By Daniel McCubbin
On April 1, Mississauga’s city council voted to pass a new bylaw that closes a loophole often used by landlords to displace tenants from their units and permanently remove housing from the already-limited stock of affordable homes.
After consulting with residents and tenants’ rights groups like Peel ACORN, the city passed the Rental Repairs and Renovations Licensing Bylaw, which goes into effect on September 1. It takes aim at what advocates call “renovictions,” a practice used to evict tenants under the guise of necessary renovations.
The Mississauga bylaw is just one of several strong protections that have been passed at the municipal level in Ontario over the last several years. As the provincial government continues to tear away at protections for Ontario’s workers, these victories signal that those seeking to slow the Ford government’s rampage should be keeping a seat warm at their local city hall.
How do landlords use renoviction?
In Ontario, landlords can issue an N-13 form to tenants, notifying them that their home requires renovation and that the unit must be temporarily vacated. The loophole works like this: landlords issue a notice, delay renovations, wait for the tenant to give up on returning home, then list the unit on the open market at a higher rent – sometimes up to double the previous rate.
For residents at 2111 Roche Court in Mississauga, who were displaced due to flooding in 2021, these manipulative tactics have gone on for nearly five years. Some residents are only now hearing back from their landlord, Jamuna Investments Ltd., that they can finally move back home. Many residents gave up years ago, giving Jamuna free license to rent out these units at market rate, permanently erasing affordable housing stock.
The targets of renovictions are consistently among the most vulnerable: elderly, sick and disabled residents living on fixed incomes. Unable to afford market rents once they are displaced, many residents are rendered effectively homeless.
Renovictions are just one piece of the full arsenal provided by the provincial government to corporate landlords aimed at destroying affordable housing, but at the municipal level it seems the prevailing winds are quickly turning against abusive N-13s.
Mississauga is the third major city in Ontario (alongside Hamilton and Toronto) to pass a strong bylaw that regulates renovictions and provides compensation for tenants including rental top-ups and moving costs. This makes pressure tactics like what happened at 2111 Roche Court untenable for landlords, since they have to foot the bill for displacing their tenants.
Of course, these changes didn’t occur spontaneously – they are the result of strong pressure from residents and consistent demands from ACORN and other tenants’ rights advocates.
However, even as wins accumulate at the municipal level, the provincial government continues its incremental assault on affordable housing.
Beginning in 2018 the Ford government announced that new housing units built in the province would be exempt from the guidelines which normally cap rent increases at around 2 percent annually, ensuring that little to no new affordable rentals will become available.
Through the implementation of the “above guideline increase” (AGI) system, the province has handed landlords a loophole around those same restrictions for older units as well. AGIs can be imposed on tenants to “temporarily” increase their rent beyond the allowed limit for years at a time, and are often stacked on top of one another to create compounding rent increases.
The most recent move by the Ford government, the Fighting Delays, Building Faster Act (2025), nearly ended rent controls entirely. Notably, thanks to the efforts of housing advocates across Ontario, the most destructive parts of this legislation were stripped out before it was quickly passed through Queen’s Park without public consultation.
Mississauga’s new bylaw highlights a strategic opportunity to resist the continued assault of the province against working people. In meetings with ACORN members, Mississauga city councillors expressed a passion to pass strong anti-renoviction protections – a breath of fresh air for housing advocates, who are painfully familiar with the typical refrain from municipal leaders: “housing is a provincial issue” (read “there’s nothing we can do, leave us alone”).
As the provincial government further imposes its will over cities, as it has done recently in the move to take over city-owned land and expand Toronto’s Billy Bishop Airport, it only further alienates and disenfranchises its constituents. This path of destruction is bound to create tensions with city hall, where it seems councillors are actually opening their ears to the needs of their constituents – a concept seemingly unfamiliar to Mr. Ford.
With municipal elections coming in the fall, now is the optimal time for leveraging local politics to build a bulwark against the provincial government’s relentless attacks on behalf of corporate profiteers.
[Photo: ACORN]
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