On June 17, city council voted to review Waterloo’s Residential Licensing Bylaw to ensure a way to protect renters from facing what the city calls “renovictions.” This is a recent trend where landlords undertake minor renovation work and use this as a reason to evict tenants.
There are many situations where landlords might implement renovictions, including cases of apartment damages, nonpayment of rent, refusal of mandatory eviction, etc. But Grant Curlew, the licensing and standards manager at the City of Waterloo said: “Landlords want to collect more rent and use renovictions, as a way to displace tenants that are paying low rent and replace them with new tenants that they can charge a higher rent.”
Since 2017, the City of Waterloo has undergone a “renoviction surge,” that has only been made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic crisis according to the Ontario Renoviction Report (2024) created by The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) Canada, an independent national organization of low and moderate-income people.
They noticed a trend of increased renovictions in 2017 using the Ontario housing data to keep track. This trend sees landlords use two eviction notices to evict would-be renoviction victims. The first is an N12 where landlords evict tenants to move themselves or their families into the unit. The second is an N13 where tenants are evicted for renovations.
Curlew said certain renoviction cases are done legally in cases where landlords need to evict a tenant to complete necessary upgrades to a unit. However, they must have a prescribed process through the landlord-tenant board to do so.
An extreme renovation case took place earlier this year on Feb. 28 at 250 Frederick St. in Kitchener, where an anonymous tenant and landlord engaged in an intense argument that later involved local authorities.
Curlew said that from a bylaw perspective, the city is aware of the few instances where tenants are impacted by evictions related to renovations. While researching the case, the city estimated roughly 20 to 30 renovictions occur every year in the Kitchener-Waterloo region. He said the housing crisis might be one reason for the increasing renoviction surge.
He said the city is potentially considering a renoviction bylaw, which other cities like Hamilton are also exploring. Acer Bonaparte, the chair of the Waterloo Region chapter of ACORN, said he believes this might be the solution to the renoviction crisis.
“It will definitely help the problem, and it will help quell it. But we definitely need support even higher up from the provinces and federal government to implement strong tenant protection and tenant rights,” said Bonaparte.
Bonaparte said the crisis started when the Ford government passed legislation on July 20, 2020, that weakened tenant protections and sped up legal evictions.
Bill 184 removed tenants’ ability to defend against eviction by raising tenant rights issues, such as disrepair, at their hearing unless they submitted evidence in advance.
The new law also gave landlords the ability to pressure tenants into onerous terms of rent payment and then apply to the Landlord and Tenant Board (LTB) for an eviction order without a hearing if ever the tenant was a day late or a dollar short on the prescribed instalments.
He said the numbers from the landlord-tenant board indicate that Toronto has the highest number of renoviction cases involving N12 and N13 measures, but notes that those numbers are from people who reported to the landlord-tenant board on renovictions. So, the numbers could be underrepresenting the true scope of the renoviction cases.
The City of Waterloo has not announced any further action regarding the renoviction cases, but wanted to pursue a different option.
Grant Curlew said the first solution they thought of was to create support tenant programs with financial support and investigate legal support programs the city could provide funding or support to. The City of Waterloo is also considering funds for multi-unit residential acquisition programs to support nonprofits and cooperative housing purchases to make it more affordable.
