Q&A: Bylaws can protect tenants from some renovictions. Can Halifax enact its own?
Hamilton has a bylaw intended to stop certain renovictions, other Ontario cities pursuing similar bylaws
A bylaw introduced this year in Hamilton has made it more difficult for landlords to order so-called renovictions — the act of evicting tenants to renovate a building and then increasing the rent charged to new tenants. Other Ontario cities, including Toronto, are pursuing similar bylaws.
Dalhousie Legal Aid says the Halifax Regional Municipality should consider doing the same to protect tenants from loopholes in Nova Scotia's Residential Tenancies Act that it says landlords often exploit.
CBC Radio's Information Morning guest host Preston Mulligan spoke with Sydnee Blum, a Dalhousie Legal Aid worker and eviction prevention co-ordinator, about Ontario bylaws and why Halifax hasn't tried to introduce similar rules.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What does the Nova Scotia Residential Tenancies Act currently say about renovictions and when they're even allowed?
Currently, if a landlord wants to seek a renoviction in a building, they have to meet a suite of new requirements and this was just passed in 2022.
A landlord will need to obtain a building permit from the city, so proof that they intend to go forward with those revisions and they need to be doing the … renoviction in good faith. Meaning that they need to, to some degree, prove that it's going to be so extensive that they absolutely need a vacant unit.
What are the loopholes in the tenancy act that are often exploited?
There's a lot of issues around landlords wanting to renovict people to do cosmetic repairs … So you see tenants that are usually in historically low-income neighbourhoods … who are being forced out so that the landlord can put up a coat of paint and laminate flooring and then flip the unit.
And then similarly, there's issues where landlords are neglecting repairs in their building in order to be able to pursue a renoviction later. And that's what we really see happening very frequently in areas like Spryfield and north Dartmouth, which are historically considered to be low-income.
There's years and years of neglected repairs, tenants are paying well under market. And then a new building owner or the landlord comes in and says, 'We got to redo everything and everyone needs to leave.'"
And so tell me about the new renovation bylaws that were introduced in Hamilton and other Ontario cities, and how do they work?
In Hamilton now, which we sort of consider to be the gold standard, a landlord has to get a licence in order to renovict tenants. And so they have similar legislation that says you need to get a building permit in order to renovict a tenant at the tenancy board.
Who would give the licence?
The licence is granted by the city, but the eviction is granted by the province. Where you need that licence to get the building permit, it's sort of putting roadblocks in the way for landlords who are not evicting people in good faith. And so there are requirements in Hamilton now where you have to get an engineer's report or otherwise a contractor, an expert to say these repairs are going to go forward and they're so extensive that the building does need to be vacant.
And then there's a sort of education built in for tenants. And something that's really key is what we call the right of first refusal. So it's the right to return to the unit after the renovations are done at the same rent that you were paying before. It really removes that profit motive to evict people.
That first right of refusal doesn't exist in Halifax, or other municipalities?
No, not at all.
What do we know about how well these changes are working up there in Hamilton?
They are working exceptionally well on the ground. Some of the preliminary statistics — so before this bylaw came into place in Hamilton — they saw about a 1,000 per cent increase in five years in the number of renovictions filed in that city, and that's dropped to single-digit numbers since the bylaw's taken place. It's really keeping people in their homes and stabilizing communities.
Why can't we do what Hamilton is doing?
The Halifax charter essentially has a clause that says that if the city is putting forward a licence or a bylaw that's going to interfere with development or housing, the province has the right to come in and veto it.
So theoretically, people say that means the province could step in and stop any sort of bylaw that the city wanted to do around this. But to that we would say, just because this clause exists doesn't mean the province has to use it. And especially in the face of the housing crisis and just the magnitude of what's happening in the city, we would really challenge the city to call the province's bluff on this.
With files from CBC Radio's Information Morning