N.B. 'rent control' produces 55% increase for Bathurst senior

Marie Roy is a New Brunswick rent control success story on paper, but the 77-year-old is still in danger of losing her two-bedroom apartment. 

Roy's rent is due on Tuesday and, for the first time, the Bathurst grandmother needs to come up with $900 to pay her new landlord.

It's a 55 per cent increase from the $580 Roy has been paying, but better than the 98 per cent increase her landlord wanted to impose.

The difference is a compromise negotiated by the Residential Tenancies Tribunal, New Brunswick's rental watchdog.

"That's a big raise for me," said Roy, who has called the same Bathurst apartment building home for the past 10 years and was hoping for a better result when she asked for government help

"I am on a pension and the pension is not going up. I mean, it doesn't leave me much for food."

For Roy, $900 in rent is better than $1,150, but it is still a lot for her to pay for housing.

It will eat up more than half of the $1,700 monthly income she earns from federal Old Age Security and supplement payments and is not something she thinks she will be able to afford for very long.

She would happily move, but there are no public housing openings in the Bathurst area and vacancies in the private rental market have fallen dramatically in the past year — down to 0.3 per cent for two-bedroom units like she has now.     

Unable to find alternative housing, Roy is left struggling to find the extra $320 per month in rent she needs to pay to remain in her current apartment.

"I look on [Facebook] marketplace every day," she said. "After I pay my rent and pay my cable and everything, there's not going to be much left." 

Roy is in a personal housing crisis that developed almost overnight last summer.

The six-unit building she lives in was bought and sold twice after a local couple acquired it in July for $140,000. They flipped it to Ontario investors for $300,000 five weeks later.

'Necessary' rent increase

The Ontario owners hired a local property management company to look after the building. Within days, Roy received the notice her rent would be jumping 98 per cent to $1,150 on March 1.

"The rent increase is necessary to maintain and upgrade the building as it has been neglected for many years and fell into disrepair," Jason Fillmore, with the property management company Canada Homes for Rent, said in an email to CBC News in September.

"In most cases tenants have lived in properties for over a decade without a rent increase and are paying very low rents in a market that has increased dramatically."

Roy's sudden plight shocked many and was eventually raised at the New Brunswick Legislature by Robert Gauvin, Liberal MLA and Social Development critic. He asked Service New Brunswick Minister Mary Wilson what Roy could do.

"What are you going to tell her," he asked. "What we are going to tell her is what you should be telling her: Call the Residential Tenancies Tribunal now. We want to hear from her." said Wilson.

Roy did, but the results were less than she hoped.

New Brunswick's Residential Tenancies Tribunal has the power to disallow an excessive rent hike which the province argues is effectively a form of rent control. It also mediates rent increase disputes between landlords and tenants and, in Roy's case, negotiated her $1,150 proposed rent down to $900.

Last month, New Brunswick Social Development Minister Bruce Fitch said the tribunal had all the protection mechanisms needed to look after renters.

"We've put in rent controls. We have rent controls," Fitch said during a Jan. 18 appearance on CBC's Information Morning in Fredericton   "If there's an unreasonable rent increase then they'll have somebody fighting for them on their side."

Jael Duarte, a lawyer working with the New Brunswick Coalition for Tenants Rights, argues negotiating a 98 per cent rent increase down to 55 per cent is not how rent control works in other jurisdictions that have it.  

Six Canadian provinces are limiting rent increases in 2022 to two per cent or less. Duarte said Roy's case proves New Brunswick needs rules like that to protect tenants.

"Rent control is a percentage amount per year that is fixed in the law," said Duarte. "And that doesn't exist. The [current] law is not a solution. The only solution would be rent control."

Unclear how $900 decided

It's not clear how Roy's new rent of $900 was determined.

The tribunal will not discuss details of individual cases, but the amount is 20 per cent higher than than the $751 average rent for two-bedroom apartments in Bathurst, according to a survey conducted by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation released earlier this month

In an email, the director of communications for Service New Brunswick Jennifer Vienneau said the tribunal considers more than average rents in a community in evaluating proposed increases including "the condition and location of the apartment compared to similar units in the same neighbourhood."

"The data provided by CMHC is based on an average. It does not consider other factors to determine whether or not those amounts are reasonable," wrote Vienneau.

Roy said she doesn't know how the $900 figure was reached but was encouraged to agree to it by the person handling her case even though she had been hoping to pay no more than $800.

"She said it was a good idea, that I would accept the $900," said Roy  "I said, if I don't accept they'll probably put it higher. So I really, I don't think I had a choice."