Key Toronto committee endorses plan to prevent renovictions

The City of Toronto has taken a step toward cracking down on illegal renovictions after a committee of councillors approved a plan to regulate how landlords renovate their properties. 

The Planning and Housing Committee voted to direct city staff to develop a bylaw that would attempt to curb the practice, which tenant advocates say is growing. They say the regulatory change would prevent landlords from evicting people by claiming they plan to renovate a property only to then increase the rent and find a new tenant.

A long line of deputants decried the practice and said it's contributing to the housing affordability crisis currently gripping Toronto. Lawyer Karen Andrews from the Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario, told the committee that the city needs to act.

"The landlords have been relentless in trying to create vacancies so they can make more rent," she said. "It's about not following the law. It's about illegality.... The city has to act, and the city can act."

Under the law, any tenant displaced by a renovation to their rental gets first right of refusal when the work is complete. But lawyer Karly Wilson, from Don Valley Community Legal Services, said it's up to the tenant to keep tabs on their landlord and enforce their rights. In most cases it isn't practical or effective, she said.

"As it stands, there is nothing in place to confirm that landlords are actually doing the renovations they say they're going to do and there's no way to ensure that tenants are being offered their legal right to move back in when those renovations are done," she said.

"The onus is entirely on the tenant, the tenant who has recently just been displaced from their home to catch a landlord doing this in bad faith."

The committee voted Thursday to give city staff the go-ahead to create a regulatory regime to crack down on the practice. Staff will spend the next five months consulting with stakeholders and developing the policy. It could include requirements for landlords to get building permits for any rental renovation that requires a tenant to vacate the unit and a requirement to cover the cost to re-house a tenant.

Advocates say those clauses, and active enforcement from the city, could help eliminate renovictions. 

Marcia Stone, a renter and chair of Weston ACORN, told the committee that staff don't need to look far to find an example of a municipal renovictions policy. The City of Hamilton passed a bylaw this spring that Toronto should emulate, she said.

"You're not reinventing the wheel," she said. "Just call Hamilton and find out what they did over there and adapt it to our laws here."

Hamilton's bylaw, which is set to take effect Jan. 1, will require a landlord to apply for a city renovation licence within seven days of issuing an eviction notice to a tenant.

It will only allow the eviction and renovations to take place if the landlord has already secured all building permits to complete the work and provides an engineer's report confirming vacancy is necessary. The landlord will also need to make arrangements with any tenant who wants to return to their unit once the renovation is complete.

Coun. Paula Fletcher urged her colleagues to give staff permission to create the bylaw in an emotional speech at the meeting. She's been pushing for the policy since 2019, and said many people have been evicted in that time because of the practice and the city could have prevented it.