Tenants in one Toronto building declare rent strike victory as another strike begins

TORONTO — Tenants at a west-end Toronto apartment building have ended their months-long rent strike after they say the landlord withdrew an attempt to retroactively increase rents by more than five per cent.

Advocates are hailing it as a victory amid a surge of rent strikes across Toronto in recent years, with hundreds of tenants protesting what they call deteriorating living conditions and unfair rent hikes.

“We won because we stayed strong and united,” Luz Flores, a tenant of 75 Spencer Avenue in Parkdale, said in a statement Thursday evening.

“We were always committed to seeing this through to the end.”

Tenants in more than 30 units in the building began withholding rent payments in March after the property management company, MetCap Living, applied for an above guideline rent increase, or AGI.

The maximum allowable increase for rent-controlled buildings in Ontario was 2.5 per cent in 2025, but landlords can apply to the Landlord and Tenant Board for AGIs to fund renovations and building improvements. The Parkdale tenants said their rents would have gone up by 5.4 per cent if MetCap’s application had been approved.

“The rent strike won because our neighbours did the thing that everyone talks about but almost no one does: they formed an independent organization, stepped outside of legal and political convention, and directly confronted their landlord,” said Bryan Doherty of Parkdale Organize, a group that advocates for tenants.

MetCap Living, which is still managing the building under new ownership since May, didn’t respond Friday. But its vice-president of operations, Michael Guyette, told The Canadian Press earlier this month that the company had applied for an AGI for the first time in 16 years.

The news from Parkdale came as another rent strike began on Sept. 1 on the other side of the city.

Around a dozen families at a Scarborough midrise stopped paying rent to pressure their landlord to withdraw its back-to-back AGI applications for 2025 and this year.

Jennie Ernewein, a tenant at 2293 Eglinton Avenue East, said many more in the building have shown interest in joining the rent strike next month.

She said she paid $1,700 a month when she moved into her two-bedroom apartment five years ago and the rent has since increased to more than $1,850 – a sum she can barely afford.

Ernewein, who is a single parent and a social worker, said she fears she might lose her home as her landlord seeks to hike the rent by more than eight per cent in two years to cover the cost of renovations deemed necessary to improve the building.

“Many tenants have expressed to me, and I feel the same, we worry about being outpriced of our homes … where else would we go?” she said.

She said she and others got eviction notices days after they stopped paying rent.

In Ontario, the province sets the maximum percentage a landlord can increase rent each year for units first occupied for residential purposes before Nov. 15, 2018. The increase for 2026 has been set at 2.1 per cent.

Ernewein said her landlord has applied for AGIs of 0.6 per cent for 2025 and three per cent for this year. Combined with the maximum allowable rent increases for both years, that would raise her rent by 8.2 per cent if approved by the Landlord and Tenant Board.

Ernewein said she and many of the building’s residents — mostly working class, seniors, newcomers and people with disabilities — won’t be able to pay.

“A lot of our wages aren’t keeping up with the cost of living … you work so hard and you’re finding it so much harder to live,” she said.

The building is owned by BGO Investment and managed by Drake Property Management.

The management company said only 10 units out of 118 have outstanding rent for the month.

“We don’t view this as an organized movement, but rather a small number of residents whose circumstances we are addressing directly,” it said in a statement.

The company said it has invested over $3.3 million to improve the tenants’ quality of life by replacing windows, doing exterior landscaping and accessibility upgrades since acquiring the decades-old building in 2023.

It argued that residents are “legally required to share in a percentage of the total capital costs.”

But tenants say the landlord’s response to maintenance requests has become slower in recent years.

Ernewein said she had water damage in one of the walls, and it took over a year and several followups for it to be fixed. A letter to the landlord sent from about 70 tenants in April also complained of damaged wooden floors, broken bathtubs and washroom tiles, as well as pest problems.

The company rejects the slow maintenance response allegations, saying it has addressed more than 360 work orders placed by residents, and is committed to responding promptly to tenants’ concerns.

Longtime tenant Mohamed Cassim, who joined the rent strike at 2293 Eglinton Avenue East, said he paid a little over $900 monthly when he moved into his two-bedroom unit nearly two decades ago. While that amount has since risen to nearly $1,500, it is still way below market rent.

Cassim thinks the landlord’s decision to further raise rents is aimed at pushing old tenants out of the building to replace them with new ones willing to pay more. “That’s why these guys just try to get rid of the old tenants.”

Parkdale has a history of what organizers have called successful rent strikes. In 2017, tenants in more than 300 units across five buildings won concessions after withholding rent for three months to protest AGI applications.

The new wave of rent strikes in Toronto began in 2023 when around 100 tenants in three East York buildings withheld rent over what they said were deteriorating living conditions. They reached an “amicable” deal with the landlord a year ago.

Ernewein said she has closely watched those collective actions before rallying her own neighbours in the latest rent hike protest.

“Being inspired from the successful rent strikes that have fought and won, with having the above guideline rent increases be withdrawn … that inspired us to say, ‘maybe we need to consider doing a rent strike,’” she said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 25, 2026.

Sharif Hassan, The Canadian Press