The meeting

It’s here “tenant’s revenge”, titre Maclean’s. On the front page of its December edition, the Canadian magazine shows members of the York South-Weston Tenants Union marching through the streets of Toronto, with banners demanding a rent strike and calling for an end to their increase.

One of the protesters, Sharlene Henry, told Maclean’s that everything was going well for her in her apartment building in the Weston district, until 2013. Since then, rent increases have followed one another, sometimes “well beyond” guidelines from the Province of Ontario. Landlords in fact use a rule that allows rent increases above the legal rate to make major repairs in their buildings.

In a market where “Tenants face skyrocketing rents and deteriorating living conditions in the most brutal real estate market in living memory,” resistance began to organize.

Last April, during a tenants’ meeting, M’s mother^me Henry “launched a radical idea: what if everyone stopped paying their rent?” At the end of the meeting, 50 tenants approved of the idea. “But in May, reports the magazine, a group of tenants elsewhere in town beat them to it”. Around a hundred of them started a rent strike.

“Reorienting the terms of the debate”

Hundreds of other Toronto tenants have since joined them, although landlords have begun issuing eviction notices. The determination of tenants to come together in an activist manner snowballed. “There are now around 40 active tenant unions across the country.” These organizations, specifies Maclean’s, “hope that a growing population of renters facing exorbitant prices will be more inclined to push back and reorient the terms of the debate, thereby opposing the power of landlords”.

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Is this bet risky? Maclean’s recalls that the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation indicated that the vacancy rate for apartments built for rental purposes amounted to barely 1.9% this year, the highest level in twenty years.

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