The corporate lobbyists and apologists of corporate landlords and investors are now in the mainstream media claiming they are not to blame for the housing crisis.
According to them it is immigration and red tape that is to blame, fanning the flames of intolerance against immigrants and distrust in government. The facts tell a much different story.
Corporate landlords have successfully lobbied Conservative governments to remove development fees and regulations, which Ontario Premier Doug Ford calls “red tape” preventing them from maximizing profits.
They are also some of the biggest contributors to conservative parties at both the provincial and federal level.
At the federal level Pierre Poilievre was Housing Minister under Stephen Harper’s Conservative government, which allowed 800,000 affordable rental units to be sold off to corporate landlords and developers.
Under the Harper Conservatives, the average home price in Canada went up 70 per cent and he refused to do anything about it.
Some of Poilievre’s top donors are real estate investors, the same people cranking up rents and fighting rent control across the country.
At the provincial level here in Ontario, Ford’s policies are making housing insecurity much worse. Ford has also enabled private investment corporations like Starlight to buy up as much affordable housing as they can. Then with only cosmetic improvements Ford gave developers the tools they needed to aggressively renovict tenants, so they could raise rents and profits.
Ford scrapped the planning rules, letting developers do as they pleased. Ford legislated that developers could shift the costs of development onto taxpayers. Municipalities now have to come up with more than $5 billion over the next decade, enhancing the profitability of the development industry at the expense of taxpayers. These changes are estimated to have put more than $400 million back into the pockets of the development industry. Ford feigns the appearance of solving the housing crisis, while actually making it worse.
Ford’s legislation, falsely named Bill 184, The Protecting Tenants and Strengthening Community Housing Act, professes to improve tenant’s rights and protections. It actually weakens tenant protections, while at the same time strengthening landlord power.
Bill 184 allows landlords to evict tenants without a hearing. This means that tenants first hear news of their enforced eviction when the sheriff shows up at their door and locks them out.
In Ford’s Ontario regulations that were put there to protect the public are eliminated as quickly as possible to profit his developer friends. And we wonder why there are so many homeless encampments.
Now Ford is blaming the homeless, telling them to “get a job” and threatening them with a $10,000 fine or six months in jail.
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