works in real life. I've done stories about how evictions work and how often. Some people get three or four different notifications and three or four different applications for eviction

over a short period of time because they fall behind. I talked to a woman a few years ago who she was a physical trainer, right, like personal trainer at a gym. And her finger actually got stuck in the door, a broken door at her rental building and it got injured. And she couldn't work for like four or five days, not even a week. Four or five days she couldn't work.

That put her behind because she was like an hourly worker. and she missed her first rent payment because of that and it took her months to catch up and if you think about that that's the kind of thing that the LTB is there to explain you go in and you say listen I got injured and it's not because I'm a bad person I'm not trying to pay my rent I got hurt

I only have so many hours I can work and the adjudicator is the human in this system who's supposed to say I hear what you're saying maybe we can work something up maybe we can mediate the problem with what the government has done in Bill 60 is that they have now changed the rules on what you can say in your defense if you are brought in on a non-payment of rent application, unless you pay

50% of the rent you owe to the landlord before the hearing begins. So you can't defend yourself and say, I got hurt unless you pay 50% of the rent owing. When you might not have an extra 50% of rent, right? Like, you might be still trying to catch up. Now you can't describe that situation to an adjudicator under these new rules. It's a real problem for access to justice, as is described to me by these tenant duty council people who see every hearing in the province. Can you just help me understand how we got to this point of like there's this residential tendencies act? And how do we get to this point and why was it important to have these protections for tenants? It's an interesting question because if you go back in time, I'm sure a lot of people

prior to this creation of the Zach Rashon, and the same question. And I think their answer really is the social contract, right? Like it's part of the sort of modern like sort of welfare state of like we will take care of people. And if you're a landowner, a landlord, you have responsibilities as well as rights. There were all sorts of horror stories in the sort of pre-residential Tenancies Act sort of environment of like lack of maintenance of cold water tenements of places that didn't have running water didn't have heat didn't have proper toileting this was a common place you know not a known thing now you know tenants can demand like if they're going to be paying rent to a landlord they have a there you're going to provide me like a livable

place and that means they can apply under the RTTLTP for like maintenance issues you got to replace my windows or you got to place my door you know things like that like and if you go to the LTB you'll see sometimes these matters come up it's not as often as evictions it's about 2,000 a year of tenants saying, hey, my landlord's not fixing my unit. You know, I have snow flown in underneath the door and we need something to happen here. So that's kind of what that, why we have these rights, because fundamentally, these are also fellow residents and citizens of this country. They have rights to, you know, sort of safety and comfort.

Housing is not an explicit right in Canada, but it is a widely agreed upon need in value. Okay. Part of the reason we're talking about this today is that there's been a lot of backlash about some of the changes to the rental system. There was protests at Queens Park. I've seen lots of negative attention on my social media account. This did result in the government walking back portions of the plan, but there's still a lot of other things that are in the bill that will impact tenant rights. Let's walk through some of these changes. So one of them is around evictions for personal use or renovation. First, can you explain what that usually looks like?

Right. And this is an interesting one because this is an example of the Ford government actually taking sort of walking away from something that it introduced. A few years ago, we at the Globe noticed there was a rise in these own use evictions, which is essentially I own a unit, but I now need to move in for reasons of whatever. And sometimes it was like my son needs to use it. But anyways, there was a lot of these kind of like applications to get people out of units and to move their family in. A lot of them were in bad faith.

And what we mean by that is that they were evicting those tenants not because their son or mother wanted to move in, but because they wanted to reset the rent, right? We have this thing in Ontario called vacancy decontrol, where when a unit becomes empty of a tenant, you can reset the rent to whatever you want if it's a rent-controlled unit. Most units that were built before 2018 are rent-controlled. So there's an annual cap or percentage of how much you can raise the rent if there's an existing tendency. And it's usually pretty low, right? It's between like 2 and 4% around that. Yeah, which, again, it was lower even than that in previous times.

And it sort of has gone up after the COVID period because of the rapid inflation and housing costs. A lot of landlords were well behind. So this new regime of vacancy decontrol, because it wasn't always here, it was, again, sort of a Mike Harris innovation to roll over tendencies. A lot of people on the left, particularly housing advocates, would like to see that end because they say it creates incentives to evict people. They're not wrong. There are incentives. And, you know, even the biggest landlords in the country sometimes refer to that incentive of like turnover in order to keep their buildings sort of closer to market rent as like a function of the process of being a landlord. So this own use stuff, the province actually really increased the fines for bad faith own use evictions a few years ago.

But now what the government has said is, all right, we used to have to give you notice in order to do this. And we still will have notice. But if you give you 120 days notice, I no longer even need to pay you compensation. So I need to use this unit. If I gave you 120 days, I won't be paying you any compensation currently or I should say previously. If you've got to notice within 60 days, then you had to pay a one-month rent compensation. As in the landlord had to pay the renter. Yeah.

So to help the renter with moving expenses, because it can be 60 days, it's not a lot of time to prepare for a new housing situation. Okay. And so what would the negative impacts be for a tenant in this case? I mean, I think there's two things. You lose your housing, which is always a challenge. Like for anybody who's ever been evicted, it's a shock. And, you know, you're also no longer going to be compensated. to help you with moving costs.

You know, maybe you had a rental deposit. You know, you might get that back. You might not. Some people don't do those. Some people apply it to the last month. So it can be difficult to pull together first and last month rent, particularly now. You know, again, this really becomes a problem for people on fixed incomes, people who have lower incomes because, you know, if they've been renting for, say, 10, 15 years, the rental

environment that they're going into today is dramatically different. The price is much higher now. Yeah. Like a one bedroom is typically $2,000 or thereabouts in the city. it floats around a bit, but like, that's a lot for somebody who was paying, say, $1,000 a month. We'll be right back. If we look at all the changes that Bill 60 is putting forth, what kind of impact could this have on the rental market? I think the first thing you'll see is you'll see more evictions because, again, this smooths the path for quicker eviction filings and, you know, you'll see that there's,

now fewer rights of recourse, you know, the government is also limited these kinds of things you can appeal to a broader bank of adjudicators for. So like right now, if you have an adjudicator makes a decision about an eviction, you don't think it's unfair. You can ask the board to review it and they'll send appoint other adjudicators to say, this adjudicator made a mistake. The government has created a process now where they can create new rules for what can be reviewable by that, you know, LTB review appeal panel. If you don't have that sort of as of right, as a tenant, then you're going to have to take it to the divisional court, right, which is the regular court system, and that takes years to get any answer out of. So it's potentially a real

problem for that. So I think you'll see more evictions, and you'll see more evictions that maybe have procedural problems stand and not be reviewed. And I don't know what that does long term to the rental market, pretty same, like in terms of dollars and cents. But again, landlords, and I should say not all landlords, but small landlords in particular have been advocating for these changes because for them, the quicker somebody is out, the quicker they can begin to get somebody else back in and they can try to recover some of the lost rent. For small landlords, some of these rent bills get huge, $38,000, you know, $50,000 of owed rent for like a six-month wait at the LTV.

That's a disaster for those people. They'll never collect that. So those are the sort of extreme cases. But this new process will mean that those people have a chance to get back out and start getting more rent into their units sooner. Yeah. You talked about evictions here. How big of a problem are evictions in Ontario?

Like, we know that we have a housing crisis, of course. But if we're looking at evictions, is it a big deal? Like, is it really happening a lot? Oh, yeah. For non-payment of rent, there was something like 50,000 applications a year in the province for that kind of eviction. This bill also is going to hire more sheriffs, which, you know, we think of sheriffs, you know, from maybe in the United States with their cowboy hats and everything. But in Ontario, a sheriff is the person who actually evicts you if you get evicted. Like the landlord doesn't do it.

the police won't do it. What happens is that you need, once you get an eviction order, you have to go to apply to the Ministry of Attorney General to get a sheriff to come, they'll knock on the door, and all your stuff has to be out that day. And we just know from research that like more evictions means more homelessness. That's just true. Every jurisdiction that's ever studied it, if you have more evictions, you're going to have more homeless people because not everybody can bounce back right away. Wow. Yeah, I actually have a stat here that in Hamilton, Ontario, there was actually a 983% increase in eviction. for repairs slash renovations from 2017 to 2022.

So that's just one stat, but that just gives you a sense of how high the increase is when it comes to evictions. Yeah, and renovations in particular in Hamilton, there's been a number of large providers of housing that have renovated big chunks of those buildings. And those renovations, you know, you can argue about what the point of them are. In some cases, it's about making space for laundry and units, which more people want. But in other cases, it's just people describe it as like just kind of gussing up the units to make them more valuable for the landlord. And then, you know, ideally you're supposed to be offering a tenant opportunity to come back into a unit you've renovated, but that is rare, rarely actually done.

We've actually had a very high profile case where the LTV found that the landlord had deliberately not brought back the people that had to renovated, but there was no recourse available. Like they had to pay a fine, but those people still did not have their housing back. So the argument from the Ontario government is that there needed to be a rebalancing of the landlord tenant system. And I've heard the argument that the system skewed more in favor of tenants. Is this true? I think what really happened when landlords say skewed in favor of tenants is that the LTB was broken by Doug Ford's government. Okay. I'm not just saying that on my own.

That is the conclusion of the Ombudsman of Ontario and the Auditor General who looked at these things over the years. When Doug Ford was elected in 2018, he didn't reappoint a bunch of LTB adjudicators for a long time for like, you know, like I think it was like in six or eight months. And eventually, you know, what was like a 12,000 sort of case backlog became a 22,000 case backlog. And then by 2019, that was up to like, oh, 30,000-ish type cases. And then by 20, 23, there were 53,000 cases in the backlog, right? So every year that would end, 53,000 cases had not been heard by the LTP, right, on their books, active cases. That was a disaster. That meant that it was in eight, nine months, a year, oftentimes, to,

get matters heard at the LTB. Even in the case of a landlord fully in the rights, the tenant is with the so-called professional tenant who has been ripping them off. They had no ability to deal with that tenant because the landlord tenant board couldn't hear their case. So that's a real problem. And that does make landlords feel like they can't get justice. And I understand why they would feel that the system is skewed towards tenants because,

again, you can't do an eviction any other way but through the LTB or if the tenant agrees, right? The tenant always has the option to just agree to be evicted, something called the N-11, which is where you agree, and there's no need for the LTB. But the reality is that it actually takes longer for tenants to get their matters heard. It's usually twice as long for a tenant matter, say, on maintenance to be heard than a landlord matter on an eviction. So the system isn't really skewed against landlords. Again, landlords are the vast majority of the people who fill the LTB. It's their applications that are creating this backlog. But the procedural rights that tenants have give the impression when the system is broken that they have an unfair hand.

And so what you're saying here is that this backlog is because of the Ontario government, the Ford government. Absolutely. Yeah. And, you know, they have spent millions of dollars trying to fix the problem. And they've actually made some progress. The backlog is now about 35,000. So, you know, we're back to, say, 2019-type level backlog, which is still a disaster for a lot of landlords. It still takes months in some cases.

everybody can agree that the LTV needs fixing. I think what tenant advocates would say is that you may actually be pouring fuel on the fire here because this speeding up of evictions will create more eviction applications. So if you're trying to clear the backlog, you don't want to add a lot more eviction applications. They don't want to make it easier to move to eviction. That's what they've done. Are the provisions of Bill 60? Are they actually going to improve things at the LTV?

I don't see how. Honestly, I wish I could say that there is a clear path in the government's logic that would show how they're going to solve this problem. The bigger thing that they're doing is to have more adjudicators. But, you know, I've spoken to the tenant duty council and the government about these things in the past. And, you know, they disagree fundamentally

about something that happened during the COVID sort of period, which was that government stopped doing in-person LTV hearings. They stopped doing that entirely. They went entirely digital. And the goal was, it was being more efficient. You can do more hearings. But it has been the opposite.

You know, they almost always over-schedule these hearings on the assumption that tenants won't show up. And then tenants do show up and they don't have enough time. So things are held over and delayed and delayed over and over. This scheduling issue seems like a solvable issue. It has never been solved. And the government continues to believe that digital only is the way to go, you know, don't want to have in-person hearings. But again, people who have worked in the system for a long time say that when you were in person, you brought back some of that humanity.

You brought back the landlords and the tenants actually talking to each other. And they could maybe make an agreement because fundamentally landlords want to get paid their rent. tenants want a place to live. That's the deal. This is a relationship that's about, you know, exchange of money for shelter. If you can find a way to break through some of the procedural stuff and maybe the hurt feelings about, you know, this or that matter, you can sometimes get to a solution. And that's what, you know, people who worked in the system when it was in person say happened more often than not. You would get to a time to say, oh, okay, we're calling this matter now and they'd say, we've already resolved this. So off you go. So just to end here, Shane, big picture.

What does this all mean for all the people involved in Ontario's rental market? I'm like talking about the landlords and the renters here. Like, what does this all mean? I think it's going to be a challenging period coming up because I think there's going to be less sort of trust on the tenant's parts, which can create problems. Like if you think your landlord's trying to evict you, you behave differently towards your landlord. And it also is true of landlords where like if you think the answer to everything is an eviction because it's easier now, you may be skipping over solutions that are easier and maybe less disruptive for you. than seeking an eviction. So I don't think eviction should be the first resort, and I don't think it should be necessarily faster for everybody. And I think that these new rules are going to make

it a little bit more tense out there for the foreseeable future. Shane, this has been a really great conversation. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Thank you for having me. That was Shane Dingman, the Globe's Real Estate Reporter. That's it for today. I'm Cheryl Sutherland. Our producers are Madeline White, Mikhail Stein, and Ali Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening and I'll talk to you soon.