Bill No. 467 - Interim Residential Rental Increase Cap Act and the Residential Tenancies Act, an Act to Amend.

THE SPEAKER « » : The honourable member for Dartmouth South.

CLAUDIA CHENDER « » : I want to rise and say a few words to what we think is the most challenging Bill for sure of this session. Every day I go out into the hallway after Question Period, and I hear the Premier answer questions put to him by the media. It's sort of like a mini-QP out there, and I also respond to those questions. The Premier often says: "We're doing what we can." I think that this Bill is a really clear example of not doing what you can.

I don't take issue with the need to build housing. We need to build housing. We think a lot more of that housing should be affordable - genuinely affordable - for Nova Scotians who need housing. We think that's what's within the government's power, but that's not what this Bill is about. Notwithstanding the fact that every time we've asked about this Bill and debated about this Bill, that's the answer we get. We ask: "How are you protecting renters?" We hear: "We have to build housing." It's a little bit of cognitive dissonance because the reality is, the line, the assertion, "We need to build housing for Nova Scotians, Nova Scotians need us to build housing" - absolutely.

There are 300,000 Nova Scotians in this province who are renters. That's almost one-third of our population who pay rent every month. Based on what we know the average rents are, I suspect that most people paying market rent in this province right now have higher costs than the majority of the people in this Chamber.

Most people in this Chamber are homeowners. Some people in this Chamber - now I'm judging based on age and stature, so I'm not trying to stereotype anyone - have paid off their mortgage, or I wish for them that they have. I think it's really important that we think about the pressure that those kinds of housing costs cause people. More than $2,000 for a one-bedroom apartment. When I rented a one-bedroom apartment on Pizza Corner - that's another story - when I was in my early 20s, it was $450 a month. It was a big one-bedroom apartment with a big living room. We were right above the King of Donair Plus, as it was at the time, so we did have neon in our windows, but otherwise it was perfectly suitable.

That actually was not the cheapest apartment we could find. You could rent an apartment and pay your bills and save money. I think that it is a categorically true statement to say right now that that is not possible in this province. The Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing says that he believes that the most affordable home is the home you can own. We have almost no path to home ownership in this province for renters right now because they simply are required to pay too much money.

The question is, and the devil is in the details: How do we fix it? I think that probably all three parties in this Chamber would have different ideas about that, and they do, because we've seen the legislation. This government is doing nothing to fix it. Nothing. This Bill preserves the rent cap at 5 per cent. We've heard lots of stories about the ways in which that will impact people negatively. It tightens the timeline for evictions so that those people who are struggling to pay the rent - based on the submissions of Dalhousie Legal Aid and other housing support workers - will functionally be unable to get help when they need it because of the backlog of cases that these organizations have. It doesn't close the fixed-term lease loophole.

I want to address one myth that I hear about fixed-term leases, and that is that the reason we need them is because non-market housing providers use them. That's true. I've had conversations with those non-market housing providers. But here's the really important difference about those housing providers - the AHANS, the Adsums, and the others: They, by dint of their mission and the type of housing they supply, have rent control. Their housing is rent geared to income. They have no financial incentive to evict a tenant.

That doesn't mean they might not have a tenant who isn't a fit for their housing, and that fixed-term lease allows them flexibility, but the government could put everyone in that situation by tying this rent cap to the unit instead of the tenant. That one simple change, which we suggested but was turned down, of connecting this rent cap the government has brought in - this government that doesn't believe in rent caps and doesn't believe in rent control - this is a Bill with a rent cap, but they've made sure that the rent cap is functionally useless, because it is not tied to the unit. Therefore, any landlord has the incentive, if they are under financial pressure - or a bad actor, but many are just under extreme financial pressure - to evict.

This Bill gives landlords the incentive to evict people. That might be something we could stomach and call an ideological difference if we had more than a zero per cent vacancy rate in this city, certainly, and not much higher in the rest of the province, but we don't. So when people get evicted - when people get evicted in this way, I should say - when people's fixed-term leases are not renewed, and then the new tenant comes in and pays a thousand dollars more, those people cannot find a place to live. We have heard story after story of them leaving the province, moving back home, and in the worst cases, becoming homeless. Every single MLA office has heard these stories.

I think it's so important to impress upon this government how little they are doing with this Bill. This Bill brings no balance. There is nothing in this Bill that protects renters. Yes, there is a rent cap in place. There is a 5 per cent rent cap in place. For the small number of people who have periodic leases and are able to hold on to them, their rents will be capped at 5 per cent, but we heard from my colleague, the member for Halifax Citadel-Sable Island, what that means in real life: 5 per cent is not nothing, and 5 per cent compounded turns out to be quite a lot.

That 5 per cent is the highest in the country. Do we have the highest incomes in the country? Do we have the highest number - do we have the highest vacancy rate in the country? No, but we have the highest rent cap in the country. Why? Because Cabinet decided that behind closed doors with no rationale. It's not tied to CPI. It's not decided by the NSUARB, as our colleagues in the Liberal Party have suggested. It's a number that someone literally pulled out of a hat, because there's no formula that gives us that number.

The last thing I want to say is that when this Bill was introduced, after many requests to see the Davis Pier report on tenancy and on a compliance enforcement unit, the minister, after saying that that report didn't recommend a compliance enforcement unit - which we know it does, as it's been tabled in the House - decided not to go ahead with that. That would have been balance. That was something that landlords and tenants wanted that would give some measure - not enough, but some measure - of balance to ensure that everyone can avail themselves of the rules and the regime that the minister likes to reference in this House so often.

The reality is, as we have told in story after story, many people don't actually get to use the system as it was designed. It's abused. It's not as accessible to everyone. It's extraordinarily hard to navigate without help.

On the topic of health, I want to address comments that have been made by the government many times this session that infer that we are not giving Nova Scotians the true information about residential tenancies. I want to assure all members and all Nova Scotians that that is the majority of what our constituency offices do. We might as well be RTA consultants because, literally, that's what we do. People come in, and they bring us eviction notices, and they bring us Form As, and they say, "What does this mean?" and "How do we do it?" We help them as much as we can, and we send them to the agencies that know more than us. It's all we do, and it's not enough. It's. Not. Enough.

As the MLA for Dartmouth South, I want to say that when I knock on doors on Gaston Road, when I knock on doors in North Woodside, when I talk to people across my constituency, what I hear is fear and concern, and a desire to be able to build a life, and frustration that costs are making that impossible. I want to say that Nova Scotians deserve better than this. They deserve better from this government - this government that says they are doing what they can is not doing what they can for the 300,000-plus Nova Scotians who rent.