Protect tenants from opportunistic evictions

Addressing the lack of affordable housing has become a priority for all levels of government. The focus has been on increasing the number of domiciles, but how about protecting existing affordable rental housing, which is currently under siege? Landlords are doing an end run around rent controls by issuing fraudulent N12 eviction notices to clean, quiet, dependable, long-term tenants. The N12 is legal notification to a tenant that the landlord, or an immediate relative of the landlord, intends to move into a rental space. It's one of the few reasons a landlord in Ontario can ask tenants to move, even if they haven't violated their lease for issues such as non-payment. If the filing was done in bad faith — for example, if the relative never moves in and the eviction was actually done to move in a higher-paying tenant — the landlord could be fined up to $25,000. But no one is tracking and monitoring the situation. The Landlord/Tenant Board is notoriously dysfunctional. So the most effective way to address these wrongful evictions is to eliminate the incentive for landlords to take that action. They should not be allowed to charge a new tenant any more than the current tenant is paying. Scarcity has substantially increased the rents that can be demanded from new tenants. Moreover Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem has made it clear that interest rates will continue to go up, to offset inflation, the rate of which was 6.8 per cent in April. With mortgage payments rising, landlords are more motivated than ever to charge as much as the market will bear for their rental properties. The temptation to deliver fraudulent N12 eviction notices will be great, especially since they're neither tracked nor monitored. The result is that more and more tenants -- often elderly and on fixed incomes -- will be tossed out into an unaffordable rental market, and some will end up homeless. Please ask Ontario Housing Minister Steve Clark, to eliminate this rent-control loophole immediately.