N.B. tenants facing large rent increases lose automatic right to get them phased in

A key protection for New Brunswick tenants in 2023 required rent increases above the inflation rate to be spread over multiple years — with "no exceptions" — if a tenant asked, but that won't happen this year, according to a new interpretation of the policy quietly adopted by the province.

The protection against excessively high increases is no longer automatic.

In an email to CBC News explaining how disputed rent increases will be adjudicated this year, a government spokesperson said tenancy officers will take a case-by-case approach to deciding whether tenants faced with rent increases that exceed inflation qualify to have them phased in.

"It is at the discretion of the Residential Tenancies Officer whether the phased-in approach is deemed acceptable," according to the email.

There are no listed reasons why a tenant might not qualify to have a large rent increase implemented gradually. On the Tenant and Landlord Relations Office website it says only that phased-in awards will be made "if contributing factors warrant it.'

That is a change from last year, when New Brunswick Housing Minister Jill Green intervened with tenancy officers who were not phasing in large increases for tenants in all cases. She told the officers there was no room in the policy to decline a tenant's request.

"There aren't exceptions built into the rules around the rent increases," Green said last April about whether the protection for tenants was to be automatic or discretionary

"If it's over [inflation] then it will be phased in over two to three years."

Green created the phase-in policy in 2023 as a replacement for a hard cap on rent increases that New Brunswick used for one year, in 2022.   

Nichola Taylor, chair of the New Brunswick branch of national housing rights group ACORN, said the phase-in policy has been a less effective and overly bureaucratic substitute for the rent cap.

But the policy will be weaker still if its protection ceases to be automatic, she said.

"The only thing to stop all this is to put a rent cap back into place like they had," Taylor said.

According to legislation, the annual rate of inflation in New Brunswick each year is used to measure whether an approved rent increase the following year can be implemented all at once by a landlord or should be phased in to give tenants who ask for help time to adjust to a big increase.

In 2023, any rent increase above 7.3 per cent, which was the annual inflation rate in New Brunswick in 2022, was eligible to be phased in.