Tackling Ontario’s Housing Crisis

Helping Homebuyers, Protecting Tenants Act

Our governmentt is committed to solving Ontario’s housing supply crisis through The Helping Homebuyers, Protecting Tenants Plan.

These changes come as part of the governments plan to build 1.5 million new homes by 2031.

If passed, changes will include further strengthening homebuyer protections, supporting tenants and streamlining the rules around around land use planning by:

• Increasing the number of adjudicators and staff at the Landlord and Tenant Board to speed up decision timeframes, as well as strengthening a broad range of tenant protections.
• Investing $6.5 million to appoint an additional 40 adjudicators and hire five staff to improve service standards and continue to reduce active applications and decision timeframes at the Landlord and Tenant Board.
• Enhancing tenants’ rights to install air conditioning in their units.
• Strengthening protections against evictions due to renovations, demolitions and conversions, as well as those for landlord’s own use.
• Reducing barriers for home builders to replace older rental apartments with larger, more modern rental buildings. 
• Doubling the maximum fines for offences under the Residential Tenancies Act (such as bad faith renovictions) to $100,000 for individuals and $500,000 for corporations.

In 2022, Ontario saw the second highest number of housing starts since 1988, with just over 96,000 new homes. This is 30 per cent higher than the annual average for the past 20 years. Ontario also broke ground on nearly 15,000 new purpose-built rentals, the highest number on record.