Regional Municipality of Waterloo planning department 2008 to 2018. Left after a decade of watching policy decisions that prioritized development over affordability. Journalism since 2019. Knows every zoning bylaw in the region and has read the Regional Official Plan three times.
Beats: housing, urban planning, tenant rights, municipal politics, Waterloo Region
Contact: d.mcleod@printmag.org
A notice is not an eviction. In Ontario a landlord cannot put you out on their own, cannot change the locks, and cannot skip the hearing. Here is what actually has to happen, and where you can push back. This is general information, not legal advice.
The average asking rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the Waterloo Region is nineteen hundred dollars a month. A used-vehicle payment, on a car purchased three years ago at a price the market now considers entry-level, is three hundred and fifty dollars a month. The country has spent forty years making the room unaffordable and the car inevitable. The country is now surprised when the car becomes the room.
The country's housing market is a predator. The polite advice is to bid harder. The honest advice is to leave. There is more land in this country than in almost any country on earth. Most of it has a road through it, a power line above it, and a price below the median monthly rent in any city worth fleeing.
For a decade Canada recruited international students as a revenue stream for starved colleges and a pipeline for a hungry labour market. Then, in January 2024, with rents at record highs, it capped their numbers and let them carry the blame for a housing crisis they did not cause. The cap was real policy with real effects. So was the scapegoating.