Tantramar MLA pledges to fight for rental reforms

Tantramar MLA Megan Mitton says she intends to keep pushing for major reforms to the law that is supposed to protect New Brunswick tenants from big rent hikes.

She adds that the new Liberal government’s 3 per cent annual rent cap that takes effect on February 1 has a major flaw.

“There needs to be vacancy control,” Mitton says. “And what that means is tying the rent cap to the unit and not to the tenant.”

She notes that under the new 3 per cent cap, landlords can increase rents by more than the cap when tenants move out of an apartment and new ones move in.

“Tying the rent cap to the unit and not to the tenant is the right policy,” she says “because it doesn’t just protect tenants from significant rent increases, it also protects the affordable housing stocks so that rents don’t increase too much between tenants.”

Mitton made her comments on Saturday during an interview at Mount Allison where professors, politicians, students and members of the public were holding a workshop to discuss ideas for a forthcoming book on New Brunswick’s political history since the year 2000 and how it compares to developments in the rest of Canada.

University of New Brunswick Professor Julia Woodhall-Melnik, who is co-writing a chapter on rental housing affordability, says in the last 25 years, governments pursued neoliberal policies that promote the growth of the private housing market over the provision of publicly subsidized housing.

“At present, public policy at both the federal and provincial levels is insufficient to address the growing severity of the housing crisis and the changing nature of renting,” she told workshop participants during her keynote, lunch-time address.

Woodhall-Melnik showed slides dividing the last quarter century into three, 10-year periods: the 2000s to 2010, 2010 to 2020 and the years since.

She said the first period featured limited government investment in public housing coupled with tax incentives to promote real estate investment trusts (REITs) in which private investors are encouraged to buy up properties that can generate profits for shareholders.

For a local example in Sackville, click here.

In the 2010s, Woodhall-Melnik said New Brunswick lost more than a third of units that rented for less than $750 a month accompanied by nearly a tenfold increase in the number of apartments with monthly rents of $1,500 or higher.

At the same time, she said, the provincial government did almost nothing to protect low-to-middle-income tenants.

And although in 2022, the Higgs government did bring in a 3.8% rent cap, it did not renew it for 2023.

Woodhall-Melnik describes New Brunswick’s latest investments in public housing as too little too late.

“In New Brunswick, a provincial investment of $102.2 million in public housing to renew and develop 490 housing units, when approximately 11,000 households sit on our provincial waitlist for public housing, is a mere drop in the bucket of what is needed to provide affordable rental housing to low-income households,” she said.

She also criticized government reliance on providing financial incentives to private developers in what she sees as a futile attempt “to build our way out of the housing crisis.”

Woodhall-Melnik says most of the new rental units built by private developers are “targeted towards higher-income renters who make up a very small percent of the rental population within New Brunswick.”

She also suggested that Canadian governments will never solve the housing crisis as long as they view housing as a generator of private wealth and investment rather than a public good and a human right.

“We have a solution [to the housing crisis]. she said, “we’re just never going to do it.”

For a concise summary of rent control measures from the tenants’ rights group ACORN NB, click here.

Bruce Wark worked in broadcasting and journalism education for more than 35 years. He was at CBC Radio for nearly 20 years as senior editor of network programs such as The World at Six and World Report. He currently writes for The New Wark Times, where a version of this story first appeared on January 16, 2025.