Doug Ford: Tilting the Scales Further Towards Landlords at the LTB

On November 20th, the PC Ontario Government announced changes to the Landlord Tenant Board (LTB) with the ‘Cutting Red Tape, Building Ontario Act, 2024’ – an omnibus bill containing ‘60 new burden reduction initiatives’ as part of the broader Fall 2024 Red Tape Reduction Package. In it, is the government’s plan to give consumer reporting agencies access to information on tenants who have fallen behind on rent. All in an effort to ensure landlords’ profits are protected.

What this means for tenants?

If passed, these changes would further weaponize the LTB against tenants to harm their credit scores and deny them housing. All the while evicting tenants and raising rents faster.

If consumer reporting agencies like Equifax or Transunion have access to the LTB regarding missed rental payments, this can negatively affect tenants in multiple ways:

1. Tenants can be denied housing by a prospective landlord because they missed a payment for a variety of reasons. For example, COVID, job loss, death in the family, sudden illness or any other life circumstance outside of their control.
2. This will have a disproportionate impact on the most vulnerable tenants such as single parents, women, seniors, persons with disabilities and others who are already struggling to access adequate housing.
3. What happens to late payments? For example, the landlord doesn’t deposit the cheque on the first of the month or they report late payments too early? The Province has given no details on what (if any) safeguards would be in place to protect tenants’ credit scores in these scenarios.
4. Negatively impacting a tenant’s credit score will affect their ability to get a loan or access credit, making it much harder to get out of poverty.
5. The Province is currently only seeking to punish tenants who miss rent payments but not landlords who fall behind on utility payments, property taxes or other bills.
6. Already, consumer reporting agencies have a lot of power and rarely share information with individuals if they have bad/not great credit or how they got there. This makes it extremely difficult to correct mistakes in reporting payments.
7. These changes will give more power to wealthy landlords to access tenants’ personal information. No similar checks are in place for tenants to evaluate if a landlord holds up their end of the bargain by doing regular maintenance and repairs.

Ford’s bill also aims to speed up operations at the LTB.

90% of LTB cases are initiated by landlords, largely to evict tenants. The second most common filing is for Above Guideline Increases in rent (also known as AGIs). Without completely overhauling the LTB, any efforts to reduce wait times will simply result in tenants being evicted faster and higher rents. While Tribunals Ontario claims that wait times are down across the board, this is not true for tenants who wait three times longer to have their cases against their landlords heard.

ACORN Demands:

The PC Ontario Government has missed the mark completely. If the Province was so concerned about tenants missing rent payments, perhaps they’d investigate measures that made housing more affordable? Rents are out of control. Renovictions, demovictions and AGIs only make it worse. Giving landlords, credit agencies and the LTB more power over tenants will push those who are already struggling deeper into poverty and housing insecurity.

Ontario ACORN is demanding:

1. FULL Rent Control! That means applying rent control to all buildings, stopping unlimited rent increases when a unit becomes vacant and banning AGIs.
2. Overhaul the LTB and Residential Tenancies Act.
3. Take immediate steps to rebalance the LTB by:
   1. Treating tenants’ applications for disrepair and harassment as serious health and safety issues.
   2. Eliminating the differences in hearing wait times between tenants and landlords.
   3. Removing barriers for tenants – only 10% of cases before the LTB are initiated by tenants.
   4. Resuming LTB hearings in-person and stop digital, phone and written hearings unless preferred by the tenant.

For more information:
https://news.ontario.ca/en/backgrounder/1005367/cutting-red-tape-building-ontario
https://www.ontario.ca/page/fall-2024-red-tape-reduction-package