Montreal Listening to the reports from all of the offices around Canada where ACORN Canada is organizing is always a treat in their Year End / Year Begin meeting. Every year it seems there are more unusual issues, as well as dramatic progress on longtime campaigns, as the organization and its successes spread around the country.
Take pigeons for example, please! Known by some urban dwellers as “flying rats,” pigeons have a reputation that putting them far afield of their Rock Dove name. A complex where ACORN was organizing in Ottawa was overrun with pigeon guano everywhere to the point it was more than a nuisance; it was a health hazard. Putting plastic owls up here and there was not a solution, but with one action after another, the ACORN tenants forced the landlord to put up netting over the entire building to keep out the pigeons. I hadn’t thought of that, but next time we have a problem, that makes sense. Almost as common in the reports as pigeons were parking problems, where tenants were paying monthly sums for parking that either didn’t exist or wasn’t accessible. Sometimes those issues were easier to win than stopping pigeons!
Common issues in many Canadian cities where we have won “rent caps” which set a limit on how much a landlord can raise the rent annually is stealth fabrications by landlords to break the rules. AGI stands for “above guideline increase.” In Ontario, landlords can apply for AGI increases, if they can justify them. ACORN ends up dealing with a lot of tenant complaints in buildings where they are trying, usually on specious grounds. The reports from the Ontario offices establish quite a successful win rate for ACORN on these AGI requests.
Real progress was made in several cities from east to west on what we can “renovictions,” where a building owner is trying to evict tenants so they can renovate. In various British Columbia cities we have won significant restrictions on this practice. One dodge that some use is evicting on the pretense that the landlord or her family is going to move into the property or the unit. In British Columbia, an ACORN victory there is going to require proof of residency by the landlord actually moving into the property and requiring them to stay for up to a year. Believe me, that scam has just been stopped.
Where there continues to be huge progress is heat and cooling guidelines requiring action by landlords when temperatures go way low or way high. Where many areas of Canada thought they didn’t need air conditioning, climate change has turned the tables. Hamilton won the first study here, but subsequently as the campaign as moved from city to city, others have leaped forward as well. Weirdly in Missassauga there was a heat ordinance for places that had air conditioning, but nothing for those that needed air conditioning.
Brick by brick these individual and building-by-building issues are building an unstoppable effort to create a structure of rights and protections for tenants in Canada. It’s a process, but ACORN has a plan, and it’s working.