Advocates disappointed Nova Scotia won't legislate tenancy enforcement unit this year
Decision not to introduce legislation this fall means recommended timeline will be missed
Advocates for both tenants and landlords have expressed disappointment that the Nova Scotia government will not be creating a residential tenancy compliance and enforcement unit this year.
Officials announced on Thursday that legislation won't be introduced this fall to create the unit, meaning it will miss the timeline recommended in a report the government commissioned on the issue.
"We were hoping that the compliance and enforcement unit would move forward," said Kevin Russell, the executive director of the Investment Property Owners Association of Nova Scotia. "It is sorely needed to resolve landlord-tenant issues, particularly with issues of serial repeat offenders of the Residential Tenancies Act.
"We were disappointed to hear this news. We've been on record for years saying that the residential tenancies process is a broken system and it needs to be fixed."
Russell said there is no ruling in place to enforce the act in the event of a violation. That is unlike jurisdictions such as Ontario and British Columbia that have compliance units to ensure the residential tenancy laws of the respective provinces.
Last year, Colton LeBlanc, the minister responsible for the Residential Tenancies Act, said his department put out a tender to look for a consultant to plan an enforcement division within the residential tenancies program, adding that his staff had looked at other regions, including British Columbia and Ontario.
"I have a strong desire of certainly improving the enforcement mechanism under the [Residential Tenancies] Act," LeBlanc said previously.
In August, the report that was commissioned by the provincial department recommended the creation of a residential tenancy compliance and enforcement unit, as well as a March deadline, a timeline which required the government to introduce that legislation during this sitting of the legislature.
On Thursday, LeBlanc said the creation of the unit is on his department's "radar," but the current focus is an awareness and education campaign about the rights and responsibilities of tenants and landlords.
Reaction from tenant advocates
"We've seen the province choose to prioritize increasing its powers over the municipality, as opposed to providing targeted and enforceable protections that Nova Scotians desperately need," said Katie Brousseau, a community legal worker at Dalhousie Legal Aid.
Like Russell, she said it was "incredibly disappointing" to hear the news that the province would not be going forward with the enforcement unit.
In her view, she said, the decision means further increasing the backlog of the residential tenancies process, which has complainants waiting up to a year for a hearing as it is.
"We won't have an enforcement unit to be able to filter some of those complaints and issues," she said, adding that there's also a concern that there's the possibility of increased homelessness rates without a unit.
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With files from Haley Ryan