Shanice Sharpe’s small living room is carefully styled in pink and grey with pops of white and gold. Her professional equipment — shelves and drawers of cosmetics surrounding a lit vanity, above which professional certifications hang — stands across from the sink of a one-counter kitchen. Outside the sliding glass door, a GO train rushes by. She sits at a small dining table tucked in the corner, paging through her folder of receipts.
Sharpe was happy when she moved into 22 John Street in the Weston area of Toronto in 2019. At $1,540, the rent was at the top end of her budget, but “basically, it was brand new, it was close to work, and it was reasonably priced,” she says. Nobody from the building’s leasing office, she says, informed her that the new building wasn’t subject to rent control because of a law passed the previous year.
In 2021, Sharpe got a raise at the plumbing company where she also works as a service coordinator, and she was able to move into the one-bedroom next door to her old unit. Initially, she says, she was paying her old rent because of the COVID-19 rent freeze; when that lifted, she paid $1,616.97 for the larger space, which also included indoor parking. Then the rent increases started — about 9 per cent per year.
Now, after two increases, she’s paying $1,920 for the same apartment and parking space, nearly 19 per cent more — but she’s not paying that rent to property owner Dream Unlimited. She and 35 of her neighbours are paying it into the Landlord and Tenant Board’s trust account as they wait to hear the outcome of the rent strike they started last summer in protest of annual rent increases that they say, like Sharpe’s, fall in the 9 per cent to 10 per cent range.
Shanice Sharpe's most recent tenancy-renewal offer. (Kat Eschner)
Around the province, thousands of renters are facing increases that well outpace those allowed under rent-control legislation and, importantly, the growth of their wages. That’s because, in 2018, the Progressive Conservative government removed rent control from all buildings first occupied after November 15 of that year.
The PCs said that removing rent control was meant to encourage construction of purpose-built rentals (previous governments tried the same approach with limited results). But as Sharpe and her neighbours demonstrate, the human cost of that decision has been high. Legal experts say the 22 John rent-strike case, now before the Landlord and Tenant Board, highlights significant problems with the legislation — and has the potential to drive change.
“At a general level, we’re challenging the idea that landlords in post-2018 buildings have no limit on the rent increases they can order on tenants,” says Sima Atri, a lawyer with the Community Justice Collective who is representing the rent strikers of 22 John. In her interpretation of the Residential Tenancies Act, “there is a limit.”
Atri and her colleagues maintain that Dream Unlimited is violating its contract with Sharpe and the other tenants of 22 John in a way that affects their security of tenure — a important principle of the RTA that holds tenants can be evicted only in a few specific circumstances, after being given due notice by the landlord.
“The act is very specific on the limited reasons that justify the eviction of a tenant so tenant’s housing is not subject to the whims of a landlord,” Atri told TVO Today in a follow-up email.
Dream Unlimited bills 22 John as a luxury building that offers “resort-style living.” (Kat Eschner)
She argues that the 9 per cent to 10 per cent annual rent hikes that Sharpe and her neighbours have been subject to violate the contract they signed with the landlord because the hikes are beyond what they can reasonably pay. (For context, average wage growth in Ontario was 4.2 per cent in 2022 and 5.1 per cent in 2023, and overall inflation in Canada was 6.8 per cent in 2022 and 3.9 per cent in 2023.)
“Established contract principles hold that discretion needs to be exercised in a reasonable way,” Atri says. “Our argument … is that increasing rents at a rate that’s so much higher than what the landlord knows a tenant can afford is an unreasonable exercise of discretion.”
That exercise amounts to economic eviction for tenants who just can’t manage the increases, she says —something that isn’t grounds for eviction in the RTA. The issue isn’t paying rent; it’s being unable to forecast what the cost of housing might be next year. And renters rarely have access to the financial resources that property owners are able to leverage, says Atri, so it’s particularly important that rent increases be predictable and sustainable.
“Those are important arguments to make,” says Douglas Kwan, director of advocacy and legal services at the Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario. “It’ll be interesting to hear how the board weighs in.”
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To keep her apartment, Sharpe has taken on a third job in retail. “I work seven days a week,” she says. She’s pouring money into her home and, while she’s looked for other units in the area, she isn’t seeing much that’s more affordable.
Dream Unlimited bills 22 John as a luxury building that offers “resort-style living.”
Sharpe doesn’t see it. “I don’t know what’s luxury about it. Because we have en suite washer/dryers and we have a gym? Okay, it’s a condo-style amenity building.” If another new build went up in the area that had coin laundry in the basement, “I would have went there,” she says. “It wasn’t because it’s luxury. It’s because it’s a brand-new building.”
The landlord’s representation had requested that the 36 tenant cases be considered individually, but at a case conference held on January 29, LTB Vice Chair Patrick Shea agreed to hear them collectively. The LTB adjudicator also ordered that tenants start paying their rent into the board’s trust account, something they have been doing since.
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This practice has become the norm in the current spate of rent strikes. Previously, as TVO Today reported, rent-striking tenants at Thorncliffe Park received the same order. From a legal perspective, Atri says, the argument for this practice is that all rent striking tenants will be raising the same issues. From a strategic perspective, it creates an opportunity to bargain collectively.
“A hearing on these matters has not yet been scheduled,” an LTB spokesperson told TVO Today in an email confirming the details reported in this story.
Samantha Lem of Toronto PR firm Kim Graham and Associates sent TVO Today the following statement, attributable to Dream president and CEO Michael Cooper: “The Landlord and Tenant Board is the appropriate forum to resolve disputes between landlords and tenants. Despite the extensive time required to reach a hearing, which is prejudicial to both us and our tenants, the ongoing Landlord and Tenant Board proceedings are playing a crucial role in maintaining order and fairness.”
According to the statement, a growing number of tenants are paying their rent. “This encouraging trend reinforces our dedication to offering individualized payment plans to each resident so as to ensure that each resident can continue to live in their apartments,” the statement reads.
The York-South Weston Tenants’ Union, to which the rent-striking tenants of 22 John belong, says that 100 out of 369 units are participating in the rent strike.
The eventual outcome of the case could affect others. How, exactly, is less clear than it would be in a court, where the rule of precedent means that any decision weighs on future decisions: the Landlord and Tenant Board is a tribunal whose members are appointed by the government of the day.
Unlike judges, LTB adjudicators are free to ignore the parallels between previous rulings and the case before them, says Noel Semple, a lawyer and professor at the University of Windsor’s law school: whereas the decisions of common-law courts must take precedent into account, “it’s more common to see tribunal decisions that choose not to follow up on a previous precedent.”
However, he says, tribunals “do aim to be consistent.” For instance, it’s an obvious miscarriage of justice, says Semple, “if identical facts produce different results. It’s very damaging to the reputation of a tribunal if unsuccessful parties perceive that the only reason they lost is the luck of the draw.”
For that reason, tribunals have checks on their decisions to ensure consistency, including reviews from within the tribunal itself, Semple says. That means cases before a tribunal that cover new ground are notable.
The Landlord and Tenant Board will be hearing the 36 tenant cases collectively. (Kat Eschner)
The LTB decision in this case may still set common-law precedent: either party could choose to appeal the board’s decision in the higher courts, Kwan notes. Regardless of whether the LTB’s eventual decision favours the landlord or the tenant, he adds, the argument being put forth hasn’t been subject to judicial scrutiny yet — and a court ruling could set a precedent that all LTB adjudicators would have to follow going forward.
If that happens, he says, “it’ll put into question the policy decisions that the legislature has made in introducing this exemption ... and really highlight the impact it has on individuals and the affordable-housing crisis overall.”
Semple also doesn’t believe that the LTB alone should be making these decisions. “From a policy point of view, ultimately, the solution to this come from the legislature,” he says. “I think it's really problematic that there's no rent control whatsoever for buildings after 2018.”
TVO Today requested an interview with Paul Calandra, minister of municipal affairs and housing, and received the following response from a minister’s office spokesperson: “The Minister is unavailable for an interview at this time, and it would be inappropriate to comment on a case currently in front of the LTB.”
In the medium term, Atri says, the LTB could establish a standard method of evaluation that would enable it to decide, on a case-by-case basis, what constitutes an unreasonable rent increase. That’s part of the outcome she and the 22 John rent strikers are hoping for: that the board will deem the increases at 22 John unreasonable and devise some kind of remedy.
What Sharpe knows is that there’s no way she could afford another big increase, and moving wouldn’t lower her current rent by much. If something doesn’t change, she says, “it’s either move back in with my mom, win the lottery or start gambling, or leave Toronto.”
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