Northern Ontario        Before dawn, I slipped a canoe into the inlet at Stoney Lake in northern Ontario, where the staff of ACORN Canada was meeting for training and planning sessions.  Most of the supermoon was above me, and the dawn was gradually breaking in the east as I paddled back, having flushed several Canadian geese off the rocks and hearing loons calling as shore came closer.  The temperature was fall, but almost perfect.

Listening to the organizers give their reports, fall’s coming seems especially welcome for our members, because everywhere across the country the summer had propelled the ACORN Beat the Heat campaign.  ACORN tenant unions have been demanding from city councils that bylaws or ordinances where cooling systems would be triggered at when temperatures hit and are maintained past the low 80 degrees Fahrenheit.  Canada has traditionally been cooler, so many, if not most, apartment complexes do not have air conditioning systems.  With climate change, these demands have become more urgent.

In recent years the first ACORN breakthrough was in Hamilton, a mid-sized city in southern Ontario a bit over an hour drive south of Toronto.  They won a comprehensive study of temperature conditions and what it would take to mandate landlords provide cooling spaces or individual unit air conditioners.  Now other cities have taken up the banner this summer as well with mixed results.  In Toronto, they also won a commitment from the city council to study what it would take to create a similar program.  One of the organizer managers joked about whether Toronto or Hamilton would end up with a real program faster as the race of the studies began.  Another city won a piece of the program, but it was miserly.  The city will pay bus fare for lower income tenants to ride for free to a city-supported cooling center.  That city shall be nameless, because I wouldn’t want to slander our northern neighbor, still pretending that climate change isn’t coming in full force.

The most ridiculous situation arose from some Ottawa properties owned by the huge landlord Michael Klein.  His name cropped up in a number of cities where our tenant groups are in a tangle with him.  In this particular complex that was demanding more provisions in the ACORN Beat the Heat campaign, an existing rule was perverse.  All tenants were separately metered and paying their own hydro or electricity bill. They could own their own personal air conditioning unit and run it, but if they did, the landlord would charge them an additional $75.  Can you follow this?  The landlord didn’t provide the A/C and isn’t paying the hydro bill, but is still charging them.  For what, other than greed, who knows?

We’ve got always to go to win, but it’s going to keep getting hotter, so the issue is going to be impossible for cities and landlords to avoid.  Add to all this, that ACORN is also going to keep the heat on both of them as well.