Press Hits

When you think of extreme weather in Canada, thigh-high snow drifts may no longer be the first image that comes to mind. Instead, heat waves and wildfires are steadily emerging as a threat to our health and the environment.

Despite this, most residential bylaws only account for cold weather, requiring buildings to have heat in each unit and adequate insulation.

But as temperatures and deaths connected to heat keep climbing, more tenants, politicians and climate advocates are calling for comparable cooling rules. During municipal debates — from councils in British Columbia to Newfoundland — the same question keeps coming up: who should pay for the upgrades?

After years of delays, the city will take more time to ensure a prospective bylaw to protect Hamilton tenants against sweltering apartments dovetails with shifting provincial legislation.

But that added runway for details of the long-awaited maximum heat policy has brought tenant advocates to a boil.

“We’re talking about people’s health,” Ian Borsuk, executive director of Environment Hamilton, told city officials last week. “This is an issue of life and death for folks.”

Staff had hoped to present this month a policy that obliges landlords to cap temperatures in apartments at 26 C starting in the spring of 2027, bylaw boss Dan Smith said in an interview Wednesday.

A rural Flamborough resort community has reportedly been operating without the benefit of clean, safe tap water for nearly a month.

For full-time Fernbrook Resort resident Mary Kovacs, who said she’s been buying cases of water to keep up with household needs, the time has come for “appropriate compensation or rent reduction due to the loss of our essential services.”

Kovacs, who said she pays a monthly water testing fee of $35 on top of her $676 lease, told The Spectator she received a knock on her door in late May, and was presented with a boil water advisory.

According to Hamilton ACORN, a community union of low- and moderate-income people, an advisory notice was hand-delivered or put in the door of Fernbrook tenants by management.

Halifax Regional Municipality does not require landlords to prove an apartment building is vacant before issuing a demolition permit, something that one group in Nova Scotia is trying to change.

ACORN, a national tenant advocacy group, says the recent case of Shailagh Benteau — whose Halifax apartment was demolished while she was awaiting a ruling on her eviction — shows change is needed.

“It’s me today, but it could be you tomorrow,” said Benteau in an interview.

“I would love to be the very last person this can happen to in Nova Scotia.”

ACORN says there are other cities in Canada that have better protections in place for tenants. The group points to Hamilton, Ont., as a city with a rental housing protection bylaw.

When hundreds of tenants shut down the federal housing office in Ottawa earlier this month, I was part of a small group that managed to reach the 11th floor to demand a meeting with the minister.

Housing Minister Gregor Robertson’s office refused to listen to us. The department even threatened tenants with arrest.

More than 300 tenants from across the country filled the lobby of the Ministry of Housing, triggering a building shutdown. We continued to occupy the office for more than an hour, chanting and flooding MP phone lines.

Tenants are pointing out this hypocrisy in Canada’s approach to housing: subsidizing provinces and municipalities without conditions to fund unaffordable private housing developments, while allowing them to destroy existing affordable housing.