Ottawa will consider whether to establish an anti-renoviction bylaw despite an earlier staff report that recommended against it.
City council has approved a motion proposed by Somerset Coun. Ariel Troster to have city staff study the possibility.
“Unfair evictions are unacceptable, and the statistics are really alarming,” Troster said during the council meeting. “We know that there was a nearly 500 per cent increase in N13 evictions over the last three years and just this year alone we’ve added 400 to our shelter system to get us through this winter.”
Troster says her motion was not to create a new bylaw.
“This is a vote to further study the issue, it is not a vote on a bylaw itself,” she said.
Renovictions happen when a tenant is issued an N13 notice to vacate their unit while major renovations occur. But councillors and housing advocates are concerned these notices have been misused by some landlords to force tenants to leave their apartments, so increased rent can be charged to new tenants.
The province addressed some issues around renovictions in Bill 97 in June 2023 but it has not come into effect and there is no timeline for when it would. Hamilton and Toronto have renoviction bylaws that require landlords to obtain a permit before conducting substantial renovations forcing tenants to vacate.
“When staff comes back in 2026, we will know what the provincial government is planning on doing or not doing, we will have more than a year of data out of Hamilton, which enacted a renoviction bylaw that started this month, and we will also have the financial case for whether doing something is ultimately more affordable than doing nothing,” said Troster.
“We don’t want to punish good actors, but the reality is right now bad actors are going unpunished and it’s costing the city tremendously,” she said.
Barrhaven West Coun. David Hill, one of six councillors to vote against the motion, said he is concerned about going against staff recommendations.
“This motion gives no consideration to the second- and third-order effects that municipal policy would add to the cost and time of the rental market that is already overheated and is bogged down in process,” said Hill before the vote.
“The simplest and most effective way to regulate rental prices is through increasing supply. Looking at N13 notifications as a bad thing is disingenuous oversimplification of a complex ecosystem of the rental market,” he said.
A city staff report recommended against examining a renoviction bylaw, but the planning committee opposed that advice by passing Troster’s motion on a near-unanimous vote on Jan. 15. (Only Barrhaven East Coun. Wilson Lo voted against it.)
At that meeting, Kaite Burkholder Harris, executive director of the Alliance to End Homelessness Ottawa, spoke in favour of the motion.
“We know that renovictions can lead to homelessness. At minimum a renoviction means that tenants are forced to find other housing almost guaranteed to be unaffordable in our current housing market,” she said.
“We need to start designing policies designing policies that put the onus on the system to protect people not the person in a crisis.”
