I’m really delighted to stand and speak to this bill because I want to bring a story from our constituents and kind of bring some reality to what people are experiencing daily. Not everybody has a beautiful home wherever they live. People have situations that are out of their own control.

So I received this letter and I have permission to use the names of these constituents and I’m going to read the letter. It’s a couple of pages, so bear with me and I ask you for your patience when we’re listening to how people are living today in all of our ridings.

“Dear Ms. ... Armstrong,

“My name is Lori ... and fiancé Ron ... resided in a two-bedroom apartment for 11 years. The apartment was located within a fourplex. We are also writing on behalf of other tenants who lived in the fourplex. Tenants in unit 1 were an elderly couple in their mid-seventies of which had health issues of heart attack and stroke. We resided in unit 2. In unit 3 this couple had unknown health issues. In unit 4 the couple who resided there were again another elderly couple in their seventies with diabetes and requiring knee surgery for both legs. The fourplex was put on the sellers’ market in June 2021. An investor purchased the fourplex. Once the finalization of the sale was completed all the residents of the fourplex were given N13 notices of terminating tenancy due to extensive renovations that were going to be involved. We were given till January 31, 2022 to vacate the premises.

“We (all the tenants of the fourplex attended) had called a meeting with the new landlord on September 27, 2021 to discuss our rights to reoccupy the unit once the renovations were complete. We were told the renovations had to be done in accordance of insurance and to upgrade to building code standards. The renovations would take four to five months to complete. It was felt by the landlord to complete all renovations at the same time instead of doing one unit at a time. We prepared to vacate by the date of January 31, 2022. We wrote a letter to the landlord stating our intentions of reoccupying once renovations were complete.

“Our belongings are being stored in a storage container upon which we pay a monthly fee. We decided to leave the utilities account open in our names so as not to pay for any reconnection fees or deposits once returning. We have been living in a motel room for now 365 days. The renovations have not been completed in the four to five months as informed. We have had no apparent contractors at our home to do any of the renovations in months. We have emailed the landlord on numerous occasions for an update on when we can reoccupy. We have received the same response each time: ‘Renovations have been stalled due to increased costs of materials and unable to secure trades.’

“As stated, we are residing in a motel with our 11-year-old cat and our belongings are kept in a storage container. The utilities (costs are minimal) are still being paid by us. We had personal property insurance while living in the apartment which we had to inform the insurance company that our property is in storage. This caused an increase in the personal property insurance.... All costs are amounting to more than double what we were paying while living in our apartment. We have not been compensated for anything. The close quarters of living in a motel are stressful at times. The financial burden is also stressful. We have tendencies of feeling anxious as we don’t know when we will return to our home.

“We also have children” who “are unable to visit us because of the living situation. I have a son with autism” who I’ve “missed spending weekends for birthdays with, Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving. Our grandson hasn’t been able to spend weekends” with us because we are living in a motel.

“We also have a growing fear of the landlord flipping the fourplex: meaning he will resell the apartment fourplex and we don’t know where we” will “stand or what rights we have to reoccupy our home if this were to occur. There have been rumours he intends to resell as individual condominiums. We have not been informed of his intentions. We felt it was in our best interest not to look for another home for the reason of a binding lease upon which we would have to be signed for a year. We were told the renovations would only take four to five months to complete. It is now a year of being homeless.

“My fiancé and I are employed and make good wages between us. We don’t live beyond our means. We don’t make enough to buy a home or even to rent at the going rate of today’s market. The apartment where we resided was very affordable for us. According to the” Residential Tenancies Act “the landlord must charge the same rent as when we resided there. The landlord does have the right to increase the rent up to 2.5% in 2023 as well as applying for an additional amount by the Ontario Landlord and Tenant Board due to renovation cost which is up to an additional 3%. This would still fall below the market rent rates of today and” be “affordable for us.

“We feel something needs to be done about landlords evicting tenants to do extensive renovations. Landlords should be held accountable to tenants when they have to evict and the tenant wants to reoccupy. Our suggestion: Landlords have other property for their tenants to reside till renovations are complete. Also, to continue paying the same amount of rent as if the tenant was living in the original rental unit. Additional suggestion: Landlords compensate for the above costs incurred while living outside of their home” to “which they want to return. Landlords need to be accountable to do their due diligence in completing renovations in a timely fashion so ... people can return to their homes. It is not the tenants’ fault that there has been an increase in material costs. It is not the tenants’ fault that there is a labour shortage.

“This is our outlook on part of the reason there is a homeless situation across our country.

“We would be happy to release further information of our situation if you feel you want to contact us.”

Speaker, I wanted to read that letter in full because here are tenants who are doing all the right things. They were told four to five months. They moved into a motel, and that’s pretty expensive. They said they didn’t want to rent or lease a full apartment because they’d have to commit to a year. They put their contents in storage. When you have contents in storage, that’s a higher risk in insurance portfolios, which means they’re paying much more. They can’t have their family come into a hotel room to celebrate holidays and special occasions. And yet landlords are allowed to control people’s lives in extreme fashion.

Imagine being out of your home for four to five months—that’s what you were told—and the contractor is coming in to do some renovations in your own home, and it goes to 365 days, a year. How would it make you feel? What kind of laws would you want? Would you want to be compensated for the extra cost that you incur because of these renovictions? I suspect you should want that because there’s no incentives if we don’t have built-in costs for long-term inconveniences—upheaval, quite frankly—of people’s lives. So what’s the incentive? Currently, it’s up to two years. Can you imagine living somewhere else for two years, waiting to be put back in the home you were in originally?

It doesn’t make good business sense for landlords to have that tenant come back and pay the same amount after they’ve fixed up a unit. The laws we have now that are being proposed are somewhat improvements, but they’re not strong enough to make sure people act according to what agreements are supposed to happen between people who don’t have the legal means to argue about where they were originally living, and it also perpetuates the cost.

She has said that the cost of today’s market, even if they wanted to go somewhere else, is out of their reach. Just recently, I think it was just yesterday—yes, April 16 here—there was an article in London’s paper that said, “A Stunning Year-Over-Year Spike in London’s Apartment Rental Rates.” It says, “London apartment rents soared by more than 25 per cent over the past year, one of the largest increases in big-city Canada, a new market snapshot shows.”

I’m going to say that’s little old London because that’s how I remember it, but it’s growing exponentially, and the cost of living is outpacing what people can afford. If these tenants were in a small fourplex and there’s rumours of it going to a condo, well, they can’t afford—she said, “We can’t afford to save enough money. We make a decent wage so that we can cover our expenses that we can predict now and budget for now, but if you’re asking us to pay 25% more rent or to buy a condo because he’s transferred it over to a condo complex, we aren’t in that position.”

The bill that’s before us talks about doubling fines when landlords break the rules, from—I think it’s from $50,000 for individuals to $100,000; that doubled that. In corporations, I think it’s up to $500,000. That’s all good, and it pays—all these fines go to the Landlord and Tenant Board. I haven’t checked this question out, but I got curious once I heard that the fees go to the Landlord and Tenant Board. I’d like to know how those fees are used. Do they help to educate tenants? Is there some kind of victims fund for tenants so that they can recover some of the losses, that if they were bad-faith landlords, bad landlords that acted in bad faith and they lost financial means—what happens? Does anyone know what happens to those fees that are paid to the Landlord and Tenant Board?

I know the government has talked about increasing adjudicators on the Landlord and Tenant Board. I believe they said 40, and that’s good. We need to speed up those processes. But again, I’d like to know how they’re going to manage that. Are they going to look after the big landlords first or are they going to look after the tenants and the small landlords that are really, really suffering when the system is broken at the landlord tribunal?

We have had many solutions to helping the rental market. No one is disputing that people need to pay their rent on time so that landlords can have a good business investment, but when we’re rolling back rent control, that’s something that leaves people in a position of uncertainty when their annual lease is due for rent increase. That’s so unfair. It’s just so unfair. You’re not able to budget if you don’t have a predictability of your rent increase.

Part of this bill could have had a strengthening of putting on rent controls on all buildings, because it does look like, in this bill, if you’re going to build a new rental building as a developer, gosh, the sky’s the limit for what you can charge for rents in this province. With people such as Lori and Ron, these are the people who we’re leaving behind when we don’t strengthen legislation to ensure we’re not causing another trickle effect of another problem. You fix something over here, and something is broken because you haven’t dealt with the whole picture.

The other couple of examples I want to use—it’s interesting, because the bill does talk to the examples that have come into my office before the bill was written. Here we go; we have a woman here named Nicole. She called back in January of last year and she had an issue with her landlord with wanting to put a window air conditioner in her three-storey apartment building.

Again, that is something that has gone to the Human Rights Tribunal. There has been a decision placed that tenants now can do that. There are stipulations it has to be safe, make sure that they’re the ones apparently going to be responsible for the extra electricity costs. If you already have electricity covered in your rental agreement right now, can the landlord increase those rates? There are so many unanswered questions.

I really think, if the government is going to allow those air conditioners to be put in and put conditions on those, one of the conditions that I think should be in there is that the landlord should actually oversee that installation. Because what if you’re an elderly person, or maybe you don’t know a contractor, or you hire a contractor, a handyman, 1-800, and they come and they do the work and everything looks good on paper, but then it’s not installed properly? Where is the landlord’s responsibility to make sure that apartment building is safe—working with the tenant, and both of them making sure that they’re happy with the installation, that it’s a safe installation and it’s going to be there and work the proper way.

Just putting it on one party when two parties have a vested interest in something I don’t think makes for good outcomes. I really don’t. It just causes, I think, more arguments. But if you had the landlord involved in making sure that that got done properly, you can get things done on time, instead of the landlord calling up the tenant, “Oh, your air conditioner is in there. Give me the paperwork.” I can hear it in the constit office. I can hear all about it.

The other one who had the same problem with the renoviction was Henryk, and he’s an elderly gentleman. He came to my office, and again, it was a renoviction. He had to leave his unit, and he has been out of his unit for quite some time. He came to me in—I think it was November of 2022. He has been out of his unit for—and that was before that. He came to see me in November, and he was out of his unit for months and months and months.

It’s not right and it’s not fair. What I’d like to see is the rights and the fairness balanced between both parties in having someone leave their unit because it’s going to be renovated. I know there’s a stipulation in there that says that if the tenant could stay there while renovations are being done—that’s another thing we need to assess. If you ever have renovations in your home, I don’t think you’re asked to leave your home. If you’re going to do the kitchen, somebody comes in and, yes, you might be without a kitchen sink for a couple of weeks, but you’re not asked to leave your home for months and years at a time for those renovations to be done. There has to be more of that.

The Landlord and Tenant Board: Again, there needs to be more support for tenants when they go there. I’ve heard so many stories that they feel that they’re being pushed into agreements; they can’t hear the proceedings, perhaps; they’re not getting proper representation; they get cut off. Those kinds of things don’t help the tenant-landlord situation either. I think people in this Legislature want things to work for both parties, but we have to create that environment for that to work. That means making things happen for both parties, not just one; levelling the playing field; making sure adjudicators provide the services that they’re supposed to—not cutting people off, not giving opportunity for representation, not explaining things. How many of us have had phone calls from tenants where they didn’t even understand what was happening to them and they were evicted?

There are some things in this bill that go beyond some of the things that we expected, so it is somewhat supportable, but there are things in the section where there’s sprawl. We have a lot of land inside London. London Psychiatric Hospital was a wonderful piece of land that government owned, and the Liberals put up for sale and the sale was completed under the Conservatives. There’s a piece of land that could have been kept in the public realm and there could have been a mixed housing in that. It was right in the city of London. It was on a transit route, as the government talks about wanting to have.

Having those infill projects are good for the locally owned businesses. It’s good for the economy if you build those homes inside the city limits. They support local business and small business. We all want our BIAs to thrive. They had a very difficult time under the pandemic. Here’s a way we can bump up that economy if we build homes inside the city boundaries. There are opportunities, like I said, with the London Psychiatric Hospital, and they sold it to a developer. Now, with the fact that development charges are being waived, gosh, they haven’t built since they bought it; I wonder what—they’re going to take advantage of that, I’m sure. That means, again, economic loss, funding loss for the city of London.

I look forward to the questions from the other side. I specifically focused on the renovictions, and I’d like to hear what they think about Lori and Ron. Did they do anything incorrectly? The circumstances of what happened—why has it taken a year? Why hasn’t their landlord responded? To have them, the tenant, prove that the landlord is doing something wrong, that’s another expertise all in itself in order to get justice.

I’ll end my debate here and I look forward to questions.