1. Where we are
Toronto is a city of tenants, millions of people who do not own where we live. Rent goes up every year and life gets harder. With and without places to sleep, with and without citizenship, we live under a real estate market that hoards something we need to survive. Landlords change the locks, write the rules, and often win in court when they’re caught breaking them. Every winter, more of us are evicted and become unhoused: some falling in and out of shelters, others living permanently on the streets. This city is not merciful to the people it fails.
Toronto is a city of tenants, pitted against one another to maintain crisis-as-usual. Linh’s rent pays for lawyers who will one day evict her. Jamal mocks the unhoused over a dinner table his superintendent will never eat at. Christine tells her kids that their laundry room is dirty not because management fired the janitors, but because Mateo moved in next door. After Gurleen rushes late from the broken elevator to her job, ten hours of her skills and effort will be organized to help her boss buy a third cottage. Daniel is told he simply hasn’t done enough to earn the Canadian dream: to work hard, buy a house, rent out the basement, and retire with a nest egg.
Toronto is a city of tenants, though we don’t govern it. Politicians pay lip service to our rights before selling them off at fundraising galas. Tribunal adjudicators favour landlords, fast-tracking landlord applications and punishing tenants who speak up. City inspectors hardly show up on time to enforce the most basic bylaws, leaving many of us without heat every winter and with the indignity of unsafe homes. The result is predictable abuse. Our neighbours are evicted over pennies, our bedrooms are left to mould, mice and bugs breed in our walls and then our rents are jacked up using loopholes and blatant lies. Landlords squeeze what’s left after bosses squeeze our wages and pensions, while wealthy politicians keep ODSP/OW rates unlivable. Corporations keep consolidating their influence over our economy and politics, because the certainty of their profits comes from the uncertainty we face every night. Will we be able to stay in our homes? If not, where else will we go? The answer is up to us: not our landlords, not our bosses, not even the government.
It’s time we get organized.
2. What we’re fighting for
Landlords, developers, and the politicians they fund insist things have to be this way. Their “solutions” are sloppy repaints on the same rotten walls: a system where our homes are for profit, and where tenants suffer as a result. They have had their turn, they have failed, so now it will be ours. This is what we’re demanding instead.
Full Rent Control
We demand full rent control for all tenants. That means ending loopholes such as Above Guideline Increases and vacancy decontrol. We demand an immediate rent freeze and rent rollbacks to make up for decades of landlord price-gouging.
End Evictions
Evictions are violent acts that put our families out on the streets. We’ll go fight to make evictions harder for landlords and less harmful to our neighbours until we end them altogether. That means banning renovictions and own-use evictions, genuine scrutiny instead of rubber-stamping eviction applications, and real consequences for erroneous and retaliatory applications.
Right to Organize, Right to Strike
Tenants already have the right to organize. So we demand strict repercussions when landlords interfere with that with intimidation, retaliation, and harassment. So long as official institutions and bureaucracies remain unfair, rigged playing fields, we organize to hold landlords to account ourselves. We demand a universal right to strike: and if things get bad enough that we need to strike, we shouldn’t have to pay back strike arrears. Landlords must be required to recognize and collectively bargain with tenant unions. Any government recognition of tenant unions must not weaken our ability to organize and strike.
Public Homes in Public Hands
Housing must be reliably funded as the public good and essential infrastructure it is: moving rental homes off of the for-profit market and properly funding public housing for all income levels. That means reversing shameful decades of cuts, mismanagement, and privatization of social housing across all levels of government, building millions of new public, co-op, and non-profit homes. That means banning corporate landlords from buying up homes and expropriating corporate landlords to return housing to public hands. Tenants in all buildings must have the right to organize, to guard against trading unaccountable corporate landlords for unaccountable nonprofits.
Safe and Dignified Homes
Our homes should be beautiful spaces that we can thrive in: safe, cheap, and suitable to our needs. We demand enforceable by-laws that guarantee safe conditions, strict repair timelines, and compensation for utility shutoffs. Housing must be climate-resilient with adequate cooling, ventilation, and safeguards against extreme weather. Accessibility requirements must be fully enforced so those of us who are seniors or have disabilities can live safely.
Transparency
Despite all that our landlords know about us, they remain faceless and unaccountable. We demand a public rental registry that shows every rental building’s full history of ownership, rents, AGIs, evictions, and bylaw violations.
3. How we win
Tenants and those above us –landlords, bosses, and billionaires– have directly opposed interests. But tenants are already fighting back across Toronto, and our experience tells us that the powerful never act from the goodness of their hearts. Things only get better when we build power of our own and force the powerful to respond.
The Toronto Tenant Union is a community of neighbours who fight together. We start small in each building, with neighbours learning about their shared experiences and giving each other advice. We grow this into something that can confront power: hundreds of repair orders that were individually ignored landing on management’s desk at once, thousands of unheard people in front of their offices, millions of dollars withheld on rent strikes to force political change. We come as we are and learn how to fight back together. Every neighbour brings their own strengths, ideas, and experiences that make us stronger. A tenant union channels our power for our friends and loved ones, on our own terms. We do not do this alone.
That also means our tenant union is not an advocacy organization or charity where professionals fight on our behalf. It’s the community that every neighbour fights through collectively. It’s a democratic union led by our rank-and-file members, the very people whose trust and determination give it the power to win. It is rooted in the multi-racial working class that keeps Toronto running. Any legal or financial structure we adopt must serve this core approach, rather than dilute and disarm it.
What do we do with our power? We take on local, everyday economic fights for better conditions. Economic fights happen between local communities and the foes directly above us – individual landlords and developers. Economic fights are how we stop one AGI, one eviction, one landlord’s pattern of abuse. We also take on political fights against what allowed those abuses. Political fights are how we ban AGIs, create real rent control, freeze evictions, and improve conditions for all tenants – including those outside our union. Economic fights create exceptions to an unfair system. Political fights change the system to make every economic fight easier.
The most powerful tool we have in these fights is the rent strike. When neighbours collectively refuse to co-operate and pay rent, we hurt landlord profits and confront the politicians enabling our displacement. Rent strikes force the powerful to experience the crisis we live under. We take inspiration from how tenants fought historic rent strikes in Glasgow, Vienna, Kansas City, Soweto, and York South-Weston in our own backyard to win a better future on their own terms.
Strikes don’t come from thin air, though. We use many other tactics to confront power wherever it finds us. We fight through the Landlord and Tenant Board to protect our members from legal abuses. When official processes aren’t enough, we highlight their limitations and take direct action ourselves - such as by disrupting evictions. When we engage with elections, we do so knowing that one person on the inside will not save us: but that they could mobilize certain platforms, resources, and power towards our fight. We fight alongside aligned organizations, building on and strengthening our shared movement. Fighting together doesn’t mean unanimously agreeing on everything all the time. So we disagree in good faith and build each other up with accountability, constructive criticism, and mutual respect.
Whether we live in apartments, rooming houses, or on the streets, we tenants are closer to one another than to any landlord. We are closer to nurses and delivery drivers than to any billionaire. Our union is built on solidarity stretching beyond the walls of our units, beyond our apartment lobbies, beyond national borders, and to everybody suffering at the hands of the powerful.
4. What now?
We know it can feel overwhelming. But in their brutality and greed, the powerful cannot help but create people who want to fight back. If you’re reading this while housing is still for-profit, or while people still freeze on our streets, or while corporations still have a grip over our lives: then we still have a world to win.
The Toronto Tenant Union will still fight to build it.