Auto-Evict Petition Circulating Ontario

Have you heard about this “auto-evict” petition that’s been flying around the province for the last month and a half? It’s got 37 thousand signatures on it from BOTH tenants and landlords now! 

 

First, some data. I know, and I’m sorry. Stick around for the good stuff, but you need this to be able to understand the rest. 

 

According to the Landlord Tenant Bureau Report that was just released on Feb 16th, the backlog of cases is now up to 53 thousand. It’s presumed that 90% of those are from landlords and then 10% from tenants. Which, side note, is an interesting guess because tenants cases go to the residential housing enforcement unit and only in extreme rarity do they end up at the LTB.

 

But I digress. 

 

If we take that 53 thousand and take 90% of them, we end up with just shy of 48 thousand cases filed and waiting to be heard for landlord concerns. It’s then further estimated that 41% of those are for something as simple as rent is either always late or simply, not paid. 

 

That means that almost 20 THOUSAND apartments in ONTARIO alone are lived in by tenants who are not paying their rent, which means 20 thousand good tenants can’t get homes because squatters are in them right now. 

 

You want to talk about a housing crisis?

 

That doesn’t even count the ones where the landlords can’t justify the cost of going to the LTB and waiting 8-12 months for a hearing only to be given a payment plan that we all know the bad tenant won’t keep up with, and they’ll be back at the LTB in another year.

 

So let’s be clear. This petition is NOT a desire to “automatically-evict” tenants whenever landlords want. 

 

What it is, at its core, is a desire to implement what British Columbia and New Brunswick both currently have. What Ontario had from the 80s to early 2000s. “no pay, no stay” . Get rid of squatters and get a roof over the heads of good quality people. 

 

Even Trudeau, as much as the majority of Canadians don’t like him (he’s a minority government, not majority. Don’t @ me with those comments). Even he figured out that renters’ credit should be affected by rent payments. If all twenty thousand of those late tenants started seeing their credit scores affected, so they couldn’t finance cars or a new cell phone, do you think they’d be more timely with their rent cheques? 

 

That’s something that we at Blue Anchor have been offering to both our tenants and landlords for years. We’ve even used it to help tenants come from bad life situations to repair their credit scores so they can get cars and houses again. We’ve helped Ukrainian refugees and international students build Canadian credit so they can contribute to Canadian society and build a quality and safe life for themselves and their families here. 

 

But this housing shortage we’re experiencing? That can be resolved a lot more quickly than people think. 20,000 homes not currently over the roofs of quality people. Are some of them down on their luck? Sure. But not the entire group. Do you think that “slumlords” and “life events” are the reason that 20 thousand tenants stopped paying their rents on time, if at all? 

 

Think about it. 

Then when you’ve realized that people YOU know can’t get affordable housing because it’s all tied up in legal disputes, sign the petition and email your MPP to make sure that they know that YOU EXPECT CHANGE.