Press Hits

Kayla Leet spent one of the hottest days of the year so far taping foil to her windows to reflect heat away from her already “baking” east-end apartment…The rest of her one-bedroom unit reached 30 C Monday by the time she broke out the makeshift aluminum sun block. “I remember seeing other people put (foil) up and thinking, oh, that is so ugly. But you know what? I don’t care if it’s ugly,” said the ACORN tenant advocate. “I don’t have any other affordable options to try to stay cool … A lot of people don’t.”

En pleine vague de chaleur au Nouveau-Brunswick, des locataires réclament que l’air climatisé soit reconnu comme un besoin essentiel dans les logements, notamment pour les personnes à faible revenu.

Une vingtaine de locataires de Moncton ont manifesté au centre-ville mercredi pour revendiquer des assouplissements en termes d’installations de climatiseurs dans les logements. Le mercure a monté considérablement au Nouveau-Brunswick mardi. À Moncton, une température record de 33,7 degrés Celsius a été enregistrée. Une situation intenable dans un logement sans climatiseur, selon un représentant de l’organisme ACORN NB, qui défend les locataires, Sylvain Comeau. “En réalité, c’est une question de vie ou de mort, dit-il. “Avec ces chaleurs-là, c’est bien trop chaud pour vivre [dans un logement non climatisé].”

This week’s heat wave has been especially grueling for a group of people who live on Bold Street in downtown Hamilton. They’ve been struggling to get by with no air conditioning, no hot water for showers and nowhere to cook their meals. But tonight there’s hope that things will get better.

Kitchener city council has formally directed staff to begin drafting a potential renoviction bylaw, despite an earlier staff report that advised against implementing one. One delegate at Monday night’s meeting, Elliot Wand of ACORN, told council his building has been nearly emptied through renovictions. “Only myself and two others remain,” he said. “Everyone else has been renovicted.”

The issue of renovictions in Kitchener was front and centre in council chambers on Monday night as a dozen delegates pleaded with city council to move forward with a bylaw. Renovictions take place when a landlord evicts a tenant by claiming they will complete renovations, which range from complete overhauls to a simple paint job. A number of Kitchener residents are in full support of the bylaw, along with Waterloo Region ACORN, a community union of low and moderate-income residents who stand up for renters against bad-faith landlords.