Everything seems to be getting more expensive. Food, gas and housing prices are on the rise while paycheques are slow to keep pace.
The CBC News series Priced Out explains why you’re paying more at the register and how Canadians are coping with the high cost of everything.
Kevin O’Toole rarely takes his dog, Stella, for a walk without two or three neighbours stopping him to chat.
“I love my neighbours, the community is great, I’ve got everything I want, and at 72, where am I going to go?” he said of his high-rise apartment in Hamilton.
O’Toole pays $825 per month for the two-bedroom rental he’s lived in since 2010.
He worked for 30 years as a waiter. Now he collects his federal pension and works part time at McDonald’s to help keep his head above water.
Watch “Priced out: Canada’s rental crisis” on The Fifth Estate Thursday at 9 p.m. on CBC-TV or stream it on CBC Gem.
With rental rates on the rise, he knows that losing his apartment would be a big financial blow.
“To find an affordable apartment, I’d have to go way the hell out to Sudbury or somewhere,” he told The Fifth Estate. “To find affordable housing, it’s unheard of here in Hamilton now.”
WATCH | A tenant vows to stay in his apartment as long as he can:
‘I’m going out in a box’
16 hours ago
Duration 0:38
Tenant Kevin O’Toole says he likes his community, and will fight to stay in the apartment he’s rented since 2010. 0:38
O’Toole is right. Research shows that in the last decade, Canada has been losing affordable rental units, those available to individuals making $30,000 a year or less, far faster than new ones are being built, and it’s forcing some renters out of the homes and communities they know.
Neither the private market nor the public sector has articulated plans for how to deal with the large number of renters affected by the loss.
A key factor driving up rents in Canada is the shortage of supply, but it’s not just that new units aren’t being built fast enough.
Increases when units turn over
According to research from Steve Pomeroy, a senior research fellow at Carleton University in Ottawa, rentals that were once considered affordable are seeing significant price increases.
He estimates that between 2011 and 2016, the number of rental units that would be affordable for households earning less than $30,000 per year — with rents below $750 — declined by 322,600 in Canada.
Because many provinces control how much rents can be raised on tenants who stay in the same unit, most of these increases occur when the unit turns over.
“If you’re a sitting tenant, then the rental rates only go up by the costs of inflation and so that’s great,” said Douglas Kwan, director of legal services at the Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario. “That’s manageable.”
Douglas Kwan, director of legal services at the Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario, says he is seeing an increase in landlords applying for ‘no fault’ evictions, which make way for a new tenant and new, higher, rents. (Joe Fiorino/CBC)
However, in the current rental environment, “there is a tremendous incentive to remove that sitting tenant,” he said.
The discrepancy in prices is surprising for renters like O’Toole, whose rent has risen from $715 to $825 since he took occupancy more than a decade ago.
“The guy next door,” O’Toole said, “he pays $1,800 a month plus hydro.
“He’s paying $1,000 more rent than me for the same thing.”
1 in 3 Canadians renting
According to 2016 census data, nearly 30 per cent of Canadians, or 4.4 million households, rent their home, and statistics from the Canadian government show they’re under increasing pressure.
Using data from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), which lists average rents for bachelor, two- and three- bedroom apartments in large metropolitan areas, The Fifth Estate calculated that between 2014 and 2019, rents countrywide increased by nearly 20 per cent. At the same time, incomes remained largely unchanged.
When housing costs more than 30 per cent of a person’s income, that housing is unaffordable, according to the federal government.
A recent report from the CMHC said that a two-bedroom apartment rental is beyond the reach of the average person who works full time in many cities, including Vancouver, Victoria, Winnipeg, Peterborough, London, Kingston, Toronto and Halifax.
In Dartmouth, N.S., across the harbour from Halifax, John and Stacey Smith have experienced first-hand what having to move can cost a family. In November, the duplex they were renting was sold to a new owner who wanted to move in.
Even though they both work full time, finding a new place that they felt they could afford and fit their two teenage children was difficult. When they found it, their monthly rent went from $751 to $1,750.
“I’m trying to make it better for my kids and my family,” John Smith said. “I put family first, but I mean, it’s, it’s crazy. It really is.
“I guess that’s life.”
Financialization in housing
As Canada’s real estate market has heated up, large investors have brought industrial standardization and a financial focus to the landlord business.
The Bank of Canada says that one in five people buying a house is doing so as an investment.
Housing experts call this trend “financialization.”
Martine August, an assistant professor in the school of planning at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ont., estimates that 20 to 30 per cent of Canada’s rental apartment market is owned by institutional landlords, and that real estate investment trusts — or REITs — own nearly 200,000 rental units countrywide.
Real estate investment trusts own or invest in income-producing real estate and distribute profits to their shareholders. Many are traded publicly on the stock market.
Some in the industry give similar estimates. REALPAC, the association that represents many of Canada’s largest real estate companies, says the top 21 large real estate owners hold 17.6 per cent of the rental apartment market.
Martine August, an assistant professor in the school of planning at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ont., became interested in the financialization of housing when an investment firm started buying up apartment buildings in her Toronto neighbourhood. (Joe Fiorino/CBC)
“We’re seeing this kind of single-minded orientation towards trying to extract as much value as possible out of those buildings,” August said.
“The important thing to realize is that those buildings are people’s homes. And where that money comes from is basically tenants’ pockets.”
Business model raises the rents
When a landlord does renovations to their property, in some cases they can pass those costs on to tenants in the form of increased rents.
In Ontario, there is a form of rent control for sitting tenants. Generally, landlords can only increase the rent once a year and by a number known as the guideline, set by the province and usually pegged to inflation. When landlords do renovations, they can apply to increase the rent above the guideline, in what is called an above guideline increase (AGI).
“Those above guideline increases are critical for the landlord to be able to get a return on that extra cost that landlords have to spend to upgrade the building,” said Michael Brooks, CEO of REALPAC.
“This is like an old house, it’s the same analogy. At some point in time, you need to do a lot of upgrades to modernize that house. That’s really expensive.”
Michael Brooks, CEO of REALPAC, the association that represents many of Canada’s largest real estate companies, believes that solving the country’s rental affordability issues can’t just be the domain of private industry. (John Badcock/CBC)
August doesn’t see it that way. She believes that above guideline increases are a tool firms use to get around rent controls the government put in place.
“Repairs and renovations actually make money for firms,” August said. “They invest in them because they can extract higher rents afterwards.”
She said that making a profit is not something these companies are struggling with.
“The idea that they need to raise rents in order to do basic maintenance,” she said, “to me, it’s kind of insulting.”
According to annual reports published by the four largest real estate investment trusts in Canada, they disbursed more than $2 billion in profits to their investors between 2015 and 2020.
In 2018, O’Toole’s landlord, a real estate investment trust called InterRent, applied for an above guideline increase hoping to raise rents in the building by nine per cent over two years.
He and his neighbours fought the increase at a hearing before Ontario’s Landlord and Tenant Board in Hamilton and it was reduced by more than half.
WATCH | These Hamilton tenants went on rent strike to fight back against their landlord:
Hamilton tenants go on rent strike
15 hours ago
Duration 0:49
Kevin O’Toole says he shouldn’t have to pay for cosmetic upgrades to his building. 0:49
“If you’re a homeowner you have to pay all these things, but you own a home, I don’t. So don’t pass it onto me,” O’Toole said.
InterRent did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Brooks said that to place housing affordability issues at the feet of large landlords is incorrect.
“Remember, affordable, deeply affordable housing is a public good, and the private sector is not primarily in the business of providing a public good,” he said.
“Without landlords who have access to capital and scale and good management, without that, you’re not going to meet the housing needs of this country.”
Affordability is a problem we all have to address, Brooks said, but “you can’t expect the private sector to solve all social ills.”
“What we really need to solve this unprecedented housing shortage at the bottom end, the affordable end and the deeply affordable end of the markets is an integrated national housing strategy.”
Renters feel abandoned
The federal government announced their newly developed national housing strategy in 2017.
The Fifth Estate made multiple requests over several weeks to speak with federal Housing Minister Ahmed Hussen and was declined each time.
Within that time frame, Hussen sat down with a committee of MPs to discuss the housing affordability issue.
In the meeting, he noted that “a lot of work has been done and more work needs to be done,” and that since 2020 through the rapid housing initiative, a program centred on building affordable housing for vulnerable populations, the government provided funding for 10,250 affordable housing units.
Ahmed Hussen was appointed federal minister of housing and diversity and inclusion in 2021. (Andrew Vaughan/The Canadian Press)
The Fifth Estate asked his office whether that was enough, given that hundreds of thousands of affordable units have been removed from the market in the last decade.
They answered that a single affordable housing project can take up to three years to complete, and that “the national housing strategy initiatives are taking steps to fill important supply gaps in the Canadian housing landscape.”
The minister did not answer questions about how many affordable units have been built under the strategy or what the rent for those units is.
Meanwhile, renters like O’Toole have no confidence that help is coming.
“I think the government should be held accountable,” he said, noting that municipal and provincial governments all play a role in housing.
“All they’re saying is first-time homeowners. Nobody’s talking about the renters. Nobody,” he said. “And we’re just as equally important as somebody who owns a home.”
Have questions about this story? We’re answering as many as we can in the comments.
MONCTON, N.B. – New Brunswick RCMP say two youths have been arrested after an emergency alert was issued Monday evening about someone carrying a gun in the province’s southeast.
Caledonia Region Mounties say they were first called out to Main Street in the community of Salisbury around 7 p.m. on reports of a shooting.
A 48-year-old man was found at the scene suffering from gunshot wounds and he was rushed to hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.
Police say in the interest of public safety, they issued an Alert Ready message at 8:15 p.m. for someone driving a silver Ford F-150 pickup truck and reportedly carrying a firearm with dangerous intent in the Salisbury and Moncton area.
Two youths were arrested without incident later in the evening in Salisbury, and the alert was cancelled just after midnight Tuesday.
Police are still looking for the silver pickup truck, covered in mud, with possible Nova Scotia licence plate HDC 958. They now confirm the truck was stolen from Central Blissville.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 16, 2024.
MISSISSAUGA, Ont. – Golf Canada has set an impressive stretch goal of having 30 professional golfers at the highest levels of the sport by 2032.
The World Junior Girls Golf Championship is a huge part of that target.
Credit Valley Golf and Country Club will host the international tournament from Sept. 30 to Oct. 5, with 24 teams representing 23 nations — Canada gets two squads — competing. Lindsay McGrath, a 17-year-old golfer from Oakville, Ont., said she’s excited to be representing Canada and continue to develop her game.
“I’m really grateful to be here,” said McGrath on Monday after a news conference in Credit Valley’s clubhouse in Mississauga, Ont. “It’s just such an awesome feeling being here and representing our country, wearing all the logos and being on Team Canada.
“I’ve always wanted to play in this tournament, so it’s really special to me.”
McGrath will be joined by Nobelle Park of Oakville, Ont., and Eileen Park of Red Deer, Alta., on Team Canada 2. All three earned their places through a qualifying tournament last month.
“I love my teammates so much,” said McGrath. “I know Nobelle and Eileen very well. I’m just so excited to be with them. We have such a great relationship.”
Shauna Liu of Maple, Ont., Calgary’s Aphrodite Deng and Clairey Lin make up Team Canada 2. Liu earned her exemption following her win at the 2024 Canadian Junior Girls Championship while Deng earned her exemption as being the low eligible Canadian on the world amateur golf ranking as of Aug. 7.
Deng was No. 175 at the time, she has since improved to No. 171 and is Canada’s lowest-ranked player.
“I think it’s a really great opportunity,” said Liu. “We don’t really get that many opportunities to play with people from across the world, so it’s really great to meet new people and play with them.
“It’s great to see maybe how they play and take parts from their game that we might also implement our own games.”
Golf Canada founded the World Junior Girls Golf Championship in 2014 to fill a void in women’s international competition and help grow its own homegrown talent. The hosts won for the first time last year when Vancouver’s Anna Huang, Toronto’s Vanessa Borovilos and Vancouver’s Vanessa Zhang won team gold and Huang earned individual silver.
Medallists who have gone on to win on the LPGA Tour include Brooke Henderson of Smiths Falls, Ont., who was fourth in the individual competition at the inaugural tournament. She was on Canada’s bronze-medal team in 2014 with Selena Costabile of Thornhill, Ont., and Calgary’s Jaclyn Lee.
Other notable competitors who went on to become LPGA Tour winners include Angel Yin and Megan Khang of the United States, as well as Yuka Saso of the Philippines, Sweden’s Linn Grant and Atthaya Thitikul of Thailand.
“It’s not if, it’s when they’re going to be on the LPGA Tour,” said Garrett Ball, Golf Canada’s chief operating officer, of how Canada’s golfers in the World Junior Girls Championship can be part of the organization’s goal to have 30 pros in the LPGA and PGA Tours by 2032.
“Events like this, like the She Plays Golf festival that we launched two years ago, and then the CPKC Women’s Open exemptions that we utilize to bring in our national team athletes and get the experience has been important in that pathway.”
The individual winner of the World Junior Girls Golf Championship will earn a berth in next year’s CPKC Women’s Open at nearby Mississaugua Golf and Country Club.
Both clubs, as well as former RBC Canadian Open host site Glen Abbey Golf Club, were devastated by heavy rains through June and July as the Greater Toronto Area had its wettest summer in recorded history.
Jason Hanna, the chief operating officer of Credit Valley Golf and Country Club, said that he has seen the Credit River flood so badly that it affected the course’s playability a handful of times over his nearly two decades with the club.
Staff and members alike came together to clean up the course after the flooding was over, with hundreds of people coming together to make the club playable again.
“You had to show up, bring your own rake, bring your own shovel, bring your own gloves, and then we’d take them down to the golf course, assign them to areas where they would work, and then we would do a big barbecue down at the halfway house,” said Hanna. “We got guys, like, 80 years old, putting in eight-hour days down there, working away.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 16, 2024.
NEW YORK (AP) — Fenway Park has the Ted Williams seat. And now Citi Field has the Grimace seat.
The kid-friendly McDonald’s character made another appearance at the ballpark Monday, when the New York Mets unveiled a commemorative purple seat in section 302 to honor “his special connection to Mets fans.”
Wearing his pear-shaped purple costume and a baseball glove on backwards, Grimace threw out a funny-looking first pitch — as best he could with those furry fingers and short arms — before New York beat the Miami Marlins at Citi Field on June 12.
That victory began a seven-game winning streak, and Grimace the Mets’ good-luck charm soon went viral, taking on a life of its own online.
New York is 53-31 since June 12, the best record in the majors during that span. The Mets were tied with rival Atlanta for the last National League playoff spot as they opened their final homestand of the season Monday night against Washington.
The new Grimace seat in the second deck in right field — located in row 6, seat 12 to signify 6/12 on the calendar — was brought into the Shannon Forde press conference room Monday afternoon. The character posed next to the chair and with fans who strolled into the room.
The seat is available for purchase for each of the Mets’ remaining home games.
“It’s been great to see how our fanbase created the Grimace phenomenon following his first pitch in June and in the months since,” Mets senior vice president of partnerships Brenden Mallette said in a news release. “As we explored how to further capture the magic of this moment and celebrate our new celebrity fan, installing a commemorative seat ahead of fan appreciation weekend felt like the perfect way to give something back to the fans in a fun and unique way.”
Up in Boston, the famous Ted Williams seat is painted bright red among rows of green chairs deep in the right-field stands at Fenway Park to mark where a reported 502-foot homer hit by the Hall of Fame slugger landed in June 1946.
So, does this catapult Grimace into Splendid Splinter territory?
“I don’t know if we put him on the same level,” Mets executive vice president and chief marketing officer Andy Goldberg said with a grin.
“It’s just been a fun year, and at the same time, we’ve been playing great ball. Ever since the end of May, we have been crushing it,” he explained. “So I think that added to the mystique.”
