Canada’s eviction apocalypse is just beginning
If nothing changes, hundreds of thousands of people could endure evictions during the COVID-19 pandemic
Image: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, his podium flanked by Canadian flags, gives a July address on Canada’s COVID-19 economic situation. (Credit: Screenshot/CPAC)
None of the provinces in Canada have put forth a comprehensive plan to prevent evictions in the midst of an ongoing pandemic
Researchers and advocates anticipate waves of evictions as moratoriums lift and the CERB benefit ends, particularly in the country’s most expensive cities
Eviction has profound health consequences that will disproportionately affect marginalized communities
Waves of evictions as social supports run out will destabilize life for Canadian renters if nothing is done: that’s the message from researchers and housing advocates I spoke to for this story.
As I documented for Popular Science, that destabilization is already having a host of negative public health consequences in the United States. In Canada, similar evictions will deepen the uneven health costs of the pandemic, shifting the burden of housing instability onto those who need stability most–all while commercial renters like businesses are seeing more stable messaging and subsidy from the federal government.
In the US, government-subsidized rental housing is federally funded, while most other rental housing is overseen by individual states. Here in Canada, rentals are solely a provincial responsibility. But in the pandemic, federal policies have directly impacted what’s happened with rental housing. In late March, the federal government launched the Canadian Emergency Response Benefit, a (taxable) $2000 monthly cheque that recipients–those who qualified had just lost their jobs or seen substantial cuts–could spend however they wanted.
More than 8 million people applied for CERB, and many are still counting on it for rent money. “Things could have been a lot worse, and I think [the] Canada Emergency Response Benefit has been incredibly useful,” says Hannah Aldridge, a policy researcher at the Maytree Foundation.
But plenty of people who saw dramatic income losses don’t qualify for CERB, and even for those who do, two grand doesn’t go far in the expensive markets where the bulk of Canada’s renters live.
A substantial proportion of renters–somewhere between 8 and 15 per cent, by most counts–have already fallen into arrears and could be served with an eviction notice for non-payment of rent. After the moratoriums on eviction lift around the country, which has been happening since May 1, they’ll be vulnerable to eviction orders.
The moratorium was just lifted in Ontario, home to the country’s second-largest rental market, Toronto, which has about 313,000 units. In May, Aldridge co-authored a Canadian Centre for Policy Alternative report on the dire situation of that province’s renters and the need for an eviction prevention plan. (In terms of rental market sizes, Montreal leads at 600,000 units and Vancouver trails with 109,000 units, according to 2019 numbers from CBRE.)
In Ontario alone, hundreds of thousands of people are expected to be served with eviction notices in the coming months. But this issue is hard to quantify, because the economic impacts of the pandemic COVID-19 are ongoing and in flux.
British Columbia has provided a $300-$500 per month rent subsidy for some renters since April. At this point, that program will continue through August. It might have helped during the short term, says Geordie Dent, executive director of the Federation of Metro Tenants’ Associations, but it’s really “just kicking the can down the road.”
If nothing is done, researchers anticipate a new epidemic of evictions that will cause significant suffering for tenants but will, in the end, benefit landlords.
“What happened during the last financial crisis is that everyone just shuffled into everyone else’s units, at higher rents,” Dent says.
Aldridge also acknowledges that landlords, especially the big landlords of Canada’s financialized real estate market who own the majority of rental units, have no incentives to keep renters around, especially if those renters have been there for a while. After all, in much of the country, when someone leaves a unit they’ve been renting for a decade, the landlord can rent it to someone new at now-much-higher market rents.
This all unfolds in the middle of an ongoing pandemic. More than 115,000 Canadians are infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. And that number could go up quickly, especially in the next few months as reopening continues.
“We’re about to go into a period in September where they’re opening schools again and they’re allowing mass evictions,” says Dent. He’s concerned that these two factors combined will worsen future waves of COVID-19 infection.
Trauma doesn’t respect borders, and the bulk of the negative health outcomes from eviction I wrote about in the United States translate to the Canadian context. Even without the pandemic, eviction has far-reaching negative effects on health.
It’s “really just this upheaval of your life,” says Caislin Firth, a Simon Fraser University postdoctoral fellow who has studied the Canadian impacts of eviction. Once someone is evicted, Firth says, they may have to move to a new community (a new neighborhood or even a new city), which is associated with loss of health supports like community, familiar health services and even loss of access to resources like grocery stores, libraries and transit systems.
They might also become homeless, which is traumatically destabilizing, especially for children and youth. Families with children are the fastest-growing demographic among those who experience homelessness in Canada and more than 35,000 youth between the ages of 13 and 24 experience homelessness annually. The Toronto Foundation estimates that the rent crisis could result in 13,000 more people becoming homeless in Toronto alone.
Demographically speaking, a lot isn’t tracked when it comes to Canadian rental housing. Racial data is an important absence, says Firth. When studying housing, she says, “There’s a lot of great data sources, but they don’t capture things like race and ethnicity. ”
But other data confirm that people in marginalized demographics are extremely stressed out about the COVID-19 situation. A survey from the Canadian Mental Health Association found in June that the pandemic has already placed huge stress burdens on the Canadian population, notably on people with pre-existing mental health conditions, Indigenous people, people who are LGBTQ+ and people with a disability. In Toronto, we know that 83 per cent of reported COVID-19 cases are in people of colour, and that infection rates are also higher in lower-income communities.
Neither the federal nor any provincial governments have yet produced funding or a plan to help individual renters deal with the consequences of eviction moratoriums and CERB ending. “I’m still waiting for a government response intended to help these people stabilize their homes,” says Aldridge. But the opposite is what policy across the country is supporting now: hard end dates for eviction moratoriums and CERB.
“If you want to wrap these [programs] up, fine,” she says. “But don’t pull the rug out from tenants’ feet.”
Canadian Tuxedo puts pressing issues in context on both sides of the world’s longest land border. It’s written and produced by Kat Eschner, a freelance journalist who writes about science, business, health and animals (mostly.)
Conflict of interest: I am a gig economy worker living in Toronto, Canada, who doesn’t qualify for CERB but has seen income losses because of the pandemic. I have lived in the same rental apartment since 2013 and my rent would double if we moved into a similar unit today–that’s if we could find one.