Tenants' coalition says proposed rent legislation is missing a key piece: rent control
CBC
New Brunswick is introducing legislation that would ban rent increases in the first year and restrict price hikes to once a year after that – but stops short of actually capping rent increase amounts.
The N.B. Coalition for Tenants Rights says that's a glaring omission.
The proposed legislation, introduced Tuesday, makes several changes to address some of the issues related to renting — including concerns that rental rates have spiked "unreasonably" during the pandemic, Service New Brunswick Minister Mary Wilson said in a news release.
A Statistics Canada report released in April found that rent increases in New Brunswick were the largest in Canada from March 2020 to March 2021, when rents rose by rose 4.8 per cent.
The new legislative amendments take aim at rent increases in several ways, but don't impose a maximum on rent increases without the approval of the Residential Tenancies Tribunal, as some provinces do.
In Ontario, for example, landlords can only raise rent by a maximum of 1.2 per cent in 2022, and must get the approval of the Landlord and Tenant Board for increases of more than that.
New Brunswick's amended legislation instead increases the authority of the Residential Tenancies Tribunal to review all rent increases.
The tribunal would have the authority to "review and deny unreasonable rent increases for most tenancies, instead of being limited to tenancies that are five years or longer," Wilson said.
Fredericton lawyer Jael Duarte, the new tenant advocate for the N.B. Coalition for Tenants Rights, said the proposed legislation is "disappointing" on several fronts.
"It is missing a lot," Duarte said in an interview Tuesday night. "First of all, it is missing rent control. It's important in New Brunswick that there is rent control, that there is a clear cap, with a number."
The legislation also doesn't provide any security-of-tenure, so that tenants can be assured that they have a contract that is supported by law. Duarte said it also fails to recognize "the imbalance of power" between tenants and landlords.
Duarte said the coalition is frustrated not only by these shortcomings, but also by the fact that they were not consulted during the review process.
"The coalition has made itself available on several occasions to work with the government, and we have been ignored," she said.
"So, this proposal does not reflect at all what we have been asking for: concrete protections for New Brunswick tenants."
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