City of Toronto, housing activists demand eviction data from Ontario Landlord Tenant Board
CBC
When it comes to evictions, there's a lot that the City of Toronto and the housing advocates working alongside it don't know.
For example: how many evictions have actually taken place in the city? How many of them were what's known as renovictions, or personal-use evictions? And how many illegal evictions are happening on top of that?
The first big issue: Tribunals Ontario, the umbrella organization for tribunals including the Landlord and Tenant Board (LTB) doesn't actually track the outcomes of its eviction hearings.
Then, the second: the LTB does have data that could help answer some of those questions, but isn't sharing it.
"The problem is, we don't really know what the problem is," said Julie Mah, who works as an assistant professor at the University of Florida in the urban planning department.
"There's a lack of access to data, and to timely data."
Mah recently released a report through the University of Toronto's Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance in which she called for more collaboration and data-sharing between the province and the city to help Toronto improve its eviction-prevention programs.