Yesterday, the Ontario government introduced Bill 60, Fighting Delays, Building Faster Act, 2025, which contains many disconcerting, proposed changes to the Residential Tenancy Act.
The one that jumps out of the page is the government’s stated interest in “Alternative options on lease agreement expiry that could allow landlords to control who occupies their units and for how long.” For anyone who follows housing debates, that’s clearly code for the introduction of fixed-term leases.
Ontario currently has indefinite leases, which means tenants can stay in their units for as long as they need and want, unless the landlord has legal reasons to take the unit back. In practice, it’s more complicated, and predatory landlords find ways around those rules, which has been documented in detail by a RenovictionsTO report.
Still, indefinite leases provide much security to tenants. If fixed-term leases are an option, landlords will be tempted to use them as a way to circumvent rent controls, which in Ontario only apply to occupied units.
When introducing the bill, Ontario Attorney General Doug Downey stated, “There are a lot of landlords that are not putting their units on the market. We need to get those units.” He then provided estimates of vacant units that the bill could help bring to the market: “I’m convinced, if we get the right balance, we’ll unlock tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of new units.”
Downey did not provide a source for those estimates, and I couldn’t find any data to support them.
Let’s start with the obvious. It can’t be “hundreds of thousands.”
In the last census, Ontario had 5.5 million occupied dwellings. If “hundreds of thousands” means, say, 500,000, it would suggest that there is one empty home in Ontario for every 10 occupied homes. That’s not possible.
It can hardly be “tens of thousands” either.
In recent years, Ontario cities have implemented vacant-unit taxes that penalize property owners who leave homes empty. These programs generated some revenue and lots of data.
The City of Toronto estimated that between one and 1.2 per cent of homes in the city could be vacant, which represents between 8,700 and 10,000 homes.
A study prepared for the Region of Peel, the second largest urban agglomeration in Ontario, estimated that approximately 3,000 homes could be vacant in the region.
The City of Ottawa, in the first year of the implementation of the tax, found 3,672 empty units in the province’s second largest city.
The City of Hamilton implemented a vacant unit tax in light of estimates that 1,135 units could be vacant in the city.
Combining these reports, the four most populated areas of the province may have up to 17,800 vacant units.
Why these units are vacant is unknown. It may be due to temporary issues, such as inheritance proceedings, which would eventually be resolved. It may be due to long-term problems, like the need for structural renovations, which would prevent the unit from being rented anyway.
Either way, it is safe to assume that not all of these units can be rented, and any policy that tries to get them in the market should assume that only a share of them will be. In Ottawa, for example, of the 6,355 units accessed as vacant, 42 per cent were exempt from the vacant unit tax due to an acceptable reason for being empty.
We can’t estimate the share of all empty units that could be brought to the rental market. But we know that it is definitely not “hundreds of thousands” and hardly “tens of thousands.”
The rationale provided for the introduction of this potentially very damaging policy change does not hold up. And for too many tenants, implementing that new rule will hit too close to home.
