Why Canada should apply labour protections to the rental housing sector

Canada Standard

5 days ago

Gregor Robertson, Canada's new housing minister, was likely tapped for the job on the basis of his decade as Vancouver's mayor, where he introduced zoning changes, incentives for rental construction and the country's first empty-homes tax.
Those moves nudged supply but fell short: housing designed specifically for renting trickled in slowly and the city's homeless count hit a 13-year high of 2,181 in 2018.
Robertson once blamed the housing shortfall on tight-fisted provincial and federal budgets. Now that he controls part of that money, he can test his claim. He can plug a hole his municipal toolkit never could by being, as he vowed in 2018, "more abrasive and more vocal", and by coupling fresh federal dollars with legal protections that empower tenants to bargain collectively.
The urgency is clear: one-third of Canadians rent, yet tenant unions, though legal to form, have no right to negotiate.
This absence of statutory protection for tenants is often treated as a policy oversight. By withholding legal recognition, lawmakers preserve a model that allows landlords to negotiate from a position of structural dominance as tenants confront systemic harms - rent hikes, unsafe conditions and evictions - all on their own.
Soaring rents and evictions have been described as a temporary "housing crisis."
But researchers at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives counter that the market is not broken; it works exactly as designed. Calling it a crisis justifies "extraordinary" fixes - most often lower interest rates that lure first time home-buyers to take on debt larger than they should, according to Canadian policy scholar Ricardo Tranjan in his book The Tenant Class .
The results are structural, not temporary: median national rent for a one-bedroom dwelling now tops $2,000, vacancy rates sit below two per cent and 33.1 per cent of renters spend more than 30 per cent of income on shelter. That's the rent-burden line - the threshold used to determine if a household is struggling to afford housing - of the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation's (CMHC).
Since the 1990s, the CMHC has replaced public construction with mortgage-insurance programs that flood markets with credit, kicking the can down the road. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Mark Carney's choice of Robertson as housing minister has advanced a familiar credit-led package: GST rebates for first-time buyers.
When asked whether housing prices should fall, Robertson said "no," arguing that wages will eventually catch up - an adjustment economists project would take roughly 20 years even if prices stopped rising today.
Expanding credit under these conditions is more likely to swell asset values than improve affordability, trading a housing emergency for an indebtedness emergency.
Ontario's Residential Tenancies Act (RTA) typifies Canada's token approach to renter power. It affirms tenants' right to form associations but, in the very next clause, excuses landlords from any obligation to meet or negotiate with them. The result is performative legality: tenants can speak but landlords are free to ignore them.
The chilling effect resembles pre-industrial labour markets, where organizing invited dismissal. Recent history confirms the weakness.
In 2023, the tenants of 33 King Street in northwest Toronto mounted a five-month rent strike and won partial rollbacks, but the tribunal still refused to recognize their union; every renter had to sign a separate settlement. By settling disputes that way, the system drains collective power and drags cases through attritional timelines that encourage capitulation.
Canada confronted a parallel power imbalance during industrialization. Early 20th-century governments criminalized picketing and blacklisted organizers. The upheavals of the Great Depression forced Ottawa to adopt the Wartime Labour Relations Regulations (1944) and the Industrial Relations and Disputes Investigation Act (1948).
Those statutes codified three enduring principles:
Legislators acted not from moral awakening, but to temper exploitation and preserve social stability.
Housing now mirrors that earlier asymmetry: corporate landlords command capital, legal expertise and mobility, while tenants have none of that power. Extending labour-style protections to tenant unions would simply apply a proven regulatory formula to rental housing.
Landlord associations often voice four main objections to statutory tenant-union rights: the anticipated administrative burden, the spectre of disinvestment, purported constitutional limits and a moral claim that responsible owners don't need to be legally compelled to act in good faith.
Labour history suggests these concerns are overstated.
As Tranjan recalls, reputable employers already paid decent wages and offered sick leave before such standards were legislated. Regulation merely imposed a baseline on those profiting from exploitation.
In housing, conscientious landlords who maintain units, honour rent control and eschew predatory fees wouldn't require mandatory bargaining or anti-retaliation clauses. But those enriching themselves through vacancy decontrol, renovictions or steep rent hikes would. Their resistance to tenant protections underscores their necessity.
Empirical evidence further weakens objections.
First, administrative overload is improbable: collective bargaining consolidates individual grievances into a single agreement, dramatically reducing repeat hearings, and the system would work the same in landlord-tenant tribunals.
Second, claims that stronger tenant rights deter investment clash with comparative experience. In Vienna, where nearly half of all dwellings fall under tenant councils wielding union-like powers and stringent rent regulation, construction activity remains robust and affordability stable;
Third, constitutional concerns are overstated. Although landlord-tenant law is chiefly provincial, the federal government already shapes rental markets through CMHC insurance, targeted tax expenditures and the National Housing Strategy Act, which recognizes adequate housing as a human right.
Ottawa could condition financing on tenant-union recognition or incentivize provinces to harmonize standards, echoing its mid-20th century push for uniform labour legislation.
Historical precedent and evidence across the country make clear that formalizing tenant-union protections is constitutional, would streamline dispute resolution and sustain construction - substantially benefiting the one-third of Canadians who rent without destabilizing the housing market.
Read more: How corporate landlords are eroding affordable housing - and prioritizing profits over human rights
To make housing genuinely affordable, Robertson must see Canada's rental sector not as a malfunctioning "crisis" but as a lucrative system of organized inequality.
Legislators once recognized that individual workers could not bargain fairly with industrial adversaries and created the collective-bargaining framework that undergirds labour relations today. Housing demands the same logic.
Tenant unions already operate in neighbourhoods such as Toronto's Thorncliffe Park, Vancouver's Mount Pleasant and Montreal's Rosemont. But without legal status, landlords can simply ignore them.
Federal legislation could correct this imbalance. Automatic certification would follow when a simple majority of tenants in a building sign membership cards, triggering a duty for landlords to bargain in good faith over rent increases, maintenance schedules, security of tenure and essential services.
Read more: Financial firms are driving up rent in Toronto - and targeting the most vulnerable tenants
Anti-retaliation clauses would bar eviction or harassment of organizing tenants, with remedies mirroring labour law: reinstatement, damages and arbitration to deter stalling.
Negotiated standards could be applied across neighbourhoods while still allowing investors reasonable but socially responsible returns.
Granting labour-style protections to tenant unions is hardly radical; it simply extends a principle Canada embraced nearly a century ago: collective problems require collective rights.
Renters cannot wait for market forces to self-correct. Recognizing and regulating tenant unions is the most direct route to balancing power, safeguarding homes and treating housing as a human right rather than an asset class.