PV Ontario Bureau
The Doug Ford government’s omnibus Bill 60, the Fighting Delays, Building Faster Act is a full-scale assault on tenants, democratic planning and local democracy, designed to inflame the province’s devastating housing crisis and serve corporate interests.
The bill’s attack on tenants is direct and cruel. It is, in essence, a “Faster Evictions Act.” By restructuring the Landlord and Tenant Board (LTB), Bill 60 gives tenants less time to appeal eviction decisions while giving landlords a shorter timeline to have evictions heard, pushing vulnerable people out more quickly. It makes it harder for tenants and tenants unions to hold negligent landlords accountable for maintenance issues at the tribunal.
Furthermore, it weakens protections against bad-faith evictions by extending the notice period for a “landlord’s own use” eviction to four months, while removing the requirement for one month’s rent compensation. It has been widely reported that “landlord’s own use” evictions are already massively abused in order to evict tenants for many reasons, including in order to raise rents beyond rent control.
This bill will expand the pipeline from the LTB directly to encampments. The explosion of homelessness by 25 percent since 2022, leaving over 80,000 Ontarians unhoused, is a direct result of policies that treat housing as a speculative commodity, not a human right.
Meeting in early November, prior to the bill’s passage on November 24, the Communist Party’s Ontario Committee passed an emergency statement demanding that Bill 60 be stopped and that the province launch an emergency plan to build at least 200,000 new units of publicly owned, rent-geared-to-income social housing to eliminate the crushing waitlists. Median one-bedroom rent across Ontario sits at an unaffordable $1,821 – Queen’s Park must legislate rent rollbacks and expand rent control to ensure no tenant is compelled to pay more than 20 percent of their income on housing.
Beyond tenant rights, Bill 60 is a brazen power grab that overrides local democracy and sabotages public mass transit and bike lanes. The bill centralizes planning power with the province, allowing it to overrule municipal official plans, stripping communities of their right to shape their own development.
Simultaneously, it effectively bans new bike lanes that would remove a lane of vehicle traffic, a measure that also grants the Transportation Minister the vague power to veto dedicated transit lanes. This attacks the core of local decision-making and actively blocks municipalities from building the integrated, green transit systems that are urgently needed.
This attack is not an isolated event. It is part of a sweeping anti-democratic offensive by the Ontario Conservative government on behalf of big business. While Ford may posture as standing up to Donald Trump on tariffs, he shares the same core project: using a populist facade to attack democratic institutions.
From attacking democratically elected school boards with Bill 33, to rolling back Indigenous sovereignty with Bill 5’s “Special Economic Zones,” to gutting local democracy through “strong mayor” powers, Ford’s playbook is one of centralized, corporate rule.
This attack must be met with organized resistance from the labour, tenant and democratic movements. The Communist Party’s provincial leadership is pledging its support for building this fight. “This legislation is part of the Ford government’s current strategy: govern while the legislature isn’t in session, then unleash a blitz of omnibus legislation to overwhelm resistance. It is a conscious method for accelerating the transfer of public wealth into private hands while minimizing democratic accountability. To defeat this agenda, we must unite and fight!”
[Photo: Acorn]
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