Canada is in the middle of a housing crisis that is disproportionately affecting the most economically precarious renters. In 2022, a report found that in Vancouver and in Toronto, even two minimum wage workers who work full-time cannot afford a one-bedroom unit without spending more than 30 per cent of their combined income on rent. On Rate My Landlord, a website where tenants across the country can leave crowdsourced anonymous reviews about their landlords, many post complaints about rent hikes, inadequate living conditions and rude landlords.
Fed up with the status quo, two groups of tenants in Toronto took matters into their own hands by staging rent strikes—and won.
Identify the problems
“Rats. There was no heat, bed bugs and roaches. Those were the main things. And our laundry didn’t work for a while”, says Clifford Wade, a tenant who lives alone in Chinatown. “I could not sleep, there were rats at all hours of the night. My room didn’t have any, but outside, I would hear them. We would see them dead, or put rat traps to get them. The tenants above me would have them as well.”
He says that his landlord would not help any of the tenants with their problems despite multiple complaints. The landlord, he says, would yell at them and threaten eviction. “These things were hard on us, because nobody had a place to live if we moved out…where would we go?” he recalls.
Han Baoqin, an elderly tenant who lives with her husband in the same building as Wade, says she never missed a single rent payment in her two years of living there, despite the many problems in her unit.
“In October and November, the heating was not working. In December, it worked briefly and then broke again. With the weather being so cold, we had three months of no heating. We are advanced in age, in our 70s and 80s…if the landlord can’t make the heating work, can we even justify paying her rent?” says Han in Mandarin, the only language she speaks. “There was no WiFi, no laundry, the toilet was broken.” She says that her fridge was full of cockroaches and that she could not cook without having mice intrude on her.
Across the city in North York, Sayeed Siddique, a tenant at 1440-1442 Lawrence Avenue West, said that when new landlords acquired his building in 2016, they issued rent increases to the 30 tenants without going through the appropriate channels for an above guideline increase (AGI) of rent. It hit the tenants hard, as most of them were folks who live paycheque to paycheque and have resided in the building for decades.
They reached out to the York South-Weston (YSW) Tenants’ Union, a group of tenants and tenant associations that has been fighting for tenants rights in North York for many years. When three other buildings in the neighbourhood went on rent strike under the banner of YSW, it inspired the tenants of Lawrence Avenue West to contact the union for assistance. They began organizing under the banner of YSW, which helped them throughout the process to develop a deep network among their fellow residents.
“This building is very old, so we have the rent control cap on us. So we are supposed to get a notice of an AGI”, says Siddique. “When [the landlord] applied and got the approval from the Landlord and Tenant Board (LTB) with just six people signing, we were taken by surprise when these notices were served for us to pay the dues.”
Siddique says that the condition of his building rapidly deteriorated after COVID-19 set in. “We thought that the building condition was getting so bad with rats, termites. The garbage was not cleaned. The alleyways didn’t have exhaust. The carpets were very dirty, the ceiling was falling, the walls were cracking, the laundry didn’t work, the doors were not working, the cupboards were not working, the sink was leaking. So any problems, the landlord was not taking any care [of them] at all,” he remembers.
Take collective action and seek the support of community organizations
In Chinatown, Han says that in November 2024, the tenants wrote a collective letter to their landlord that received no reply. They also had seven meetings with the landlord that failed to resolve the problems before going on rent strike on December 1 2024.
A few weeks later, the tenants went public by staging a protest outside another business that the landlord owns. Friends of Chinatown Toronto (FOCT), an activist group that fights for better living and working conditions in the neighborhood, supported the tenants in planning and executing the demonstration.
Seeing the tenants come together forced the landlord to take action. “They started to do the work, started to have appointments to come in to deal with bed bugs, rats, roaches. The heating was okay, and the laundry was fixed,” says Wade. All tenants who requested a written lease agreement were also issued a standard form Ontario lease. “When we started striking, she was trapped. She had no choice but to resolve our issues,” says Han.
Wade believes that one of the reasons the strike worked was because it threatened to damage their landlord’s reputation.
Elaine Yu, a volunteer with FOCT, believes that rent strikes are an effective way for tenants to get their demands met. “Now they know how to get [their landlord’s] attention. Because they worked together, they were able to get their demands met. So I think if this happens again in the future, they will just do it again,” says Yu. “They have the leverage to sit at the same table with the landlord, to demand a safe place to live that they can call home.”
In North York, Siddique and a few other tenants filed an appeal to halt their rent increase in 2019, but the proceedings were stalled for two years due to COVID-19. Lawyers from the Community Justice Collective (CJC) worked with YSW, the union which the tenants were organizing under, to file an appeal in higher court on behalf of the tenants. “Lawyers were filing in court saying that [the rent strike] is because of the default of the landlord, because he has not performed his contractual norms, and that’s why the tenants are not paying”, says Siddique. He presented to the court pictures, videos and audio of all the repairs that were not done and of verbal abuse by the landlord.
The North York tenants started a rent strike against the building’s unsanitary conditions in 2023. The tenants’ union provided the organizing template to the tenants and assisted with organizing tasks from the beginning of the end of their own rent strike. Their landlord responded by issuing notice of evictions for some of the tenants.
“When one tenant was being evicted forcefully, we barged into the office of the landlord. We had a sit-in for 72 hours. [They sent] police and whatever they tried, but we were holding on strong. We were able to avoid the eviction,” he says proudly. They were able to successfully prevent other evictions with lawyers. To this day, despite threats, no evictions have succeeded at the building, something Siddique considers “a big victory.”
In 2024, the court ordered him and the other tenants to pay the rent to the LTB – Siddique complied. They also ordered the landlord to make the necessary repairs in 100 units within 90 days. “He did a lot of repairs, but he did not complete [repairs on] the 100 units in the target,” says Siddique, who considers this result a victory.
He believes that the landlord wanted to try anything possible, including illegal rent increases and evictions, to make more money, but failed because of the tenants’ collective efforts. The landlord, he says, was “totally cornered” and “has no options now” despite using the “best of the legal people.”
Siddique now educates other tenants across the city about how to successfully conduct a rent strike. He stresses that the whole building needs to participate for the strike to win. “Stay strong, stay together, and stay focused. Follow up on the notices which are sent by the landlord. That’s important,” he says. “And always be with some [tenants’] union where you can seek support. As a tenant alone, you cannot fight.”
Communicate with everyone and break down language barriers
Yu did a lot of translation during negotiations for Chinatown tenants like Han who are unilingual Mandarin speakers. “So there are Mandarin speakers and English speakers. Because the tenants wanted to do collective negotiation…some of the volunteers and Friends of Chinatown helped with translation,” says Yu.
They think that breaking down the language barrier helped the tenants, who did not know each other well beforehand, realize that they were all experiencing the same problems. “Once they started talking, with some translation supported by Friends of Chinatown, they were able to be on the same page, and were open to working together.”
Siddique also rallied all the tenants in his buildings by going door-to-door and keeping them updated on the situation. Tenants with language skills at his building would do outreach to other tenants who spoke their language to ensure everyone got the same information. They even had a list of tenants who were in danger of succumbing to pressure from the landlord and would pay extra attention to those people.
“Those types of people we identified, and kept talking to them, convinced them, told them all the victories, gave them flyers, convened meetings, sometimes provided lunch, sometimes provided dinner,” he says. They would even throw parties with food and invite all the tenants to keep them motivated in their fight.
“You have to start strong and stay strong with them. In that process, you have a lot of challenges, and you should never give up and keep educating the tenants”, concludes Siddique.
