The Ontario government has introduced measures that speed up evictions, undermine tenant organizing, and embolden landlords like Starlight Investments who in 2021, filed 8.8 per cent of all eviction applications against tenants in the Greater Toronto Area. The Fighting Delays, Building Faster Act, which passed first reading at Queen’s Park on October 23, amends the Residential Tenancies Act and empowers the government to make further regulatory changes to the eviction rules.

The bill’s stated aim is to reduce the backlog of cases at the Landlord and Tenant Board (LTB). The Ontario Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing’s technical briefing on the bill claims that since 2023, the government has reduced the LTB backlog by 30 per cent but that ongoing delays hurt both landlords and tenants. However, as I have argued here, the sheer volume of eviction applications filed by landlords is behind the backlog and a more efficient LTB mainly hurts renters, enabling landlords to raise rents on vacant units once long-term tenants paying lower rents have been removed. 

To illustrate, Tribunals Ontario reported that in 2024 to 2025, landlords filed 86 per cent of all applications received by the LTB and 92 per cent of those applications (more than 45,000) sought to evict tenants. And at the legal clinic where I work in Toronto, we now see the LTB scheduling eviction hearings for tenants facing renoviction as soon as two months after the landlord files the eviction application, when as recently as a year ago, the same hearings took up to six months to schedule.

In reality, the proposed law is a state response to rent strikes in Toronto, and the recent successful rent strike by tenants at 71, 75, and 79 Thorncliffe Park Drive in particular. In 2023, over 100 Thorncliffe Park tenants began withholding rent payments in protest of above guideline rent increases sought by landlords Starlight Investments and PSP Investments. 

In a move meant to break the strike and collect withheld rent monies, Starlight and PSP filed over 100 eviction applications against tenants. While tenants continued to put pressure directly on the landlords through a series of confrontational actions, they mounted a collective legal defense against the evictions, successfully motioning to have their cases joined and heard together, and raising common issues such as frequent water shutdowns at the buildings. This approach to the hearings, which would have been insufficient on its own, gave tenants the space to continue to organize and confront the landlords outside of the LTB process. 

Ultimately, the landlords, their lawyers, and the LTB proved incapable of subduing tenants’ organizing. More than two years after the rent strike began, and before the hearings concluded, the landlords came to the table and settled the dispute favourably to tenants.

The proposed law shortens the rent arrears eviction notice period from 14 days to 7 days and limits tenants’ legal defenses against eviction in these cases. LTB adjudicators will no longer be permitted to allow tenants to raise disrepair issues at eviction hearings unless tenants have notified the LTB in advance and only if they have paid off 50 per cent of the rent monies the landlord claims they owe before the day of the hearing.

Another one of the new measures proposes to explicitly define the circumstances under which landlords can evict tenants for persistent late rent payments. These reforms will undermine organized tenants’ ability to successfully defend against evictions like the Thorncliffe Park tenants did. 

Joe Hoffer, the lawyer who represented Starlight in the Thorncliffe Park hearings, has provided rent strike training to members of the Federation of Rental Housing Providers of Ontario, the landlord association that represents the sector’s biggest players and actively lobbies the provincial government for pro-landlord reforms.

Beyond countering tenant organizing, the legislation’s most drastic proposal was to open the door to eliminating security of tenure altogether. In Ontario, tenancy agreements automatically renew at the end of their term — landlords can’t increase unit turnover rates by signing tenants to expiring leases. On October 26, the Ontario Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing walked back the proposed changes to tenancy agreements but confirmed the government would move ahead with other “common-sense reforms.”

The ugliest and most class-antagonistic of those reforms is hiring more sheriffs — the provincial court officers who enforce evictions, overseeing the changing of locks and sometimes physically removing tenants from their homes. Thankfully, organized tenants in Thorncliffe Park and elsewhere have recently demonstrated that tenants can resist displacement by organizing with neighbours in apartment buildings and renter districts and confronting landlords directly — an approach we now need to generalize more than ever. 

Going forward, effective rent strikes will have to involve even greater numbers of tenants taking escalating actions that disrupt landlords ability to conduct business as usual.