Press Hits

The City of Toronto will see $2.7 billion in funding from the federal government to build 18 housing projects over the next three years, as the city’s construction market continues to suffer from a condo crash.

It’s the latest move aimed at injecting life in the housing sector, along with the recent HST rebate on new homes, and the reduction of development charges in Toronto.

“Every home in this portfolio will be a rental. And together they span the entire continuum, from supportive housing to affordable homes,” said Prime Minister Mark Carney, speaking at a construction site in Scarborough for new co-op housing, Wednesday.

“For decades, Toronto simply did not build enough homes, and too much of what was built was unaffordable for most Torontonians,” he added.

The funding will create more than 5,600 new rental homes, and more than 1,800 of them will be deeply affordable, supportive or rent controlled, Carney said.

A Saint John man says he’s out as much as $4,000 after discovering what he believes was mould in his new apartment, and New Brunswick’s Tenant and Landlord Relations Office said it couldn’t look into his formal complaint immediately or give a future date when it would.

The two-bedroom unit in an older building in the city’s north end seemed fine to Abdulbari Alhallak when he first looked at it. He said he detected a damp smell, but was told it was fresh paint, not something like mould that would impact the air quality.

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.