By Catherine Fife, MPP Waterloo
In the middle of a housing crisis, people in Waterloo are being renovicted at record levels.
In 2025, my office navigated as many housing cases as in the previous 12 years.
One of the leading causes of this huge increase in housing cases has been renovictions. Renovictions are happening because it is easy to do so in the province of Ontario – and the Ford government is not interested in protecting tenants.
Renovictions occur when a landlord evicts a tenant to complete repairs or renovations that require a unit to be vacant for health and safety reasons. The Residential Tenancies Act (RTA) offers some protections for tenants; however, these protections are inadequate and leave low-income tenants vulnerable. In fact, many tenants fear that raising concerns will lead to eviction and the loss of their homes. Those who do report problems are often forced to defend their housing simply for asking for safe living conditions. This acts as a deterrent to tenants who want to speak up.
Rising costs and a diminishing housing supply mean that landlords who follow the rules often struggle to compete with those who exploit loopholes. Good landlords are effectively forced to choose between treating tenants fairly and losing financial viability, or renovicting tenants, raising rents, and staying in business. This adversarial structure fuels conflict, mistrust, and hostility between tenants and landlords.
These pressures are set to worsen with the implementation of the Ontario government’s Bill 60, which strips away tenant protections, accelerates evictions, and grants more power to large property management companies and corporate landlords that are already driving rents upward. It exacerbates an already broken system and makes it easier for tenants to be displaced.
Adding to the stress on our housing system, Waterloo Region has paused new housing development while it figures out how to upgrade its water distribution infrastructure. This freeze will further tighten housing supply and incentivize corporate landlords to evict tenants in lower-rent units to increase their profits. Combined with Bill 60, this creates a precarious situation for tenants.
Compounding these challenges, the provincial government has closed the legislature for an extended winter break after sitting for only 51 days in 2025. Queen’s Park won’t sit again until March 23, 2026. This extended closure of the legislature demonstrates the government’s lack of urgency in addressing the flaws and injustices within the system.
If meaningful solutions are to be found, communities must act locally and the best place to start would be a renoviction ban bylaw.
Renoviction bans are neither new nor untested in Ontario and Canada.
New Westminster in British Columbia implemented a renoviction ban in 2019. Before that, the city recorded 333 renovictions; within two years, that number dropped to zero.
In 2024, Hamilton passed a renovation licensing bylaw requiring landlords to obtain a license before renovicting tenants. In November 2025, city staff reported that only one renovation license had been issued and no fines imposed, mirroring New Westminster’s success.
These policies work because they level the playing field, offer a tangible deterrent and introduce real enforcement. They remove incentives that encourage displacement, protect vulnerable tenants, and reduce strain on an already stressed housing system.
It needs to be said, that by keeping people housed, renoviction bans lower costs related to emergency shelters, policing, healthcare, and social services. They also protect responsible landlords from being undercut by bad actors. But most importantly it keeps our most vulnerable community members housed.
In my 13 years as an MPP, I have seen how our community responds in tough times. In Waterloo, we come together to support our neighbours. If 2025 is any indication, challenging times lie ahead in the effort to keep people housed, but we can act now to make it easier for tenants to remain in their homes.
The best place to start is for the City of Waterloo to pass a renoviction ban bylaw.