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Landlords, tenants, and the CBC

On February 16, a CBC news article caught my eye. Lodged in the sidebar of another story I was reading, the headline was too intriguing to ignore.

“This GTA condo owner says he’s struggling ‘to make ends meet’ as tenant won’t pay $20K in rent”

Here’s the gist of the story: a landlord in Mississauga has been trying to evict a tenant from a unit for six months, but backlogs at the Ontario Landlord and Tenant Board (LTB) have made it so that the tenant remains in the unit that the landlord has not paid off, meaning he now carries two mortgages and expenses totaling about $4000 a month. "Nobody wants to be a landlord anymore," he told the CBC.

Articles like this have been the source of consistent controversy, particularly as the housing crisis continues on unaddressed and rents rise faster than most people can afford (1 bedroom rents in the Churchill Meadows/Erin Mills community where the unit in question is located increased 89% from 2010 to 2022, according to the CMHC).

Jeremy Appel over at The Orchard has written about these kinds of stories:

Folks like the tech writer Paris Marx (with whom I briefly studied at McGill!) have raised the issue as well:

Canadaland has commented on this a few times over the years, most recently in a Shortcuts episode I can’t find for the life of me (bonus points to anyone who can track it down).

Stories about landlords having a tough go of it elicit fairly negative reactions. But here’s a question: does the CBC really have a pro-landlord bias?

The CBC isn’t as gleeful about these stories as, say, Toronto Life, with their ragebait articles like “I’m 28 and own six properties in Ontario” or “I’m 25, live with my parents and own 20 rental properties” (not the flex the author thinks it is…like if George Costanza was a crypto bro). Stories like these seem designed to generate controversy, which drives clicks and, thus, ad revenue.

So let’s look at CBC stories on the rental housing market and see what the evidence shows.

Talk about methodology, but make it fun

The CBC does not have a great search function. There are no ways to limit searches by time, author, or region. To search the CBC, you have to type a phrase in the search bar and go through each story manually. Thus, I limited my search to typing in “rental”, “tenant”, and “landlord” in the search bar and collecting all articles published over the past five months, from October 1st 2022 to February 28th 2023.

Sifting through articles can be challenging. Searching “tenant” can bring up related results that only vaguely reference tenants. For example, this is an article about a rally in Vancouver about police evicting encampment residents. The article briefly touches on tenant issues, but is more about issues surrounding policing and encampments. An article like this is excluded from analysis because it doesn’t specifically address tenant issues (while the housing market is part of it, the article goes broad with the analysis). That is different than this article from CBC Saskatoon about folks experiencing homelessness there, as the article goes in-depth about how rising rents and evictions are central to why many people end up on the streets. Articles like that are included. Lots of reading required. Yay.

Duplicated stories (a written story followed by a video report about a fire in an apartment in New Brunswick, for example) aren’t counted as two separate stories. In these cases, only the written story is included.

Ultimately, this returned 65 stories from 16 CBC “regions” and the Business section.

Stories will have two important elements: the reason for the story and the focus of the story. A story’s raison d'être is why the journalist is covering it. But the focus of the story is different. Most stories about housing centre on a person or people. This can either be the landlord, the tenant, or both. In some cases, the story just focuses on legislation or policy without centering a person (other than maybe a Minister of Housing or another political figure). We’ll call those “neutral” stories.

Graph time

First, let’s look at the market the story came from. I’ve aggregated the markets based on broad geographic areas and kept “Business” as its own section.

The Atlantic provinces (NFLD+Labrador, PEI, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick) have seen the most, followed close behind by Ontario (CBC affiliates in Toronto, Ottawa, Hamilton, London, and Sudbury). This is no surprise as New Brunswick’s PC government let rent increase caps expire on December 31st 2022, resulting in stories of some tenants receiving near 100% rent increases overnight and PEI (another Tory-led province) has rental vacancies under 1%.

But what about the focus?

A full 52% of stories centre the tenant or tenants in a story. These are stories where tenants facing issues are the “main characters”, if you will, and whose plight is the driving narrative; stories such as the issues facing renters in Lower Sackville, Nova Scotia, where a landlord renovicted tenants after a sprinkler system malfunctioned. The tenants spoke with the CBC, but the landlord declined comment.

Just 16% of stories focus on the landlord. These are stories like the issues facing a London, Ontario landlord who is trying to evict a tenant for non-payment. The story starts with the landlord’s issues, then devotes a few paragraphs to the tenant who is not named. While the tenant did speak with the CBC, the landlord remains the focus of the story.

Your point is?

This is just a snapshot in time and the result of manually looking through stories using an imprecise search function. But it helps to give us some context. And it helps us address, but not fully explain, our research question (which, again, is: does the CBC really have a pro-landlord bias?) In terms of number of stories, the CBC overwhelmingly centres the tenant experience with varying levels of input from their landlords.

Content-wise is another issue. The CBC has reported on important renters issues, like when the UN accused massive multinational landlord group Akelius of human rights abuses. But they’ve also set up back-and-forths, like this segment of landlords and tenants debating.

The complaint, then, isn’t that the CBC is focusing on landlord issues rather than reporting on tenant concerns. The complaint is that the landlord-focused articles do little to critique the system or question why we should be sympathetic to someone who had the opportunity to buy multiple properties, expecting a “high rate of return” on their investment, and made bad decisions. Indeed, one of the central issues is that the stories recounting the plight of the landlord fail to illustrate that these individuals are treating housing as an investment and not a human right.

Stories about two landlords in eastern Ontario and one in Mississauga frustrated at how long it has taken to evict “nightmare” tenants characterize the landlords as struggling and the tenants as serial scammers. Sure, every story can’t include a critical analysis of the commodification of housing. But in the depths of a housing crisis where rents are skyrocketing, people can’t get into the housing market, and there is little funding for non-market alternatives like co-ops and social housing, stories asking us to feel sorry for landlords missing out on $2,500 a month can certainly feel out-of-touch.

It is hard to blame the CBC alone for this. Canada is a country obsessed with homeownership. Market surveys regularly show that around 2/3 of Canadians view buying a home as a priority, with a solid 1/3 of respondents saying that a home “is a good investment”. While homeownership rates have declined since their highest rate - 69% (don’t say it) - in 2011, the fact that 67% of Canadians own their homes means we are one of the most house-obsessed countries on Earth. Just over 50% of Germans own their homes. Same with Austria. In Switzerland, it is closer to 40%. France, Japan, Denmark, Türkiye, South Korea, and New Zealand/Aotearoa all have lower homeownership rates than Canada.

Decades of pressure from all levels of government, the mortgage and real estate industries, and home builders has cemented the single detached home into the Canadian psyche. And, in the absence of any real financial control for regular people, owning a home is the closest they can get to real security. A lacklustre pension plan and uncertainty over private retirement savings means that nearly half of Ontarians believe their home will be the biggest source of retirement income, despite the fact that the financial planner quoted in that linked article reminded folks: “You can’t buy food with your eavestrough.”

In many ways, the CBC is just responding to how we, as Canadians, view housing. While it is true that, as a public broadcaster, they can definitely do more to advance an alternative vision of housing, they do provide other perspectives. Two recent stories about co-ops in Calgary and Victoria are a great start and do a lot of work to inform readers about how co-ops are a time-tested form of housing that is less expensive and is better for building community. But, ultimately, much of the work to educate people on and advocate for real housing solutions will have to be done by community advocates, local political leaders, and people with research capacity.

We have to work on advancing an alternate conceptualization of housing - one the recognizes that housing is a right, not a commodity or an investment. Once these ideas gain prominence, they’ll get into the media, further expanding the reach of these ideas.

And then maybe, just maybe, we’ll see as many stories about new public housing builds and co-ops forming as we now see about sad landlords.

The sprawl of it all

The Ford government’s plans to carve ~7,500 acres out of Ontario’s Greenbelt for more urban sprawl suffered another blow this week. The Alliance for a Liveable Ontario commissioned a study from registered planner Kevin Eby, who formerly sat on Ontario's Greenbelt Council (also another solid three-letter last name that starts with E), to consider the existing land available for development in the province. Eby found that, even without taking land out of the Greenbelt, the province could build 2,000,000 homes by 2031, exceeding their own estimates for how many homes we need by 500,000.

In fact, Eby was only considering municipal “lands needs assessments”, which aim for far lower densities than are possible on the available land. This led Environmental Defence to state: “the 2 million total projected homes that could be built represent a conservative estimate of total possible future supply to 2031.” (Emphasis added).

All this is happening as questions continue to swirl around the ethics of the Ford family inviting developers to the wedding of the premier’s daughter. The PCs have come out swinging against the new leader of the Ontario NDP, Marit Stiles, accusing the ONDP of sending photographers to the wedding (they didn’t) and lobbing allegations of discrimination against the opposition. PC House Leader, Paul “Slippery Tool” Calandra opted to run an obfuscation play by stating in the legislature:

Wow. Set aside the fact that the developers snatching up Greenbelt land are a diverse group of folks, the issue here isn’t that any person of any cultural group can’t develop ethically. The issue is that a group of developers is acting unethically by maintaining a close relationship with a government (including offering campaign donations) which is pursuing policy that benefits those same developers, all while selling said policy as a solution to a problem caused, in part, by the exact same developers.

Dirty deals for dirty soil

Speaking of unethical behaviour…

During my Masters program at McMaster, I was loitering in the Labour Studies lounge one evening. Perched on a window ledge, entirely out of place, was an old book with yellowing pages. I asked around and no one seemed to know where it had originated or who it belonged to. So I took the book home and found myself reading nearly the entire thing in a night.

That book was Their Town: The Mafia, The Media and the Party Machine by Bill Freeman and Marsha Aileen Hewitt. If you haven’t read this particular study of Hamilton’s municipal political history, I would strongly recommend taking a look.

Especially given the news this week:

Carlo Ammendolia, a city manager of construction-development (is that construction and development or the construction of development?) met with Pat Musitano, head of the Musitano Crime Family, at Ben Thanh on James North in October of 2018. If you don’t know much about the Musitano Family, definitely look them up. There are hits on other mob figures, wars with biker gangs, and so much coke, even Cocaine Bear would be like “woah, slow down guys”.

Ammendolia is named in a $75,000,000 lawsuit filed by Waterdown Garden Supplies Ltd., who claims Ammendolia and Musitano conspired to dump soil contaminated with, according to a 2021 Spec report, “cadmium, mercury, boron, zinc and petroleum hydrocarbons” on a property off Highway 5.

While the story has been developing for some time, the new information is that Ammendolia admits to meeting with Musitano at the time, but insists it was only to discuss “questions about permits required for recycling soil”, according to his statement of defence, as reported by The Spec.

This whole thing is a mess for a few reasons. Through the 1970s, Hamilton was called “bomb city” after the Musitano’s launched a campaign of terror against anyone who got in their way. In 1992, the Musitano’s were involved in a plot to burn down the Collins in Dundas. The violence and needless death that followed organized crime (enabled, in part, by drug criminalization) was tied to Hamilton’s local politics, shattering faith in our municipal institutions. A healthy democracy only works when people believe that the people we have in charge of important files are responsive to them and not to shady interests.

And the environmental impacts of the contaminated soil are massive. While the salacious tales of mobsters and allegedly corrupt municipal officials take the spotlight, the fact that we continue to pollute our soil and pass the responsibility for clean up off on rural residents is appalling.

🐈🐈🐈

Tiger King III: Joe Takes the Hammer.

While there have been plenty of “large cat-like animal” sightings in Hamilton lately, don’t worry too much; the City has stated that there has never been a confirmed cougar sighting in Hamilton (paywalled Spec article). Cougar DNA was found in about 2005 in the Wainfleet bog, but there haven’t been any confirmed sightings. (Editor’s note to self: don’t make any cougar jokes. They’re cheap and you’d be bad at them.)

Polling what’s left

The Fraser Institute appears to have commissioned polls through Leger about different economic systems. And Canadians seem to be on board with socialism.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Fraser Institute, they are a right-libertarian think tank that you probably know from their “Tax Freedom Day” events or constant stream of op-eds about how things would be better if we just destroyed government. So for them to get a survey back that says 50% of respondents think socialism will make the economy and our well-being better must have been a kick in the objectivist gut.

Other positives from this survey? 72% of respondents were cool with much higher taxes on the 1% and 59% of respondents were even cool with much higher taxes on the wealthiest 10% of Canadians. Negatives from this survey? 4% of respondents think fascism is the ideal economic system. Unlike capitalism, communism, socialism, etc., fascism is not exactly an economic system, but hey, I didn’t draft these survey questions.

What are the take-aways from this poll? Language in politics is complicated. For decades, many dedicated leftist politicians shied away from using words like “socialism” to define their economic and social policies for fear that, even if folks liked the ideas, they hated the words used to describe those ideas. But it appears that the hard work of activists and trailblazing political leaders in educating voters about different economic theories has paid off. That, or its all thanks to kids on TikTok.

Cool facts for cool people

• An update on the 15-minute conspiracy: The Town of Olds in Alberta had a raucous town council meeting where residents showed up to express fear that they would become a 15-minute city. You can walk from one side of Olds to the other in 30 minutes, so I guess folks were really riled about about halving that commute. Residents had been whipped up by the conspiracy theory discussed last week, adding a fun new bit of misinformation, namely that SmartCities are a concept developed by the UN to forcibly relocate people. Someone found an outdated document stating that Olds had won funds to become a “SmartCity” (essentially improving the city’s tech capacity) and that the town was on the way to becoming an open-air gulag. While the council told residents they did not plan on pursuing a 15-minute city strategy, one local councillor, James Cummings, peddled the theory that one definition for the concept “is to restrict residents’ movements within certain districts”. This is patently false and further advances the dangerous conspiracy. I look forward to this inevitably becoming an issue in Hamilton soon…

• Ontario’s school boards are asking for permission to start closing schools again. According to school boards, the six year-old moratorium on closures has further complicated board budgets. It is upsetting that school boards are, once again, considering closures in response to poor funding from the province. Prior to 2017, boards were faced with the unreasonable provincial policy of either closing schools and getting money for new builds or keeping schools open and not receiving necessary funds for maintenance. Back when I ran for Wards 1&2 HWDSB Trustee in 2014, I was always thinking of new, creative ways of keeping schools open and better utilizing the space around them. When faced with budgetary issues, trustees should do the same now, not simply revert back to the destructive and divisive practice of closing community schools. As some of the last pieces of publicly-owned infrastructure in our neighbourhoods, these schools can be put to better use and still provide space for education, connection, and community.

• An Ottawa city councillor is worried speed cameras will be a cash grab. Kanata South councillor Allan Hubley (yeah, Ottawa names its wards because that’s an obviously better way of doing things) told the CBC: "It's just purely a lot of speeders, so we're gonna make a lot of money." This line of reasoning is always fun to me. The speed limit is (theoretically) set for safety conditions on the road. We know people will travel faster than the speed limit. And, yet, the popular opinion is to…do nothing about it? Sure, speed cameras fine people for travelling above the posted limit on a street, which is essentially just a “Zoom Zoom Charge” so that real rich fast bois can keep going fast. But should there not be some disincentive to drive 75 km/h through a school zone? In theory, speed camera revenue could be allocated to a special traffic calming fund (legal experts can tell me if that is possible), meaning those who chose to break the law can pay for us to make it harder for them to break said law. But creating a law that you expect people to break seems like some nonsense to me.Tell your friends! I’d be very happy for more readers, so if you wouldn’t mind giving the ol’ newsletter a share, that would be great.Share The Sewer SocialistsThanks for reading another long newsletter. You folks are the best. See everyone next week!