Recent government housing announcements have received significant media attention. Last week, the federal government announced $15 billion in new loans for private rental housing construction and other measures branded as a “renters’ bill of rights”. Days later, the B.C. government announced changes to landlord-tenant law in that province that included measures meant to protect tenants from no-fault evictions and to speed up evictions and rent collection for landlords.
The announcements, which received the support of Canada’s landlord association, ensure that housing provisioning remains profitable for private landlords and developers. New loans will support private developers to build high-rent apartments that most ordinary people cannot afford. The other measures affirm private landlordism by doing nothing meaningful to change the conditions that make evictions possible and profitable.
One of the proposed measures would require landlords to disclose their rental pricing history to prospective tenants. This policy wrongly assumes that because landlords and tenants are formal equals, individual renters only need better information to more effectively pursue their interests in the market. Anyone who has actually been on an apartment hunt, however, knows that even if landlords could be relied on to provide accurate information about units’ previous rent amounts, it would not result in lower current asking rents. In cities with low vacancy rates, renters are forced to compete with each other over the few units available on the market. Vacancy decontrol–the absence of rental control on vacant units–allows landlords to charge whatever the market will bear, and also incentivizes landlords to evict long-term tenants who pay lower rents.
The federal government proposes to have provincial governments crack down on “renovictions” and B.C. has announced new measures to curb evictions for landlord’s own use and conversion to non-residential uses. These measures take for granted that the landlord-tenant relationship is normally a harmonious one and that renovictions are merely a departure from this norm that can be addressed through legal and administrative reform. Although similar measures to limit landlord’s own use evictions are already in place in Ontario these evictions continue apace throughout the province. That the federal government also announced a $15 million legal aid fund for renters is tacit acknowledgement that landlords will continue to pursue no-fault evictions because eviction for renovations and landlord’s own use remains legal throughout Canada. Lastly, the government’s suggestion that tenants should be credited for their rent payment history implies that missed rent payments should count against tenants’ credit scores.
The renters’ bill of rights obscures the fact that the landlord-tenant relationship is inherently exploitative. Propertyless tenants are forced to hand over the greatest single portion of their monthly income in rent to landlords who monopolize the ownership of housing. Landlords are empowered by governments to dispossess renters of their homes so that they can increase their rent revenues and property values. The renters’ bill of rights claims to correct imbalances in an otherwise balanced landlord-tenant relationship, thus making ongoing evictions appear to be normal and acceptable. Notably, the announcement comes at a time when growing numbers of organized tenants are directly confronting their landlords with rent strikes and other actions over evictions and rent increases that they rightly find intolerable.