Assemblée législative de l'Ontario

RESIDENTIAL PREMISES RENT REVIEW ACT (CONTINUED)

The House resumed at 8 p.m.

Mrs. Campbell: First of all, Mr. Speaker, I would like to say that I am deeply distressed at the procedures by which we are dealing with this legislation. It had been my understanding that the Attorney General’s (Mr. McMurtry) bill would already I have been before the House. I really don’t like this method of proceeding with two parts of the same problem. They were dealing with rent review; we’re dealing with the ceilings, as it were, on rent increases. We are not permitted really to know what the hill is which will grant security of tenure. I find as I have reviewed the statement by the Attorney General that there appear to be some dichotomies between the two pieces of legislation. I suppose my position at the moment is that I protest this method of proceeding on a matter of such urgency and of such concern to a great many citizens of this province.

When we look at the bill itself, I have some real reservations about it. I was rather amazed when the bill was introduced and the Attorney General’s statement was introduced to find that the official opposition was so cheerful and joyful about this presentation. In my view there was not too much to be joyful about, notwithstanding the fact, of course, that this party obviously supports the principle of rent review and, of course, the matter of security of tenure.

I would like to indicate, if I may, some of my real concerns with the bill itself. It’s interesting to me that in this bill we are requiring tenants to come forward virtually one at a time to protest rent increases. There is no provision for a class action. There is provision presumably for a class action in the security-of-tenure legislation to come. It is true, of course, that rents do not all come due at the same time. I appreciate that problem and the mechanics of it. But it does seems to me that where a group of people are involved with increases at the same time they presumably ought to be able to move collectively in this bill as in the others.

I am disappointed that we have approached this rent review legislation on the basis of percentages at all. Mr. Speaker, you may recollect that our bill did not provide this kind of percentage increase approach at all. We felt that there should be a proper review, and that we should take into consideration the increases which had been allowed prior to the legislation, in determining whether or not any increase was justified at all. What has happened is that with the government position prior to the election -- their position -- I don’t remember how many positions they had during the campaign --

An hon. member: Five.

Mrs. Campbell: Was it five? My colleague informed me it was five different positions.

Mr. Roy: Or was it six, John?

Mrs. Campbell: What happened “as we simply allowed landlords, certainly in this community, to increase their rents in many cases far beyond what one would deem to be legitimate increases based upon increased costs. Now of course the eight per cent proposed in this particular bill, in section 3, provides for a minimum of eight per cent increases on top of some that were well over 50 per cent in parts of my riding. My riding, I have to point out -- and I’m sure almost everyone in this House must know that riding because most of you live in it at least part of the time -- is about two-thirds apartment-tenant-occupant in character.

My thinking about the matter of rent increases may to some extent at least have been predicated upon a report of Central Mortgage and Housing, which came out in June of this year. It indicated only a 13.3 per cent average increase. Once I saw the breakdown of that particular report, I found that, interestingly enough, in St. James Town, they dealt with 14 properties. It happens that there are, and I believe I’m correct, 16 buildings in that particular area. Of the 16, two are limited dividends and four are Ontario Housing. These were all part of the total report. So one can see the distortions there would be if one pursued it to Flemingdon Park, which I believe has much the same kind of picture, and other areas. I find it totally unacceptable to rely on that report for the purposes indicated.

So with all these massive increases which have taken place -- I point out to you again, and I’m sick of pointing it out that Lynwood and Avenue Road increased by $215 a month -- and now on top of that they will have the dandy little gift of another eight per cent. I find it very difficult to understand how a government which purports to care could bring in that particular provision.

Another thing that disturbs me in the bill itself is the provision of rent review officers. You may recall again, Mr. Speaker, that we provided for rent review boards which would be municipally appointed, because it is obvious that the conditions vary across this province. But now we have rent review officers appointed by the province, and this doesn’t give tenants a feeling of security in the decisions which may be reached by one officer. You have your rent review board, which is a board of appeal, as it were -- whatever the name of it is, and I have forgotten it now. But there is really no provision even there to ensure that there will be at least somebody on that board who understands the plight of tenants.

I must say that I do congratulate the minister on one aspect -- that he has seen fit to take this legislation out of the courts, something which the Attorney General did not see fit to do. But I really am at a loss to understand how the two pieces of legislation can dovetail together.

I would like to look at the exclusions, which really disturb me. Why should one exclude land owned or operated by the government of Canada, the government of Ontario or by an agency of either of them. It is a fact that there are people in Ontario Housing, for example, who perhaps are improving their financial position. Since it is, in essence, rent-geared-to-income housing, one might wonder whether it is equitable -- when so many people really need to get into Ontario Housing and there isn’t any for them -- that we should protect that particular group.

I recognize the freeze that has been on Ontario Housing for senior citizens. Nevertheless I have drawn to the attention of two ministers a case at 155 Sherbourne in my riding where, by reason of increases in old age pensions and in GAINS, their rent has increased in Ontario Housing from $51 a month to $104.

I’d like to point out that when the Liberals introduced, through our leader’s private member’s bill, the GAINS programme, we were talking about disposable income. You may remember that we tried to get a commitment from this government at the time we were discussing GAINS -- and the former minister is nodding because he remembers that we wanted the Minister of Housing to be committed to not increasing the rents simply because of increases in pensions and in the GAINS programme, or as a result, at that time, of the introduction of the GAINS programme.

[8:15]

I worried then because we couldn’t get that commitment. Here we see it, just as we thought it would be. I am interested too that at this time there is no recognition of the fact that a prestige apartment building built on university property in the city of Toronto, which doesn’t pay full land taxes by virtue of charters, is able to increase its rent from $295 a month for a two-bedroom apartment to $425 as of the end of this month. And that bothers me.

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: They are controlled. They are under control.

Mrs. Campbell: I know, but no provision is made here, as it ought properly to be, that you deal with that very question now and ensure, particularly when the Treasurer (Mr. McKeough) is going to cut back on funds to municipalities, that at least they are going to have to pay land taxes like anybody else.

I would just like you to pay some attention to the inequities which are indicated as a result of the lack of clarification in this bill. We also exclude luxury apartments. I guess it’s luxury at $500 a month. That seems to be the situation. It is interesting to note, in view of the fact that this particular provision was introduced not too long ago in this bill, as it came into the House the numbers of landlords who have increased the rent from $312 to over $500. I would like to know where that tenant stands in appealing to anyone if he or she has been forced into the position of signing a lease and then become a person paying $500. I would like to get some clarification of that too.

It is a fact that there are other exclusions which bother me greatly. I don’t understand the meaning of the exclusion of the four units. I really don’t understand why we have excluded slum landlords and rooming houses. Interestingly enough, if one reads the statement of the Attorney General, he applies tenant security to weekly tenants, and in my riding most of the weekly tenants live in rooming houses. And I am quite aware that at the present time rooming house tenants are not covered under the Landlord and Tenant Act provisions.

Let me give you some examples of people -- these have just been brought to me over the dinner hour -- who live in houses with four units. There are 150 tenants invoiced in this particular group. They are not covered. The trust company, which is, I am told, the manager of the particular group of buildings, I am informed, has done nothing to maintain them. And yet the rents have escalated. In fact, I’m advised that they’re trying to put a clause in the new leases that they can evict people during the lease if more than $1,000 worth of renovations is required by the housing inspector. It seems to me that that is somewhat intimidating, because if tenants are afraid -- and I don’t know how many tenants one could count that aren’t afraid these days -- I suppose they won’t let anybody know what needs to be done in these buildings. But by the same token, for sense reason, these people are excluded from the bill which is before us. And I can’t understand why.

It seems to me that it is evident as we review this legislation that this government has acted as I suppose we ought to have expected it to do, to be brought kicking and screaming into this particular piece of legislation, withholding as much as possible from any real conclusions. It’s interesting too that the rent review officers may make an order for a rebate of rent in certain circumstances. It doesn’t say when; there is no indication about when.

In this city, notwithstanding the legislation, it is very difficult for tenants to find out who really owns the place. You know, there are changes very rapidly during the course of a very short period of time. So, while the penalty looks to be reasonable, one wonders about the mechanics of collecting. One wonders how one gets the money back. There is no provision for a registration of an order against the land. I just don’t understand why, when we come to the point of recognizing need, we have to hold back in the ways in which we are holding back under this bill.

I would like to hear from the minister if he is able to tell us how these two bills are somehow going to work together, because I think it’s essential that we know that as we debate this bill. If it is a fact that we’re going to give security of tenure to rooming house tenants in one bill, but no control in the other, where do we go from there? I wonder what the design has been behind this kind of introduction. But perhaps the minister can allay my fears. I hope so.

As we go through the bill, one notes that there is a period of time at which the increases are somewhat open-ended. I’d like to hear more about that. I’d like to hear more about why we go from eight per cent fixed to eight per cent maybe to no per cent or something. As I say, we in this party have always felt that it was important to us and to the community at large to recognize the increased costs of landlords. There was no question about our position on that. We do say we do not believe we either want to see or could see government building all of the housing needed right now let alone what may be needed in the next two, three, four or five years.

We have a concern about recognizing the costs of landlords but equally we have a concern about fixing the maximum as a minimum, if you like -- or vice versa -- in this first clause. One of the things I’m finding, too, is a great deal of confusion in that landlords who are now offering a one-year lease -- I must say thank you very much; at least the government has done that; we’re being offered leases now which is a new switch in many cases. The landlords are now saying, “Of course, since the lease is for a whole year, we should be able to charge 16 per cent -- eight this year and eight next.” This sort of thing has to be very carefully considered. I’d like to know how you’re going to proceed. Because this is the position they are taking.

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: Talk to your colleague.

Mrs. Campbell: I don’t have to talk to my colleague. I know what is being offered.

Mr. Nixon: She has talked to her colleagues.

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: She missed one.

Mr. Nixon: He is a great guy; he is going to make his own speech.

Mrs. Campbell: All right. Technically -- but this is the proposition they are putting forward.

Mr. Singer: You’ve got very little assistance there tonight at all. Where are they?

Mr. Nixon: Empty blue chairs and the Minister without Portfolio, who is everybody’s friend. He is not going to be of any help. Even Yakabuski has gone out.

Mr. Singer: Even the aspiring cabinet ministers aren’t here. Yakabuski, Eaton and the guy from Oriole.

Mr. Speaker: Order, please. The hon. member for St. George has the floor.

Mr. Singer: I would have thought Bob Eaton would be here. This is bean-board night.

Mrs. Campbell: I would like to say this, it seems to me --

Mr. Singer: What happened to Williams?

Mrs. Campbell: -- that with the way in which this bill is proceeding, and as I understand it is going to proceed, I would like very much to ask this minister to make a statement to ensure that we can remove some of the confusion in the minds of people who are very much disturbed about their position with leases coming due at this moment in time. I think it would be very helpful if he would make some statements that would clarify the position of both the landlord and the tenant.

The principle of the bill obviously is one which we support. There will be, without question, amendments brought forward on it after we’ve had the opportunity of hearing from the public, as I understand we shall be doing. I would ask the minister to think very seriously about the scheme of this bill as it is affected by the Attorney General’s bill. If he can address himself to that, perhaps I may be able to work through my problems with the two pieces of legislation at least, because I can’t see them together at this point in time.

[8:30]

Mr. Speaker: The hon. member for Ottawa Centre.

Mr. Nixon: This may take 10 or 12 minutes, so relax. Bill, are you really looking forward to this?

Mr. Ferrier: What are you doing over in that corner?

Mr. Nixon: This may take 10 or 12 minutes, so relax.

Mr. Cassidy: One of the benefits of this new House to me, in terms of my personal health, is the fact that Bill Ferrier now sits behind Tony Grande. Therefore Tony Grande can suffer the hearing problems that I occasionally suffered.

Mr. Nixon: Bill will applaud you, no matter what you say.

Mr. Gaunt: Bill is a fan.

Mr. Cassidy: Mr. Speaker, for obvious reasons I welcome the debate this evening and I welcome the bill which has been put forward by the government. Perhaps I could start with that tone because the hon. minister may already have sensed that while we have a number of reservations about the details of the bill -- reservations I may say which are so grave that if the bill weren’t corrected we might oppose it on third reading -- we agree with the principles of the bill and we intend to support this bill on second reading.

Interjections.

Mr. Cassidy: I think as far as the NDP caucus is concerned, when the vote comes up on second reading we will vote for the bill with a unanimity which will not mark the secret feelings of either the Liberal Party on my left --

Mr. Singer: How do you vote with secret feelings. That is a good one.

Mr. Cassidy: -- or of the government party which has eventually come around in order to draft this bill.

Mr. Nixon: I didn’t know you were the psychiatrist in your group.

Mr. Cassidy: The conversions that have taken place both of the antediluvian party of the Conservatives of this province --

Interjections.

Mr. Cassidy: -- and of the antediluvian party of the Liberals in this province --

Mr. Nixon: To your left.

Mr. Cassidy: -- over the last month, or the last years, are remarkable to behold.

Mr. Roy: Thank God we’ve got you.

Mr. Cassidy: The rumblings which we have heard, particularly may I say from the newer members of both the Liberal and the Conservative caucus, who say privately: Well, I don’t like what we are doing, but I guess we have to go along because our leader says we are going to do it.

Mr. Nixon: Now who could possibly talk to you frankly? Even your own colleagues don’t talk to you.

Mr. Cassidy: I can name a few names like that.

Mr. Speaker: Order, please. The hon. member is supposed to be discussing the principles of the bill.

Mr. Cassidy: On the contrary, Mr. Speaker --

Mr. Singer: You are impugning motives, today, which is against the rules.

Mr. Cassidy: In the NDP caucus, I have to say, I have been viewed as a force of reaction.

Mr. Roy: Don’t limit that to the NDP caucus.

Mr. Cassidy: Any comments that I have had to make about rent control have been viewed as the last gasp of the bourgeoisie and that my efforts to moderate the new member of our --

Mr. Singer: Do you really think people spend that much time viewing you?

Mr. Cassidy: -- caucus are matched only by the efforts of the leader of the third party to keep the new members of his caucus in line.

Mr. Nixon: Who is to your left --

Mr. Cassidy: I want to talk about --

Mr. Singer: He does little else than view you.

An hon. member: All of the leaders of that party are to your left.

Mr. Cassidy: That’s right, to my left physically but --

Mr. Nixon: This is the new sexy Cassidy.

Mr. Cassidy: I want to say, since it is probably apropos -- I am not sure if the member for Hamilton is in this House -- but some years ago a close relative of mine ran for the leadership of --

Mr. Singer: Close relative? Think of your father with more respect.

Mr. Cassidy: -- of the Liberal Party of Ontario. He was supported by Mr. Singer, as I recall.

Mr. Singer: That’s right. A fine man he was, too. Too bad it didn’t carry through to the second generation.

Mr. Cassidy: And by a number of other people who were young Turks in the party at that time.

An hon. member: I would have voted for him had I been around.

Mr. Cassidy: I want to say to the House and I want to say to the Liberal Party both: With hindsight, what my father did was really a mistake, because the party was beyond redemption and is beyond redemption.

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: Your father made one mistake. He made one mistake.

Mr. Singer: That wasn’t a mistake. He made another one.

Mr. Nixon: They caught him in bed with your mother.

Mr. Cassidy: It may be --

Mr. Speaker: Order! I think the hon. member wants to get on with the principle of the bill now.

Mr. Shore: Which bill are you on?

Mr. Cassidy: It may be that the Liberal Party, which has made many mistakes in the last 30 years --

Interjections.

Mr. Cassidy: -- my father was a socialist too. You didn’t know what you almost got. It may be that the Liberal Party, which has made many mistakes in the past, made a mistake at that time as well.

Mr. Nixon: Your father doesn’t need defending but you do.

Mr. Roy: The member for Ottawa Centre is a mistake.

Mr. Speaker: Could we get on with the bill, please?

Mr. Cassidy: Yes, let me talk about the bill.

An hon. member: You are disturbing the hon. minister.

Mr. Cassidy: The hon. minister? Rent control, yes.

Mr. Singer: He always spoke well of you.

Mr. Samis: Behind closed doors.

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: Rent control.

Mr. Cassidy: Mr. Speaker, as spokesman for a party which has consistently advocated protection for tenants --

Interjection.

Mr. Cassidy: -- and rent control in this province for a number of years, it’s obviously --

Mr. Nixon: There have been two years of inactivity. Don’t give us that business.

Mr. Cassidy: -- a pleasure to speak in this particular debate. I want to say that --

Mr. Roy: It’s not a pleasure to listen to you.

Mr. Cassidy: -- Conservatives have dangled this plum before the electorate on a number of occasions before. I have a headline here which says “Ontario Plans To Control Rent” --

Interjection.

Mr. Cassidy: It says, and I quote -- it’s from the Globe and Mail -- “The Ontario government plans to introduce legislation to regulate rents at the current session of the Legislature.”

Hon. Mr. Taylor: This is it.

Mr. Cassidy: This was in February, 1969.

Mr. Moffatt: And you were still a Liberal then.

Mr. Nixon: That was when you were a Liberal.

Mr. Cassidy: Bert Lawrence --

Interjections.

Mr. Cassidy: It was about that time that an NDP member, the member for Wentworth (Mr. Deans), first introduced to this Legislature a bill that would have provided for a rent control. It was also at about that time that the city of Ottawa, which was then experiencing difficulties which have now become --

An hon. member: Hurrah!

Mr. Cassidy: Well!

Mr. Nixon: There is the next speaker. Come right in now.

Mr. Cassidy: The member for Renfrew South (Mr. Yakabuski) should be on the stage for making that kind of an entrance.

Interjections.

Mr. Cassidy: It was also in 1969 that the city of Ottawa --

Interjections.

Mr. Cassidy: -- that the member for Wentworth presented a bill. That was the first time that the NDP publicly advocated in this House that there should be protection for tenants against rent gouging.

The rent gouging which was beginning at that time has gotten consistently worse, year after year. I don’t need to introduce a whole lot of horror stories into the Legislature, because the principle of rent control has now been accepted. Even the government accepts that what we have talked about over the last three or four or five years is a legitimate concern which requires legislation. I would point out though, to give one example, that CMHC figures themselves indicate that the rents on vacant apartments, which had been increasing by 15 to 20 per cent in 1974, were increasing from 20 to 35 per cent in 1975. As you know, Mr. Speaker, being a man who is a cognoscenti in urban matters of note, the --

Interjections.

Mr. Cassidy: -- rent increases on vacant apartments are very quickly reflected in the pattern of rents that occurs in buildings generally. For the record, on June 20, 1973, some seven or eight months before the member for St. George, I introduced a bill into the Legislature which implemented my party’s policy on rent control. If I can read the principles that were given in the explanatory notes of that bill, they will illustrate that we, unlike the party opposite and unlike the party to my left, have consistently hewn to the same principles of rent control every time we have talked about this subject.

Mr. Nixon: There is certainly something repetitious about you.

Mr. Cassidy: We said at the time that the purpose of our bill was to set guidelines to govern rent determinations and to provide tenants with security of tenure. We said that starting from the rents that prevailed at the end of December, 1972 -- this bill was introduced in 1973, and would that it had been accepted at that time -- rent increases for residential accommodation in major Ontario cities should be justified only in relation to increases in the costs -- not in relation to scarcity or the increase on new accommodation or to speculative factors.

That is a position that we hold to today. We said then and we say now that our intention was that most rent settlements would continue to be made without reference to government but with reference to the principles laid out in the Act. We called for a landlord and tenant tribunal, which is comparable to the landlord and tenant tribunal in this Act. We called for a network of rent regulation officers located in major cities around the province who were comparable to the rent review officers suggested in this particular Act.

We have suggested -- this doesn’t happen to be included in the Act -- that the rent review officers would mediate disputes between landlord and tenants over rent initially. If they couldn’t reach an amicable informal solution, they would make a rent determination, and if that was unacceptable to either party then they could appeal to the landlord-tenant tribunal. The structure is similar, although we did not at that time include a maximum permitted rent or rent guideline as is proposed by the government. In fact it had been proposed when we came up with some --

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: Is this 1972?

Mr. Cassidy: June 20, 1973. It was debated in this House a while later. We also, at that time, called for security of tenure along lines which have been imitated, with a number of changes, in the bill to be proposed by the Attorney General (Mr. McMurtry).

It was said, and I regret the fact, that our proposals, which at that time should have been adopted, were rejected by the government. They were defiled by the government. They were simply anathema to the government. When this bill was debated in May, 1974, for the first time in the Legislature, the former member for Peterborough, one of the many who fell by the wayside in this election, and whose successor sits to my right now, decried the bill.

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: The whole caucus is to the right of the member.

Mr. Cassidy: I’m suggesting that they think that I am to the right of them. He said, mouthing what then was the ministry’s line: “I think you have to look at the long-term effects of these things. I suggest that once you impose any controls, it becomes more difficult to remove them.” Then he recalled the difficulties of removing rent controls after the war, and he said that the results of removing rent controls were often more disastrous thin the imposing of the rent controls themselves at the time. The line had been laid down and it was reiterated on many occasions, particularly during the disastrous tenure as Housing Minister of the hon. member for Carleton-Grenville (Mr. Irvine), a man who must bear a great deal of the responsibility for the fact that Ontario has been liberated from 25 or 26 Conservatives who sit in the last House and that Ontario now has a new official opposition.

Interjections.

Mr. Cassidy: The government’s cronies in the development industry began to spend money as though it were going out of style this spring in order to give the official government line about rent controls. They said it has happened in New York and it could happen here.

Hon. Mr. Welch: What has that got to do with this bill?

Mr. Cassidy: They said that in New York, where rent controls have been tried, quality neighbourhoods have been turned into slums as buildings deteriorated. In neighbourhoods that didn’t go to rack and ruin, they said, New York saw a black market created where tenants bartered apartments and leases for large sums of money.

Mr. Nixon: Just like those island leases.

Mr. Cassidy: They didn’t mention the fact that six other major American cities with exactly the same urban problems as New York didn’t happen to have rent control. The members of the UDI had made zillions of dollars, tens and tens and hundreds of millions of dollars, out of the backs of their tenants.

Mr. Nixon: Oh, zillions! That’s a lot of dollars.

Mr. Singer: Zillions?

Mr. Cassidy: Quite a return.

Mr. Nixon: Some of the minister’s best friends are UDI millionaires.

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: How many zeros in a zillion?

Mr. Cassidy: They were using some of those gains that they had taken from their tenants in order to back this government, just as they had used some of the money that they had taken from tenants over the years in order to contribute to Conservative campaign funds in order, they hoped, to have the assurance that rent control would never darken the door of the Province of Ontario.

Mr. Nixon: Did UDI contribute to the minister’s campaign?

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: I don’t think so.

Mr. Cassidy: I quoted some comments from the UDI with reason.

Mr. Nixon: What’s that intra-uterine?

Mr. Cassidy: If I can bring the record up to May of this year, the city of Toronto was making an effort to get rent controls before the private bills committee of this Legislature. It was up against the entrenched opposition of the member for Carleton-Grenville, that great urban expert, who called the city of Toronto’s bill a disaster and put up as his mouthpiece a rather able Minister of Housing, Mr. Warren, who has flow just become the commissioner for the Toronto Transit Commission.

Mr. Singer: He was deputy minister.

Mr. Cassidy: Deputy minister. The ministry line then was so different from the ministry line now that it almost rivals the flip-flop or the conversion which has taken place among the deputy ministers. The department’s line has changed lust about as radically and dramatically as has the minister’s line. “In the ministry’s experience,” said Mr. Warren, the deputy minister -- confusing his position -- “after careful research and visits to other jurisdictions where rent controls have been tried, such controls have worsened the situation in the long run.” In Quebec, he said, they haven’t worked. In Boston, Mass., he said, the rental crisis has been intensified since controls were enacted. In New York, he said, rent controls were administratively unworkable. So the line went on, and I think the minister has got to explain his situation now. We know where we stand, and we have been pretty consistent, but neither the minister nor his department is being consistent at all.

The deputy minister said then that controls drive private builders out of the market.

[8:45]

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: Right.

Mr. Cassidy: Right, says the minister. Mr. Warren said it is unfair and unworkable to control the prices of one commodity without controlling the other commodities. He has said that maintenance would deteriorate, and this is a question that the minister needs to talk about.

He alleged that black markets would develop and that key money would begin to be charged, and then alleged, in the most amazing, rather leap of analysis, that income transfers which would take place would largely be from poor tenants to equally poor landlords.

I want to put on the record, I think it was in a gossip column or some --

Mr. Roy: We don’t want any gossip in here.

Mr. Cassidy: Well no, this was fact as a matter of fact. It was a real estate column that I happened to pick up when I came back from the election.

Mr. Mancini: That’s a good source of information.

Mr. Cassidy: It referred to a certain Mr. Berman. Mr. Berman, whose first name I can’t recollect, is executive vice-president or administrative vice-president of Cadillac Fairview Corp. He is one of these poor landlords of whom the ministry talked.

This man, who has spent the last several years of his life ripping off tenants, now has the chutzpah to be spending $3 million, according to the press, on a modest little mansion up in the territory around King City -- up in the millionaires’ belt north of Toronto.

Mr. Nixon: He couldn’t get a lot on the island.

Mr. Cassidy: I suppose that he couldn’t afford the rents in St. James Town so he had to find a little something that was more suitable to his means. Those are the kinds of rip-offs that have been taking place.

Mr. Roy: You are getting great support from your front bench.

Mr. Cassidy: As recently as June, the former Minister of Housing (Mr. Irvine), was getting up in the Legislature on a point of privilege in order to assure the House that he had been misrepresented when the Toronto Star said that there was a move under way at Queen’s Park to limit rents.

So it went. Then he began to feel the heat, and maybe the Premier (Mr. Davis) began to get to him as well. There were two or three members of the Legislature, including the member for Ottawa West (Mr. Morrow) who began to let it be known privately in caucus that maybe things weren’t quite all they ought to be.

The member for Ottawa West had a $70 or $80 increase on Clearview Ave., where he lives, just outside the great riding of Ottawa Centre, and it began to come home to some of the tenants.

Mr. Morrow: On a point of order, just to correct the record, the hon. member for Ottawa West didn’t have a rent increase. Some of his neighbours had.

Mr. Nixon: I would think the member for Ottawa West would be protected.

Mr. Cassidy: In other words, speaking on behalf of the middle class and upper middle class, who harbour in the same building as he does, some of the Conservative members began to feel the heat as well.

The former Minister of Housing, on July 4 of this year said that the matter of rent legislation would lie determined in the next few days. Then on the 10th he said that the statement on rents would be made “when the cabinet decides what my statement should be”; poor man, he never really understood what this was all about. Then on July 17 ha said: “The government has discussed the matter of rent controls very seriously and fully in the last two days. I am expecting to make a statement very shortly.” And so it went.

Finally came the statement, and never has the mountain laboured so hard to produce the mouse that came up on July 30.

Dear Donald Irvine, the line was still there; rent control didn’t work, nothing could be done, and then he said:

“Government intervention on a wide scale would follow as one of the major disadvantages of rent control because of the withdrawal of private developers from the rental market.”

Never did the ministry acknowledge that there has been a massive withdrawal of private developers from the rental market in Metro Toronto and other Ontario cities over the last year or two, and this has taken place alongside of gouging and enormous rent increases. There have been problems with private development in Montreal and Vancouver but they have not been as intense a withdrawal as has taken place in Toronto and tenants have not had to cope with rent increases of 20 per cent to 30 per cent.

The former Minister of Housing alleged that there would be a decline in the quality of building maintenance; that assessment values would drop and lower the municipal tax base; that black market practices would come; there would be the creation of a large bureaucracy to enforce controls and grave difficulties with the eventual return to a free market.

He promised an aggressive policy to promote construction -- this was the old housing -- by-headlines thing which we have had from the government these many years -- arid then he came forward with this programme:

The government would try to increase the supply of rental accommodation. Nothing has been heard about that.

The government would provide financial support to the landlord and tenant advisory bureaus. Nothing has been done about that.

The ministry was holding discussions and had had a pledge from the Urban Development Institute that its members would introduce into their code of ethics a requirement that all UDI tenants receive a complete explanation of requested rent increases. Nothing has been heard about that.

The core of the whole thing was the establishment of rent review boards in low-vacancy areas, whatever those were, at the request of the municipality with the power to look at landlords’ books. All very well except that the only thing they could do would be to publicly expose unjustified rent increases through the holding of public hearings and other appropriate methods.

At that point the retreat was on in full flight, because it was evident within hours that the public would not accept the idea that landlords could be publicly exposed, either in the press or through some other more vivid means, and that this would somehow shame them into charging more reasonable kinds of rent.

The government then began to adopt the first of many other positions. “Decision 1975,” the Conservative policy book, talked about the powers of rent review boards to bring to light unjustified or excessive rent increases.

A few days later, the Premier said that if the rent review boards were too weak, the government would develop a mechanism to deal with rent gougings.

Next the rent boards were to get temporary rollback powers, and then the review boards were to get the power to take the landlords to court. God knows what happened after that.

What was happening was that the Premier in particular -- we didn’t hear much from the then Minister of Housing in these days -- was reacting under the pressure of not just the member for Scarborough West (Mr. Lewis) but the 900,000 tenants of this province and their families who were crying out from the bottom of their souls for action on rents.

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: What rent is Stephen paying in Florida?

Mr. Cassidy: I haven’t a clue. I haven’t a clue. We will deal with rent control in Ontario first. Hotels are going to be exempted under the Act anyway --

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: He owns a condominium.

Mr. Cassidy: Oh, no. It’s the Premier who owns the condominium, and I haven’t heard that he is lending it to Stephen.

Mr. Nixon: Oh, they are pretty chummy.

Mr. Cassidy: As late as Sept. 12, the Premier was saying that although a tenant might be protected, if the tenant moved the landlord could raise the rent to any level between leases. Then he went on to say that he couldn’t see why landlords would take advantage of that particular kind of freedom.

On Sept. 13, there was the famous advertisement of which the Conservative Party has washed its hands of responsibility but for which it was chastised by the election expenses commission. Headed, “Notice to Tenants”, it talked about unfair rents being adjusted or rolled back and asked tenants to file their complaints. That was a setup, because there was an effort there to say after the election that the response to this rather inadequate and dearly partisan advertising, paid for out of government funds, had been so slight that there wasn’t really a problem out there and therefore no action would be necessary. I am pleased to note that the government has not taken that particular position.

It was around that time that the government said it might use the courts, which have been notoriously pro-landlord, and use the Unconscionable Transactions Relief Act, an Act which has been used five times since 1923.

Mr. Speaker: Order, please, I wonder if the hon. member would get to the principle of the bill, rather than review history?

Mr. Cassidy: I think this is interesting, Mr. Speaker, and it is useful to put it on the record once and for all. People will want to know how many positions the government has taken, and maybe the minister can get tip and tell me of a few positions the government has taken of which I was not aware.

Mr. Mancini: You just like to hear yourself talk.

Mr. Speaker: Perhaps the hon. member would get to the principle of the bill.

Mr. Cassidy: Mr. Speaker, I would point out as well that in this chronology I have now arrived at Sept. 18 whose events are perhaps known to you, Mr. Speaker, and where the vote clearly reflected a mandate for rent control from the electors of the major urban ridings.

There was still shilly-shallying after that, though. On Sept. 25, the Premier said the plan wasn’t going to change, it would remain that weak. On Oct. 1, the then Minister of Housing, who obviously hadn’t been in touch with everything which had been happening over the previous two months, warned that if there was a shortage of rental space, he might have to consider legislation to regulate the rental accommodation industry, something one thought the rest of the government had promised some time before.

Then, on Oct. 9, the Premier said maybe there would be alternatives to the promised rent review boards. This was at the time when he and the new Minister of Housing had enormous difficulty in communicating and were doing most of their communicating through the pages of the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail. The minister immediately he came into office said rent review doesn’t work; we’ve got to do something else.

It appeared the whole network of pledges made by the government during the course of the election had gone down the drain.

Finally, we come to the discussion which has taken place over the last - few weeks: Support from the social planning councils; support from the Metro tenants; support from a number of other groups -- important groups -- which have given a great deal of thought to the questions of rent control; and support for schemes of rent control rather than rent review. Refreshing, may I say, from the minister was the statement he read in this House a week ago tomorrow, in which he said, “As the minister responsible for housing I am and must be concerned with the possibility that rent control could have an adverse effect on the development of rental accommodation.”

Everybody agrees that is a problem and a problem which must be discussed: I hope it might even be discussed during the course of this debate. He mentions that a reduction had occurred in certain other jurisdictions and saw it as a distressing side effect of the strong medicine of rent control. Then he tied this government’s rent control programme to the federal anti-inflation programme.

Pierre Trudeau had come along and had taken the government off the hook. He had given the government a ready-made excuse when its friends from the UDI came in quite properly feeling, perhaps that they had been betrayed. They asked “How come you guys, who’ve been holding the pass for us for some time, have let us down and have brought in this legislation which we, the developers, find so unacceptable because of its interference with our sacred right to make unlimited profits?” Anyway, there’s an enormous change of view which is reflected in the bill and that’s what I want to come to now.

It’s somewhat difficult to talk about the bill without going through some of the major points two or three times, particularly since I appear to have left some of my notes behind.

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: Ad lib it. Go ahead.

Mr. Cassidy: I want to begin by summing up our position on the bill and the major areas where we dissent from or disagree with the government. While we welcome the governments belated conversion from the toothless principles it had advanced before, we still feel there are major weaknesses in the bill. We do have every hope, however, that the necessary amendments can be made in the minority government situation in order to make the government’s bill effective.

We have the following major differences and I’ll go into them in more detail. The first -- and the difference which is most crucial -- is our grave unease about the exemptions which have been written into the bill, particularly the exemption of fourplexes and other small rental units even when a landlord owns many such buildings. That is clearly unacceptable.

We have had some heart-searching in caucus on the position we enunciated a week or two ago and we now feel that all landlords should be treated the same and that there should be no small landlord exemption. Small landlords, like large landlords, will be untouched by this bill if they are not gouging and if they are proposing only reasonable rent increases. We think that is the proper kind of exemption. We think any landlord who gouges, whether he is a small or a large landlord, should come under the requirements of the bill.

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: We may amend it.

Mr. Cassidy: Okay, the minister indicates that there may be an amendment in that direction. I’m happy to see that. That is crucial to us. We will also oppose the government’s proposal to leave rents in new buildings totally without restraints.

[9:00]

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: You’ve got trouble there.

Mr. Cassidy: That’s okay. We feel that the exemption of roomers and rooming houses is unjustified and we’ll have some more to say about that. Just to comment on the exemptions, I don’t think that anybody, whether it was the ministry staff, the minister or even ourselves, were aware of just how much rental accommodation exists in the Province of Ontario in detached houses, in doubles, duplexes, semi-detached houses and so on.

Approximately a third of the rental accommodation in the province is in single family houses, row housing and semi-detached. If you estimate that only 10 per cent of the remainder of apartments are in duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes, then that means that 40 per cent of Ontario’s tenants live in properties that would be exempt if the bill were to stay as it stood.

Moreover, according to the 1971 census, two-thirds of the families in the province -- and that is just counting larger families with a couple of kids or more -- live in rental accommodation which would be exempt if the hon. minister isn’t going to change his proposals.

Second: We categorically reject the government’s decision to bring in rent control for only two years. The government, I think, is arguing that this is a temporary measure which will be taken off once their other programmes succeed in alleviating the rent crisis that exists in the province right now. Frankly, we don’t accept that it is possible to do that within two years. We notice that even the federal anti-inflation programme has an expiry date of December, 1978, which is a year and five months after the expiry proposed for this particular programme. We tend to think that the timing of this programme has got political motives and that the government has said to its right wingers: Look, we’ll bring in rent control for two years because we have to because of those nasty New Democrats. We can’t avoid doing it right now. Then, we will go to an election next spring or fall. We’ll get our majority back -- which is a futile hope -- and once we have our majority back, we can let the bill die.

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: What are you worried about then?

Mr. Cassidy: Well, it is okay.

Interjections.

Mr. Speaker: Order please. The hon. member has the floor.

Mr. Cassidy: In the unhappy event that an election were to return a majority of the Conservative persuasion -- it would be very unhappy may I say to the hon. member from Woodstock -- it would then be possible for the government to pass legislation to rescind rent control if that was its philosophical position, in a year, in two years, in five years. That would be up to the government. But we feel that rent control should stay for at least as long as the rent crisis lasts. We cannot see any signs that measures being taken by either the provincial or federal governments will solve that problem within the space of two years.

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: We disagree.

Mr. Cassidy: I would say toe that as far as the New Democratic Party is concerned, we believe that rent control is necessary over the long term because of the need to bring into more equal balance the rights and responsibilities of landlords and tenants. We think that tenants right now are victimized. We noted that many people, for the first time in the Province of Ontario, can expect to pass their lives as tenants, whereas in the past, the bulk of the population expected, and did in fact, become homeowners at some stage in their life cycle.

If people are going to be tenants on a permanent basis, then they need the protection of a security of tenure which is being proposed by the Attorney General (Mr. McMurtry). You can’t have security of tenure without rent control. You can’t have rent control without security of tenure. Tenants can’t gather together and negotiate with their landlords in common, unless they have the protection of the two complementary measures of rent control and security of tenure.

Third: We disagree with the government about the degree of retroactivity. Too much gouging took place in the first half of 1975 to be ignored. We felt, as a caucus, that there was an awful lot of gouging that took place back in 1974 as well and I would say that it was with great difficulty that we eventually came to a position which we felt was responsible, even though we knew that it left some people high and dry, that the retroactivity should be to the end of 1974 and not to an earlier date. We feel though that is the least that the government could do to accept our position that the rollback, which is accepted in principle by the government, should be to the end of December last year and not just to the end of July.

We also feel, in the same vein, that the 8 per cent permitted increase for this year proposed by the government is too high. The experience in BC and in Quebec, and the experience which I think the ministry may have discerned here in Ontario as veil, is that the average increase in operating costs in Ontario this year, and certainly in the other two provinces, related to rents, is equal to about 6 per cent. That is what the maximum permitted increase should have been allowed for all of 1975 and not just for a portion of it.

Finally, while we welcome the proposals for security of tenure which are coming forth in a week or so, we deplore the fact that unlike the landlord-tenant review tribunal, unlike the rent control proposals, that the government is proposing to leave other landlord-tenant disputes in the hands of the courts which have been proved again and again to be insufferably pro-landlord. That’s not this minister’s fault. But we would see a joint administration so that the rent review officers and the landlord-tenant tribunals should in fact acquire jurisdiction over evictions, maintenance disputes, all of the other stuff that affects landlords and tenants in residential tenancies under the Landlord and Tenant Act, rather than having a divided jurisdiction in two or even in three portions if you consider the jurisdiction under the small claims court as well.

Just before the session began, the NDP caucus enunciated principles on rent control. I want to run through them briefly and I want to congratulate the government for having the good sense to adopt the kind of proposals and structure that we proposed on a number of occasions. We said that as a basic principle rents should be allowed to only to the extent needed to offset increases in operating costs. The government agrees in part. It will be determined during the course of the committee stage whether the government agrees completely or not.

We have said that the rent control system should encourage tenants and landlords to determine rents in accordance with this principle, but that it should also protect tenants against intimidation and give both parties the right to appeal any rent determinations. In large measure the government has agreed with that particular point.

We have said it would be wrong to permit rent increases from the current inflated levels. The government agreed. We said that rents should he rolled back. The government agreed. We said that rollbacks should go to December, 1974, and that rents for all of 1975 should be re-calculated on the leads of increases in operating costs. Unfortunately, the government was not prepared to go that far, although they had accepted the principle of a rollback.

We said there should be a rebate of excess rent paid by tenants during 1975, whether they had moved or stayed in the building, arid the government agreed. That, we believe, is important and we congratulate the government for having the fortitude to accept that particular principle.

We said that landlords should justify rent increases to the tenants as a matter of course whenever they sought to raise rent. The former Minister of Housing (Mr. Irvine) talked to the UDI about that back in July. Nothing has been done about it and it’s unfortunate that the government has provided that the justification by landlords will come only if a tenant initiates it by asking the rent review board to look into a proposed rent increase by a landlord. Landlords will not otherwise be forced to justify every rent increase as a matter of course.

We have said that tenants should have the right to examine the books of the landlord. The government gave way a little there by saying that the rent review officer should have that right. If the rent review officers could allow tenants to look over their shoulders, it would probably satisfy the principle that we put forward.

We said that tenants should be able to deal with the landlord as a group. The government seems to agree, but some of the mechanisms it’s proposed are imperfect and need to be improved.

We have said that security of tenure should be a basic right for all tenants and was an essential part of our rents policy.

We said that no eviction or refusal to renew a lease would be permitted without just cause being shown. That is a revolutionary change in the nature of contract law as regards housing in the Province of Ontario, and I’m glad to see that that is being accepted by the government I think that will have tremendously positive effects on the quality of family life and the way people relate to their communities, on the way people can live as individuals and on the decisions people make between choosing to be tenants or owners. In one stride it does a tremendous amount to make more equal the position of tenant and the position of owner-occupier. It’s very welcome that the government has agreed with that principle.

We said that beginning in 1976 every rent determination should be subject to appeal to local rent offices and the government has agreed. We have said there should be rent offices in every major centre of the province with power to make rent determinations. The government has agreed but unfortunately has not agreed with the suggestion that the rent offices also be able to investigate landlord-tenant problems and arbitrate evictions in other landlord-tenant disputes.

We can discuss that during the course of the committee. That might be seen as a refinement or a further elaboration on the development of landlord-tenant law which has at last emerged from the freeze into which it had been put over the last five or six years by the government. I hope the minister will consider that kind of change positively, whether or not it is possible to bring it in at this session of the Legislature.

We suggested that municipalities have the power to run their own rent offices or pay their own rent review officers if they pay 25 per cent of the costs. In other words, if they were willing to pay a part of the freight they should have the power to run them and there should therefore be more opportunities for local input. A number of municipalities in Metro Toronto in particular feel quite strongly about that and so do the organized tenants’ groups within Metro Toronto.

It was our feeling that rent control should not be local option because many local councils would reflect the propertied interests and the developers’ interests, as they have so faithfully in the past, and they would not bring in rent control even if it was desperately needed. We did feel that if a municipality wanted to have that kind of participation, it should have that power. I see the minister has taken note about that and might be prepared to act.

We recommended a provincial landlord-tenant tribunal which could make a final rent determination on appeal by landlord or tenant. The government has agreed. We said that the tribunal and the rent offices should be under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Housing. The government has agreed. We said that the landlord-tenant tribunal should be the final appeal for all other landlord-tenant matters. There, again, the government has not agreed but I hope it would consider that idea favourably.

We suggested that in 1975, because of the administrative problems of landlords trying to make the system collapse, there should be no appeal and there should be a fixed allowable increase of six per cent. The government disagreed on the numbers and on the effective date but accepted the principle.

I can say we had some difficulty in going along with the idea we should start the scheme without an appeal. That was rather difficult for us, as we were thinking it through. We felt some relief when we saw that the administrative device we had chosen to get rent control protection quickly was also acceptable and had been adopted by the government.

We proposed the use of a rent guideline of six per cent starting in 1976 which would be a dividing line. Landlords would have to appeal if they wanted a higher increase and tenants would have to appeal if they felt their increase was too great. That again was basically an administrative device designed to keep most rent determinations out of the bureaucratic system. I may say that we in the NDP have probably more interest in avoiding excessive bureaucracy than the government, given the fact that in the past Social Democrats and socialists have tended sometimes to be tarred with the view that we are over-bureaucratic. We thought very carefully about this and we are rather pleased that the government adopted the mechanism we had suggested.

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: You had better have a talk with Barrett. Talk to BC. Work with him. Work with Barrett.

Mr. Cassidy: That’s right. It’s also what the BC government has arrived at after a couple of years of rent control. I think Quebec is sort of heading in that direction, although it still has a tenant-initiated scheme.

Our feeling is a tenant-initiated scheme is simply too weak for those tenants who are easily intimidated -- the old, the weak and the poor. Therefore, the tenant initiation without any protection of the maximum rent increase or of a rent guideline was not workable.

We suggested a reduction of maintenance and services would justify a tenant appeal or a rent cut. The government has agreed.

[9:15]

There is a difference between the government and us over the question of what the rent guideline or the maximum permitted increase should be. The government appears to have chosen a number which is as high as it can get without, it hopes, bringing down the wrath of this side of the Legislature on its head.

We would suggest that the maximum permitted increase be related to the average increase in operating costs which has been experienced over the previous six-month period, annualized -- put on an annual kind of basis. The best figure we had to start with was six per cent; starting around April of next year, we could see a new determination of what that rent guideline or maximum-permitted increase ought to be. I think the minister would agree, and I think the legislation provides, that there’s about a 90-day notice to landlords of what the maximum permitted increase is going to be. But there are real differences between the government and ourselves about the initial levels.

If the government accepts the principle that we put forward, that the maximum permitted increase be at or very close to the average increase in operating costs as it relates to overall rents, then I hope --

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: You used the BC formula, didn’t you?

Mr. Cassidy: No, we did not use the BC formula, in fact. I hope the minister will comment about this; there’s obviously room for some difference. Obviously as well as far as we are concerned, eight per cent is a hell of a lot better than 15, 20 or 25 per cent, which were the rent increases that people had been experiencing before. Although we want to tighten it up, there is perhaps some honest disagreement which doesn’t have to --

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: You’re both wrong, so we’ll go to nine.

Mr. Cassidy: Mr. Speaker, at the time we suggested that small landlords who were owner-occupiers and had no more than two rental units, whether they were a couple of lodgers in the top floor or the owners of a duplex or triplex, ought to be exempt. As I was saying before, though we now feel on reflection, and particularly as a result of the calls we have had -- we’ve had a deluge of calls in the last four days, many of which have come from the tenants of owner- occupier landlords who are experiencing gouging -- that gouging landlords, whether they are small or large, should be covered by this bill. Any small landlord who isn’t ripping off his tenants will be protected from any penalty under the Act. Therefore, we feel that there should be no exemption for small landlords or for small buildings.

We suggested that rent controls should apply to mobile homes parks until there was adequate separate legislation. We’re glad to see that the government agrees.

Now we come to the question of new housing. Here the exemption route has been taken by this government; it has been taken by the Quebec government, and at this time it has been taken by the BC government. What we found out, though, when we listened -- and we did listen to developers -- was this: They kept on saying, “Look, if you have rent controls then we can’t get a reasonable return on our investment.” In fact, as far as we are concerned, we are not opposed to landlords getting a reasonable return on investment.

We understand that so long as there is going to be a mixed rental housing market, in which some housing is provided privately and some housing is provided publicly, then an investor who is going to put up a building, or a landlord who is going to buy a building from the speculative builder or the developer, has got to be guaranteed that he can get a reasonable return. Otherwise he’s simply not going to do it.

While we have all sorts of ideas about co-operative housing, non-profit housing and that kind of thing, it is very possible that under an NDP government, as in British Columbia, for various reasons we would find ourselves relying on the private sector for a certain proportion of rental housing to be built.

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: They are not building any.

Mr. Cassidy: They are in British Columbia, as a matter of fact.

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: You’d better tell the minister because he has not seen it.

Mr. Cassidy: Rather than give you a complete exemption, we felt that we should simply come to the point that the developers made, which is to guarantee that they can in fact make a reasonable return on their investment, whatever that may happen to be.

We therefore propose that owners of new buildings would in fact set a fair rent on new units which would provide a reasonable return on their investment and then have that fair rent approved by the rent officer or tribunal. Given the nature of bridge financing and the way these things work, we would have anticipated that in many cases that fair rent would have been developed and approved on an interim basis or on a provisional basis by the rent review board before the building was even erected, in order that the landlord or the developer could go to his financing and say: “Look, I have an assurance that I can have this kind of return on my investment, if I build my building. Will you give me a mortgage?” If they said yes, then he could go ahead.

Then what we suggested was that the landlord would be free to charge less than the fair rent but that increases above the fair rent level would become subject to rent controls. In other words, if a landlord wanted to cut his rent by half in order to fill the building up immediately and then increase the rents over two or three years to the fair rent level, that would be legitimate because the tenants who took advantage of the bargain rents that might be offered in order to fill up the building would be informed as they came in that the fair rent was such and so and would, therefore, be under warning that before very long their rents could rise to the fair rent level and until that time they would be subject to rent control.

That’s a lot fairer than having a five- or seven-year exemption and bringing a person into a building at $250 a month without any knowledge of whether his rent is eventually going to top out at $350, $450 or $550 a month. You’ve got to have a ceiling in there. You can’t have a particular exempt sector.

We’ve said in our principles that the local rent officers in the Ministry of Housing should lay heavy stress in making full information available to the public about rent increases, trends in operating costs and landlord-tenant rights. Frankly, apart from that ad that was inserted for political purposes during the campaign, the record of the ministry in communicating what people’s rights are and the record of the ministry in getting information about what is actually happening in the rental market as in the housing market generally is actually deplorable. The emphasis on information is not found in the bill and I hope there is a commitment during this debate that one of the major functions that’s carried out by the government will be public information so that people know where they stand.

I can say that when I talked with the rent control people in Quebec one of their major complaints was the fact that for 25 years they’ve had rent control on a temporary basis. Their Act has been renewed year after year but they’ve never been able to hire anybody for more than a year at a time. The consequence is that the good people that they would hope to have had for information purposes, public education and so forth couldn’t he hired. They’ve had to make do with people who were willing to experience the risk of constantly being subject to being fired if the bill wasn’t renewed at the end of the year.

Mr. Foulds: Is that the collection plate?

Mr. Cassidy: It isn’t quite that, Mr. Speaker,

Hon. Mr. Meen: We’ll send it over there to you.

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: I will tell you one thing, you wouldn’t recognize one.

Mr. Foulds: We do it at all our meetings.

Mr. Speaker: Order, please.

Mr. Cassidy: The point I’m making is that if the government brings in rent control for only two years then you will have that problem of getting good people to make an effective rent control system and to make both landlords and tenants understand what are their rights, their responsibilities and obligations.

Finally, in our principles we suggested that there should be a comprehensive revision of the Landlord and Tenant Act, and that may come. I hope that it will come eventually. It’s not contained in this bill but we hope it comes soon.

I don’t want to comment at length about the bill itself. I think that I’ve had a fair amount of content in what I’ve had to say here. I have some specific points which I hope the minister will begin to consider now, which is why I’m putting them on the record and they will come up again in committee.

First, there is no incentive for a landlord to make repayment of the rebate if he has been charging an excessive rent in 1975. All he needs to do is sit back and wait to see if the tenant challenges him by going to the rent review board. There should probably be some penalty on landlords who don’t pay.

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: There is.

Mr. Cassidy: No, there isn’t.

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: They’ve got 60 days to pay or face a $2,000 fine.

Mr. Cassidy: Secondly, there is no sanction to enforce the orders of the rent review board. That was, I’m sure, an oversight.

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: You don’t go after everyone with a bat. It is not like kicking the member off the island. They are ordinary people.

Mr. Cassidy: No, but if you can be fined for charging a rent of more than eight per cent higher in 1975 you surely ought to be subject to a fine if the rent review board orders you to roll back the rent increase to eight per cent and if you continue to try to charge the tenant a 15 per cent increase. That isn’t contained in the Act.

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: He is violating the law. He’s subject to a $2,000 fine.

Mr. Cassidy: No, that is not contained in the Act.

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: It is sure supposed to be.

Mr. Cassidy: I’m sure that it was intended but it is more of a drafting error than anything else. On the maximum permitted rent increase, I have spoken about the principles that we think should govern how that rent increase should be determined. It should not be a figure plucked from the air which is what the minister seems to have in mind.

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: We plucked our eight when you got your six.

Mr. Speaker: I wonder if the hon. members would direct their comments to the Chair, please?

Mr. Cassidy: Mr. Speaker, with great pleasure I direct my comments to you particularly as I know you are following this debate with avid interest.

Mr. Singer: Following this debate with avid what?

Mr. Foulds: He is trying. He is right on the edge of his seat.

Mr. Cassidy: There are real problems with the questions of renovation expenses, of normal maintenance expenses, of abnormal maintenance expenses and of what the ministry chooses to call without definition “capital expenses.” We are coming to the view that in the cases where there is an unavoidable refinancing -- for example, a rollover of an eight per cent mortgage where the rate is going up to 11 or 12 per cent, that there should be some provision in the legislation in order to permit a landlord to pass that cost on to tenants. But we are damned determined to prevent a situation where speculators can take the cost of the speculation out on tenants, or where landlords can refinance at inflated rates of interest in order to get venture capital for other things, or in order to give some payola to their uncle or their mother-in-law. That has simply got to be prevented.

We find it difficult to see why proposed increases of over eight per cent should be subject to review, but that landlords should not be subject to review on the portion of the rent increase that lies between zero and eight per cent. There is a bias in the legislation which has come in unintentionally -- or maybe subconsciously -- which puts too much emphasis on tenant initiation. To give an example, if a landlord fails to justify a rent increase after he has been challenged by the tenant, the tenant has got to apply to the rent review board before he can get an order from them that he doesn’t have to pay more than seven or eight per cent. Whereas if the said landlord fails to justify, then surely the whole application for a rent increase should collapse and the tenant should revert to the previous rent.

In the case of class actions -- if a landlord has got to go before the board, then obviously he is doing a class action on behalf of all tenants in a particular building. But there is no indication that tenants who don’t object to a rent increase will be informed if the landlord has got to go before the board. Clearly they should be, so that they can participate if they want do so.

Another problem -- a very simple problem -- is one of information. It is very difficult for a tenant moving into an apartment to know what on earth was the rent charged for that apartment six or nine months ago. The previous tenant may have gone to Timbuctoo. Tenants in the past have not been too forthcoming with their neighbours about what they pay. We need a simple, accurate, effective, and accessible system of registration of rent increases. And that should probably be handled by the rent review officers in each particular area, and made accessible to tenants who want to find out what the rents were and what the rents are. In fact, landlords should probably tell the tenant what the previous rents were on a unit whenever they seek to change the rent.

In the bill, the government is leaving tremendous latitude to the rent review officers about how they take into account excessive rent increases that took place before July 30, 1975. And if the retroactive date is not changed, then it seems to me that what the minister has said in words -- about how gouging before July 20 could be rolled back by application of a tenant after Jan. 1 -- should be made much more explicit during the course of the bill.

We rather question the way in which the tribunal and the rent officers are being set up. We don’t know whether the rent officers are going to be full time or part time. The tribunal will not be a true tribunal because it will sit with only one member at a time. There is no guarantee of equal tenant representation on the tribunal -- and there should be.

We question whether a $2,000 penalty is nearly adequate for some of the things that are being done by landlords and as I have said, there is a serious technical weakness that orders of the rent review officers which are disobeyed are not followed up with sanctions of the penalties that are provided.

[9:30]

Finally, there is the question of the exemptions which the government has talked about. We don’t see why government-owned property should be exempt. There have been serious abuses of tenants by the owners of limited dividend housing and those tenants have not been protected by CMHC.

There have been serious problems with public housing tenants. I can give an example; I have a tenant who lives just outside of my riding who happens to be a tenant activist and whose rent is rising from about $140 a month right now, to something approaching $300 a month, in one jump.

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: What of her lease?

Mr. Cassidy: It is doubling.

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: Is it a one-year lease?

Mr. Cassidy: She is not protected by a lease, because although her income has been coming from LIP projects and things like that, the local housing authority deems that she has been receiving public assistance -- which is not true -- and therefore did not give her the protection of a lease. Now that she has a paying job, she is being charged a rent which is far in excess of what either the market rent for that unit would be or the full recovery rent would be.

The minister isn’t aware of that. We will come to this during the course of his estimates, but it seems to us that so long as the rent scale is so inequitable; so long as people are being gouged by OHC, that the OHC and other public housing should come under the jurisdiction of rent control.

I have spoken about the small landlord and small building exemptions. We don’t think there should be either one.

Luxury apartments: We don’t see why rich, as well as poor, shouldn’t benefit from this particular legislation.

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: Get off that middle road.

Mr. Cassidy: After this bill has come through, somebody has to protect the rich people in this province.

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: The halo on Stephen’s head is enough; not on yours.

Mr. Cassidy: I just want it to be clear that when it is a question of principle, we feel that legislation in the province should serve everybody in the province.

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: But you are.

Mr. Cassidy: The government is notorious for legislation which discriminates against the poor. We don’t wish to be known as a party which discriminates against the rich.

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: You disseminate against the man.

Hon. Mr. Meen: Your halo is slipping.

Mr. Cassidy: I have spoken about the question of new accommodation and the a tentative that we would have to bring it in under rent control but to allow landlords a fair rent that would give them a reasonable return. We also don’t think that the government should have the power to make further exemptions without coming back to this Legislature. We do happen to agree that an exemption on seasonal accommodation would probably make sense.

Just to sum up: Clearly, we welcome the bill in principle. We hope that it can be improved during the course of the committee. We intend to do everything we can to improve the bill along the lines we have expressed. We hope to have the co-operation of other parties in making amendments along the lines that I have suggested and along the lines of others that we may suggest during the course of the committee stage. We welcome the fact that the bill is going out to committee so that various interested groups, including landlords, and developers as well as tenants and municipalities, can comment on the bill. We in turn intend to co-operate with the other parties in order to make this bill the best kind of bill possible.

We would have to reconsider our support on third reading if the bill is not improved. It seems to me that the hon. minister is prepared to make a number of essential improvements. I hope that he will co-operate with us. as we will try to co-operate with him, in order to ensure that now that rent control has at last been accepted in the Province of Ontario, that we can do everything possible in this Legislature in order to make a workable system; a system that will work for a long period of time; a system which will provide effective protection for tenants and at the same time remain equitable for landlords and the other people in our society.

I had hoped to talk about what happens beyond controls, about the other measures that are necessary as part of housing policy, because controls on their own are not a panacea. I would suggest that that will come up during the course of the housing estimates or perhaps in other speeches during the course of this debate.

I would say to the hon. Minister of Housing: You’ve come a long way, baby. I hope you come a bit further. We congratulate you for the degree of conversion you’ve expressed up until now.

Mr. Shore: Certainly our party, as our spokesman did before, agrees in principle with the concept of this bill.

Mr. Foulds: Were all of you unanimous?

Mr. Shore: I would like to stress, particularly to the NDP, that we haven’t got any in to the secrets of the other caucuses that they appear to have.

Interjections.

Mr. Speaker: Order, please. The hon. member for London North has the floor.

Mr. Shore: I don’t mind the interjections because we’re here till 10:30. Let me know when you’re through, and then we’ll get started.

Mr. Foulds: A fine speaker.

Mr. Cassidy: This is one leadership campaign that’s going to come to a halt right tonight.

Mr. Shore: Are you almost through?

Mr. Cassidy: Yes.

Interjections.

Mr. Shore: We have no secrets of other people’s caucuses. We agree in principle with this document. But I want to stress, particularly to the party opposite, that they have no licence, in my opinion, to the theory that they’re the most humane and only humane body in the Province of Ontario. I believe that we have, and I believe that opposition members have and the government too. I truly believe that.

Mr. Nixon: Hurray for the Liberals and the Tories!

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: You’ve come a long way, baby.

Mr. Nixon: We’re all good guys with very few exceptions.

Mr. Shore: What I would say addresses itself equally to the belief that we have a responsibility to all the people, taking into account the philosophy and concept that we do believe in this rent control aspect, for a period of time. But we also believe in the free marketplace.

Mr. Foulds: Do you believe in a period of time or do you believe in rent control?

Mr. Shore: That’s what we said. The deepest thing that we believe in is the availability and opportunity for housing for people in this province. All the controls in the world are useless, if people haven’t got any place to stay. The member for Ottawa Centre (Mr. Cassidy), may very well succeed in his controls --

Mr. Haggerty: He has two homes.

Mr. Shore: -- but they may have to have some tents. I submit to you, Mr. Speaker, that the free market and the public market is the best place.

Mr. Cassidy: Would you use the marketplace and not --

Mr. Shore: The member for Ottawa Centre had an hour and a half. Surely he covered a good number of his points. I only want 15 minutes.

An hon. member: What points were they?

Mr. Nixon: Take as long as you need.

Hon. J. R. Smith: Keep on rolling. Keep on trucking.

Mr. Speaker: Order, please. The hon. member for London North has the floor. Would you give him the courtesy of hearing him?

Hon. J. R. Smith: We are enjoying it.

Mr. Shore: Surely the government and the members opposite should recognize that we’ve had a lesson in history tonight and we’ve had a lesson in theory.

I want to give members a few practical lessons, if I might. There are very serious areas of this document, albeit sound in principle, to which I would hope the committee will address themselves positively. One of them is that we never want to lose the opportunity of having the free market.

Mr. di Santo: Why?

Mr. Good: They wouldn’t knew anything about that over there.

Mr. Foulds: Why not vote against the bill?

Mr. Speaker: Order, please.

Mr. Shore: Can Hansard hear me at least?

Mr. Nixon: Hansard is all-hearing.

Mr. Shore: One of the members opposite said he had a great deal of sympathy for the small businessman. I want to tell the same member so do we and always will have. I must tell him that for every Cadillac, if there are any, there are many hundreds of free enterprising people in this industry today, and don’t ever forget it.

Mr. Foulds: Is that Cadillac the automobile or Cadillac the developer?

Mr. Shore: I would hope, in respect to my colleague who has made her point and left, that we will not be totally parochial in this matter. We should not constantly think in terms of universality. I believe truly that the problems that may exist in Toronto may not exist in Ottawa or may not exist in London or may not exist in Hamilton or certainly may not exist in other communities. Lt’s address ourselves to the fact that everything isn’t total universality. I would also like to stress certain other aspects which must be kept in consideration for the benefit of people who want rental accommodation. That is, there is constant refinancing required on these properties and that is at all times subject to re-negotiation. We don’t want to lose sight of the opportunity for people wanting to sell properties; retroactivity must be looked at.

I submit there are so many good things in this bill that I’m convinced the private sector, along with the public responsibility and some minor but real adjustments, could make this thing work. If we’re not prepared to give on this and to take that into consideration I would want to stress that the short-sightedness of members opposite particularly --

Mr. Moffatt: Are you looking for support here or opposite?

Mr. Shore: -- may well make serious problems for us five and 10 years from now and that is not what we are trying to do. We want housing in this province and let’s not lose sight of the private sector.

Mr. Grossman: In rising to speak in this debate, I’ll try to avoid all the standard routine words that go through the rhetoric that we have to go through on this. We’ve already heard them.

Mr. Good: Why don’t you get them all in the cabinet? We wouldn’t have to listen to him.

Mr. Grossman: I quote -- they couldn’t be my words -- “the poor aren’t participating; -- ”

Mr. Nixon: Now we are going to have the pearls of wisdom.

Mr. Grossman: “ -- panacea; gouging; payola; $3 million homes.” The official opposition has covered all that rhetorical territory.

Mr. Ferrier: Your dad used to do that.

Mr. Grossman: We don’t have to go through that because none of them is applicable. After taking credit for three-quarters of the bill, which they’ll try to do but can’t, they still feel obliged to use those tired old words. That’s okay; those will help us next time around.

Mr. Warner: Your policy goes through a revolving door.

Mr. Grossman: The first is the limit to four units which has been talked about earlier. I’ve been deluged with calls also this week, although in my case the deluge isn’t 10; it’s 40 or 50. Most of those have been from people who live on the same street as a high-rise building for example, but they happen to live in duplexes or fourplexes and these people, quite properly, feel hard done by. They say they might bear the brunt of the new scheme. They are in an unfair situation; they’re not protected and their neighbour is.

They’re saying in very many cases their building is like dozens of others owned by the same person who is in the business and is entirely unaffected by this legislation so long as he retains four units in each building which is part of his empire. The tenants in these buildings, I suggest, are very much entitled to protection in this period of time. In a very real way they would be discriminated against should this four-unit minimum he kept in place.

Because of this situation I have taken this matter up with the minister over the last week since the bill was first introduced. I’m happy to say he has indicated that as far as that particular provision is concerned, he would be happy to co-operate and is hopeful that perhaps something can be worked out and that provision eliminated.

I think that’s a very progressive step and in my mind, notwithstanding all the tired rhetoric from the other side, we now end up with a bill which does the job. As the member far London North (Mr. Shore) has pointed out, it still leaves some viability to builders to continue to develop suites so that we don’t get locked in to a ridiculous long-term situation which calls for more and more rent controls and less and less development. The bill as it stands with the exception that we absolutely must remove that four-unit provision will, I think, get us over the next period of time.

[9:45]

One other concern I have is the fact that although in several sections the words “notwithstanding the terms of any tenancy agreement” are used, nonetheless landlords and tenants could perhaps get together and by way of a separate and different document agree not to be bound by the terms either of this Act or the amendments to the Landlord and Tenant Act. Such a document could be interpreted as not being part of the tenancy agreement, being a separate and distinct document. Yet the landlord could conceivably produce that separate and distinct document at court and say, “We had a distinct and separate agreement, which we entered into for other reasons, by which the tenant agreed not to appeal the lease we had entered into to the rent review board”.

In order to avoid that happening, I would suggest that reference be made to a provision such as in in section 82 of the Landlord and Tenant Act which uses the words “This part applies to tenancies of residential premises” and so on, “notwithstanding any agreement or waiver to the contrary.” I think that is quite important to retain the integrity of this Act and to see there are no violations by anyone trying to find loopholes in the Act.

I feel obliged, before finishing by remarks, to point out to the member for Ottawa Centre (Mr. Cassidy) that while the tenant must give a certain notice to the landlord that he is unhappy with his rent -- that’s all the tenant need do -- it is the landlord who must then carry forward the steps to the court to get any of the increases provided for under the Act. The instigation is indeed in the hands of the landlord.

With regard to the penalty provisions, they are explicit in the Act. Sections 3(1) and 3(2) call for the rollback and where the rent has been paid the rollback must be paid back within 60 days of assent. Later on in the Act there is --

Mr. Riddell: You have got a co-pilot.

Mr. Grossman: -- section 15, which is the penalty provision for violating section 3. Those two items are covered. Together with the package I have referred to -- eliminating the four-unit restriction -- I submit the bill is a highly effective one from the standpoint of both the landlord and tenant in this critical time.

Mr. Ferrier: I consider it a privilege to enter into this debate. I think the member for London North did a good job in speaking up for the private enterprise people of this province.

Mr. Nixon: You can speak for the United Church. That’s my church; go ahead.

Mr. Ferrier: You fellows need Ted Culp over there to move you a little bit to the left.

Interjections.

Mr. Ferrier: I think one of the reasons we are in this situation today is because governments have opted out, to a significant degree, of their responsibility to provide sufficient Lousing for the people of this province. They have left it to the private sector and the private sector has been so interested in making money it hasn’t been looking toward the needs of the people. The free market has obviously caused the situation we are in today and we need more intervention by the government.

I am glad to see you in the chair, Mr. Speaker, for this portion of the speech I want to make because you have been one of the outstanding voices on problems in northern Ontario. I am most discouraged by two exclusions in this Legislation because the minister comes from northern Ontario. He has travelled northern Ontario and he was supposed to be the Conservative Party’s main voice in northern Ontario, particularly in the northeast in the last election. Somehow or other things didn’t pan out for him that well in the northeast, but he knows northern Ontario.

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: I got the work done.

Mr. Ferrier: But do you know how many high-rises there are in northern Ontario?

Mr. Nixon: In Bruce Mines, Sturgeon.

Mr. Ferrier: We have got three or four low-rises, but there are very few rental units in my riding that will be covered under this Act. You exclude single family dwellings.

Mr. Nixon: That is, over $500.

Mr. Ferrier: You exclude homes where there are more than four units -- or is it six? -- four or fewer residential units. That pretty well says that the Act doesn’t have too much hearing on a city like Timmins. Timmins is a city where development is taking place. Texasgulf is in the midst of an expansion programme, and the demand for houses is very great. People are calling up two and three times a day wanting to find rental accommodation, and there just are not very many units available. They talk about Thunder Bay having probably one of the lowest amounts of rental units available in the province. I don’t think Timmins is very far behind. As a result landlords have been taking advantage of the tenants.

I have a case here that was phoned to me earlier in the week. A woman had moved into a new apartment where the rent had been $175. The rental agent said, “I haven’t heard from the landlord but I think $175 will be all right.” The landlord hasn’t answered any of her correspondence, but when she did get word by telephone she called back on the phone and she didn’t want to speak any more than the three minutes. When the three minutes were up she hung the receiver up. She was pretty concerned about her money. He wants the rent to go up $75 -- from $175 to $250 a month. And your legislation here doesn’t cover that situation.

Mr. Haggerty: Sounds like Ontario Housing.

Mr. Ferrier: It doesn’t cover the situation of the working people who are renting a single family dwelling. During the election people came to me saying “my rent has gone up $50”. And so it goes.

This legislation isn’t going to have much effect on us in Timmins. The people have been gouged in the rents that they have been charged and we were led to believe that you were going to provide some kind of protection -- not just for the people here in Metropolitan Toronto, or Hamilton, or London, or Ottawa. We thought that you were going to bring in legislation that would help us in northern Ontario -- the people who are being taken advantage of there.

Maybe you are thinking of Sault Ste. Marie as being the southern part of Ontario now, I don’t know. But I would have hoped that this minister would have looked toward the needs of the people in the north as well as the needs of the people here in the south, and would have granted some kind of protection for our people.

I hope that the minister will be amenable to amendments. Why should you exclude single homes which people rent? There has been gouging taking place there just as much as it has been in these apartment buildings across the way in St. James Town or up there in Wilson Heights or wherever it is.

Mr. Singer: What is going on in Wilson Heights?

Mr. Ferrier: The tight housing market is as acute in a city like Timmins as it is right here in Toronto, and the percentage increases are just as large.

I am pleased that in this legislation the bait of rent increases that you are allowing is eight per cent. We think that it could be six per cent, based on studies in BC and elsewhere showing that the costs to the landlord have not gone up more. At least it’s better than the 10 per cent that you originally talked about when you talk about pay. We would like to see six.

I agree with what my colleague from Ottawa Centre (Mr. Cassidy) stated, that only an owner-occupied house with perhaps two units may be exempt. Whenever people are taken advantage of by excessive rent increases, those kinds of tenants, wherever they live, should have adequate protection. There are good landlords who have not been ripping off the situation as it exists in the province, who have been responsible and who have not been raising their rents unduly. This kind of legislation is not going to apply to them. They don’t see that they need rent increases above what is offered here. Those landlords, whether they rent one room or whatever it is, who take advantage of other people need to have this kind of legislation imposed upon them. Wherever the strong are taking advantage of the weak, then we as legislators should be seeing that there is some protection afforded to those who are in a vulnerable position. This is why I’m glad to see that there is going to be security of tenure brought in. because we all know that anybody that raised a complaint would be looking for another place if this kind of legislation providing security of tenure is not enforced at the same time. Landlords could make things pretty unpleasant for those who complain against them if there was not some way of protecting them.

The Act does freeze the rent at the eight per coot increase until Jan. 1976. I had an interesting experience on Saturday. I had an owner of one of these mobile parks come in and tell me of the expenses that he had in the last summer in adding about 45 more pads for mobile homes and the interest that the Industrial Development Bank had placed upon him. He had raised his people’s wages a dollar and his expenses had gone up considerably. He had sent out notices before this legislation was introduced increasing the rent on those mobile homes by 20 per cent. He was jumping about that high in my office saying that he needed some kind of protection to charge more than the eight per cent. He said that he wasn’t even nearly recovering his costs and that he hadn’t increased his rent for two years.

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: What did you tell him?

Mr. Ferrier: I hadn’t read the bill at that point, so I said I’d look into it and pass the letter on to you. I said I’d act as a courier.

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: You were going to pass that on to sue. You handle it yourself.

Mr. Ferrier: I said to him the legislation should have within it the possibility of a landlord, if he feels his costs are much higher than that, of being able to go and open his books and argue a case before a rental review officer; I see that this will be in effect on Jan. 1 and that that kind of a person can go and argue that case. The other side of the coin was that one of his tenants came into my office. I said to him that the man said he hadn’t raised his rent since March, 1973, I think it was. The tenant said the owner added on $10 a month last year to the rent to cover for taxes and he said that that guy shouldn’t have the opportunity of raising his rent by eight per cent. That’s too much, he said.

[10:00]

Under this legislation, he has the opportunity to appeal that it not be eight per cent. It will be interesting in some of these situations, but at least the mechanism is there, as I understand it, for those kind of situations to be resolved. I think that that is important. One doesn’t want to see too much bureaucracy creep in, but at the same time citizens have the right on both sides of the coin to argue for an increase or decrease.

From the decrease point of view there are landlords in this province who put no money at all into the house by way of repairs, decorations or any of these kinds of things. They do as little as possible. You hear some tenants say that there has been nothing done on the house for three years. In those kind of situations the tenant can come and argue before the rent review board that the eight per cent is way out of line. Perhaps there will be some way of getting that kind of accommodation brought up to standard for those tenants.

I think that the time limit stating when this bill is supposed to cease to he is not the best way of handling this. I think that rather than having the Act automatically repealed on Aug. 1, 1977, that we should take a look at things to see if this rental market has improved; if rents are stabilized; if there is more rental accommodation on the market; if the government itself has moved in in a fairly major way and has provided many more family rent-geared-to-income situations and senior citizen accommodation; and see if the mortgage programme of Ottawa has some bearing on providing more houses; and if the market itself begins to respond; or whether there has to be a great deal more infusion of public participation in housing, as I think there will have to be. I think the legislation should leave this open-ended and not repeal it.

The government, of course, doesn’t like this legislation. They had to be cornered and manoeuvred into bringing it in in the first instance. The first day that the minister took office in this portfolio he was trying to find some way out of bringing this kind of legislation in.

Mr. Hodgson: You don’t believe that, do you?

Mr. Ferrier: I certainly do.

Mr. Samis: Read what he said.

Mr. Ferrier: I heard him on the CBC radio up in my riding --

Mr. Yakabuski: He was good, wasn’t he?

Mr. Samis: Wasn’t he ever.

Mr. Ferrier: He was saying that you didn’t need to come in with rent review legislation -- there was another way of doing it.

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: That’s right.

Mr. Ferrier: To this day he hasn’t told the people of Ontario what he had in mind. The Premier (Mr. Davis) was trying to do some fancy footwork to not embarrass his minister and to try to live up to a pledge that he had made. But in fact it took my leader to announce what our programme was and what should be in rent review control legislation and what we were demanding of this government. After that was on the record and the public of Ontario could see it, the minister did come in with this kind of bill.

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. That last remark was not correct, because I made a statement in this Legislature the day before your leader made his press release.

Mr. Hodgson: The member should stick to the facts.

Mr. Ferrier: You made a statement in the Legislature but you had to --

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: I gave you the content of the bill.

Mr. Ferrier: You gave us the content of the bill but you didn’t --

Interjections.

Mr. Speaker: Order, please. The member for Cochrane South has the floor.

Mr. Ferrier: Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’m glad that you’re there to protect the rights of this member over here against the strident, noisy voices from across the way.

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: Let the record show the Speaker is protecting the hon. member.

An hon member: Uninformed voices.

Mr. Samis: Protecting his rights.

Mr. Ferrier: I’m glad to know that the present member for St. Andrew-St. Patrick (Mr. Grossman) is no longer going to carry on the rhetoric and the kind of speeches that the former member in previous Houses for St. Andrew-St. Patrick could rise to on certain occasions. Perhaps he will move into those kind of speeches if he is here long enough.

Another thing that this bill does is exclude the government of Canada and the government of Ontario in any housing projects that they are administering.

Mr. Warner: We will fix that.

Mr. Ferrier: One of the offending ministries that is taking advantage of its employees and is raising rents in a most gouging fashion is the Ministry of Natural Resources. I can tell you, Mr. Speaker, of an incident that takes place in the town of Kapuskasing where the Ministry of Natural Resources has 10 houses. The government is raising the rent in these houses.

Mr. Yakabuski: They are cheap rents.

Mr. Ferrier: From May 1, 1974, until Sept. 30, 1975, the man was paying $54.

Mr. Yakabuski: What do you expect in Kapuskasing?

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: Oh, shame!

Mr. Ferrier: For a six-month period on jack it up to $66.23.

Mr. G. E. Smith: He is a great landlord.

Mr. Bounsall: A 20 per cent increase.

Mr. Ferrier: Then for the next six-month period you jack it up to $77.73. How much increase is that?

Mr. Bounsall: That’s 17.5 per cent.

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: Tell him, professor.

Mr. Ferrier: Then for Oct. 31, 1976, to March 31, 1977, you have jacked it up to $85.09. That’s an increase of 57.6 per cent in slightly more than a year. The government is taking advantage of its own employees and is putting in a section in the Act that allows it to do that kind of thing.

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: Mr. Speaker, on a point of order, with respect, the member is out of order, but I would wonder if he could inform me, in order to respond properly, about the type of accommodation that the employee of the Ministry of Natural Resources is living in?

Mr. Speaker: Is this a question or a point of order?

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: It’s both.

Mr. Ferrier: I am very happy that the minister is interested in the people of northern Ontario.

Mr. Yakabuski: It must be a tent.

Mr. Ferrier: I am very surprised that he, as a former parliamentary assistant to the Minister of Natural Resources, wouldn’t be aware of the kind of accommodation that his former ministry is supplying to the employees.

Mr. Yakabuski: It is a tourist tent you are talking about?

Mr. Hodgson: Summer accommodation.

Mr. Ferrier: Some of these are three-bedroom houses. They are quite small. They have to use a bedroom for a dining room.

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: Three-bedroom homes?

Mr. Ferrier: Of course, this is much below the market that other people would be paying.

Hon. Mr. Bernier: Indeed it is.

Mr. Foulds: It’s for a two-week period though.

Mr. Ferrier: This government is going to freeze their wages though, and let Ottawa decide what kind of increases they are going to get. Those people in northern Ontario have to pay more for food and heating and this kind of thing.

Hon. J. R. Smith: Lots of fresh air.

Mr. Ferrier: It would have been a lot better if you didn’t exclude yourselves from this kind of legislation and let yourself off the hook. I am glad to see that at least an election can express the will of the people, that democracy can have some real effect, that it can work, that a government over there that argued that rent control would mean that the accommodation would go all to pieces --

Mr. Yakabuski: Haven’t seen it yet.

Mr. Ferrier: It’s been shown --

Mr. Yakabuski: Wait and see.

Mr. Ferrier: -- by a brief I got from the Metropolitan Toronto Social Planning Council that that kind of thing doesn’t happen at all. It happens with as great frequency, or more so, in those jurisdictions where there is not rent control. So that’s a red herring that the developers bring across the picture to try to justify their rent gouging --

Interjections.

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: Take a little run over to Sweden. Take a little trip over to Sweden. Take a little trip over to England. See how things work there.

Mr. Ferrier: -- and their social irresponsibility and they’re building up fat reserves for themselves --

Interjections.

Mr. Ferrier: -- where they’re refinancing their apartments because of the appreciated value to get more money to go and take advantage of other people.

The developers and the big landlords in these UDI situations certainly are not the great corporate citizens that they would have us believe. Else they wouldn’t be taking advantage of people the way they have and we have to bring in this kind of legislation.

Interjections.

Mr. Ferrier: We need amendments to this Act to take into account homes in northern Ontario -- single homes and those situations where there are units less than four. The bill here is very deficient. It may look after the tenants in the apartments here in Toronto, but it doesn’t do justice to the very acute situation that we have in Timmins, or other smaller communities in northern Ontario where the high-rise boom hasn’t dome, but where there are many tenants who have just as much right to be protected from gougers as the people here in Toronto.

I feel that this only does about 60 per cent of the job that should be done. I hope that in committee, the hon. minister will think of his northern Ontario roots and of his friends and acquaintances in northern Ontario and he will see that justice is done to us up there rather than just look after the people in the big exploiting towns of southern Ontario.

Mr. Cassidy: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. I just want to point out to the hon. minister, in view of his comment just now, that statement of the member for Scarborough West (Mr. Lewis) on the policy on rents from the NDP was issued on Thursday, Oct. 30, which was a week before --

Mr. Singer: That is not a point of order.

Mr. Cassidy: -- the hon. minister’s statement about rents in the House.

Interjections.

Mr. Singer: Mr. Speaker, now that we’ve straightened out who said what before who, let’s get back to the bill. I think one serious flaw is that this bill is coming in as a single part of what should be a three-part programme. Number one, we should have a bill to do something about rent. Number two, we should have the Attorney General’s (Mr. McMurtry) bill here with us. And number three, the hon. minister should have brought a package on homebuilding or apartment building or housing construction so we can see. What the hon. minister is doing, unfortunately, is stopping for a while -- now I hope for a very short time -- new construction of Metropolitan Toronto,

Goodness knows that those figures have fallen and fallen badly. I know in my constituency, where 60 per cent of the people live in apartments, how seriously they feel some kind of relief is needed. I knocked on a lot of apartment doors during this last campaign and I know the stories that were told to me. I came back here and through the campaign determined to try to do something to help them. But it isn’t going to help them if controlled rents are going to force the deterioration of the buildings in which they live. It isn’t going to help them unless they are given some choice in the marketplace of going someplace else to live.

[10:15]

I think the government has made a mistake in not having made up its mind soon enough as to which direction it was going to move in. Your record during the campaign and during the first weeks of this 30th Legislature has been absolutely atrocious. You weren’t going to do it. Then you were going to have rent review boards that were going to embarrass landlords into adjusting by publicity. Then you were going to do something with that wonderful statute, the Unconscionable Transactions Relief Act. Then, finally, the present minister got into the saddle and he said, “I don’t think any of it is any good,” and he and his leader had a public discussion about who was right and who was wrong, until finally they agreed and now we have got this.

There are a lot of flaws in this. It was put together quickly. We will get into some of the flaws into committee. There are going to be lots of people come on the landlord side and on the tenant side who will say it is wrong because A doesn’t fit in with B and so on. I think the most serious mistake is that we haven’t got a full package. What I believe is needed in Metropolitan Toronto -- and I speak as a Metropolitan Toronto representative and I have been that for a long time -- is an alternative source of housing supply, and we haven’t got one.

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: Public or private?

Mr. Singer: Hopefully private. But the people who have built houses and apartments up until now, if we believe them -- and I am inclined to believe some of them -- are going to say, “We are just not interested this year or next year, or the year after, until it becomes a little more obvious that we can turn our money to good investment; that it is going to work for us; that it is going to produce a reasonable profit. We might just as well go to the trust company and buy a guaranteed investment certificate and get 10½ per cent. At least it is safe there. There is that savings account deposit guarantee and all that sort of stuff. Why worry?” And what is going to happen to the tenants? There is going to be a black market.

It is just so sad. Some of us remember the wartime controls, and with all of the loyalty that most Canadians had for the war effort, we remember the army of civil servants, of judges, of lawyers, of prosecutors, the investigators, who were necessary to try and keep that system somewhat honest. Well, we are not at war. We may be in an economic war, but we are no in a physical shooting war, and it is going to be a great deal harder. We are going to try to do it, I gather from what I hear from government, with a minimum of expenditure. This minister is going to have a terrible job frying to enforce what is here; trying to get people before these rent review officers, trying to get people before the courts, as the Attorney General is talking about, and deal with them in any reasonable way. It has been suggested that if the landlord is going to be ordered to refund money who is going to be able to find him. And if the landlord is entitled to get more money and the tenant says, “Too bad, I am not going to pay it,” and the tenant goes off and disappears, equally a hardship is going to take place. There are people who are small investors who are not going to be able to cope to the extent that large investors are. What about people in OHC? I worry very much about the people in OHC. They are exempted completely, and the rents keep on creeping up. I have a very large Ontario Housing development in my constituency; Lawrence Heights. About 6,500 people live there. Every time the minister’s colleague gives a GAINS raise, or somebody gives a pension raise, or something else, OHC seems to grab it off.

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: What do they pay for energy? What do they pay for heat?

Mr. Singer: All right. But the people who can’t afford to pay, who live in OHC, are dug in there seemingly for ever because the minister exempts OHC homes from some control. That should be another part of the policy. It just is no use to say, since it is public money that is going in there we are going to keep on grabbing what other parts of government or other arms of government or other governments are giving them. Those people, too, need some relief and some kind of protection. Hopefully we are going to get some of them to move out of there, such as the young couple that goes in there, starts to work, begins to earn more money, has more and more of its income taken for rent -- yes, sure it does -- and is never able to get ahead.

One of the minister’s predecessors -- that Frigidaire salesman, what was his name?

Mr. Givens: Stan Randall.

Mr. Singer: Stan Randall came out with the great idea that we are going to let those tenants in Ontario Housing buy their own homes. That programme just never got to Toronto. I don’t know whether it came into force anywhere else in the Province of Ontario. But I don’t know why the minister hasn’t --

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: CMHC gave it thumbs down.

An hon. member: They did it in Guelph.

Mr. Singer: It was announced here and Randall sat over there in the second seat from the end of the front row -- I remember him well -- and that was a great idea. The government has to do something for those people who live in Ontario Housing but all it has done here is exempt Ontario Housing.

Without throwing new burdens in the minister’s direction, what is going to happen in those buildings where there is a percentage of Ontario Housing units taken up? Ten units in a 100-unit building, say, are OHC. Ninety units are controlled and 10 units are uncontrolled. It’s going to present a very serious kind of a problem.

I worry at the way this is going to work. I worry that one arm of government is talking about raising hydro by 25 per cent and another arm of government is talking about controlling rents. I worry about the burdens which are going to be put on one group of people in our society to prove -- what? That hydro’s going up? That municipal taxes are going up? It’s many months after the event. To prove all these basics are going up and therefore, in addition to their eight per cent, they should get some more on the put-through basis.

We recognize all these things are going on. Suppose we have isolated the grasping, greedy, miserable landlord we hear about from time to time. How much investigation is the minister going to make before he can really prove that the new mortgage financing has been a fake in order to authorize a greater put-through?

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: It isn’t easy.

Mr. Singer: That he hasn’t padded his figures by taking his wife, his cousins, his daughters and his aunts and putting them all on the payroll at high rates of pay to deflate?

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: Tell them.

Mr. Singer: It’s going to take armies of investigators to try to establish this. There are some greedy landlords. There are some good landlords, too.

Mr. Foulds: Are you for or against the bill?

Mr. Warner: Where do you stand?

Mr. Singer: Certainly we are for the bill. If you came with me into my riding and talked to the tenants who live in 60 per cent of the housing units in my riding you would recognize it. What I’m complaining about, if you would listen --

Interjections.

Mr. Speaker: Order, please. The hon. member has the floor.

Mr. Singer: You people are unable to understand. You had a nice young NDP candidate who ran against me, who tried to sell this policy -- not very successfully; he ran a bad third this time. You used to have an NDP candidate who came within 20 blocks.

Mr. Speaker: Order, please. Would the hon. member get on with the bill?

Mr. Singer: They don’t accept you fellows at all in my riding.

Mr. S. Smith: Earn money from Vern.

Interjections.

Mr. Singer: I think I can convey my message to the minister this way: This bill is better than nothing but it is really not very good because it isn’t part of a package. I am certainly not going to applaud very loudly until I see what the rest of the package is. I heard the Attorney General say what he said. I haven’t seen the statute yet and I want to see that. I also want to hear, most importantly, from the minister, how he is going to get more housing accommodation into the Metropolitan Toronto area. It isn’t just enough to say we’ll build more high-rise apartments.

Every time somebody wants to build a high-rise apartment some citizens of our community -- I don’t know that they all sit in those seats over there -- some citizens of our community say not here, not there, and not anywhere else. We need more houses. Is the minister going to do it by taking everything into public control?

It’s going to take an awful lot of convincing in my direction to convince me that government can build housing units cheaper than private enterprise can build housing units. Or that the government can look after housing units better than private enterprise can.

Mr. Foulds: What is the average price of a house on the free market in Toronto?

Mr. Singer: The solution to this very serious problem which our society faces involves all segments of the community. It involves an understanding on behalf of those people who sit on municipal councils that we need more housing in our large cities. It involves an understanding on behalf of the people who sit here in this Legislature that every time somebody comes and says, “I want to build a new development over there” we don’t get speeches from all over the place, including this Legislature, saying, never, never, never.

We’ve got to have a housing programme. We’ve got to have a control programme -- a short-lived one. We’ve got to have an understanding. And just making these great speeches about how terrible it is, isn’t enough.

I’m going to support the bill -- my colleagues are going to support the bill -- but we look forward anxiously and eagerly to the rest of the programme that I think the minister is obliged to introduce before this Legislature has lived too many more weeks.

Mr. McClellan: Mr. Speaker, I would like to comment very briefly on the truly extraordinary nature of this bill. It might more appropriately be called an Act to provide for the Exemption from Review of Rents of Residential Premises. The minister has managed, by a number of devices, to exclude an enormous number of people from coverage of the bill. I want to stress again, as has been stressed by our previous speakers, that this is totally unacceptable.

Section 1(f) of the bill excludes all roomers by virtue of the definition of residential premises as containing bathroom and kitchen facilities. Section 12(c) manages in a short sentence to exclude all single family housing -- attached or detached, duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes. The combination of exclusions and exemptions in those two clauses alone amounts to virtually 50 per cent of the tenant population of this province, and probably exemptions for 50 per cent of the landlords of this province. That’s a remarkable achievement. I think if the minister had thought a little bit more about it, and worked a little harder, he could have excluded all tenants and all landlords. And so he could have had his cake and eaten it, too.

I want to deal as well with the totally spurious exemptions that are dealt with in the rest of section 12. There is no reason to stigmatize further Ontario Housing tenants by singling them out for an exemption from the provisions of the Act. There is absolutely no reason for mentioning limited dividend housing. There is no reason for excluding the so-called luxury accommodation -- assuming that when the Act becomes amended to include single-family housing, the minister may be surprised to learn that $500 a month is not considered luxury accommodation in the Toronto housing market. In many parts of Toronto $500 is the starting price for the rental of a relatively modest home. It is not a luxury rate.

Interjection.

Mr. McClellan: I’m telling you that prices in the Riverdale area of this city begin at that level, and there are other areas as well.

Mr. Speaker: Order, please. Will the member have further remarks to make another day?

Mr. Speaker: If you would move the adjournment of the debate then?

Mr. McClellan moved the adjournment of the debate.

Motion agreed to.

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: Mr. Speaker, before I move the adjournment of the House, I would remind the hon. members that tomorrow we will continue with the debate on the Speech from the Throne.

Mr. Reid: Mr. Speaker, before we adjourn could the acting House leader indicate when we might return to this bill?

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: Mr. Speaker, my understanding is that we will be back discussing this bill on Tuesday next.

Mr. Reid: Tuesday afternoon?

Hon. Mr. Rhodes: Tuesday afternoon.

Hon. Mr. Rhodes moved the adjournment of the House.

Motion agreed to.

Mr. McClellan: I’ll continue at the start of the next day.

The House adjourned at 10:30 p.m.