Toronto tenants organize “Keep Your Rent” campaign during pandemic

By Ivan Byard

This article was originally published in the April 1-15, 2020 issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading socialist newspaper

Workers, especially low-income tenants, are being hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite social distancing, they’re organizing to put their rights and needs ahead of landlords’ profits. Parkdale Organize, a membership-based group of working class people who organize to build neighbourhood power in Toronto’s Parkdale area, has called for tenants to “Keep Your Rent on April 1.” The campaign comes on the heels of the Ontario Superior Court March 19 decision to place a hold on the enforcement of residential evictions, and the subsequent decision of the Toronto the Landlord and Tenant Board (LTB) to suspend hearings.

For a People’s Recovery, NOT A Corporate Plunder!

YCL-LJC Central Executive Committee, March 2020

This statement was originally published on the Young Communist League of Canada - La Ligue de la jeunesse communiste du Canada homepage


We salute the immense efforts of healthcare workers to combat the COVID-19 pandemic and provide their essential services in a state of emergency. For over 30 years public sector unions and community organisations have struggled against privatisation, job loss, and closures in the healthcare sector. Our public healthcare system was overwhelmed before the outbreak of the global pandemic. Decades of cuts and austerity will leave working people, Indigenous peoples, the unemployed, the elderly, and the poor severely exposed unless emergency action is taken. 

The affordable housing crisis

Read the full report here.

With statistics from the Wellesley Institute: 

In 2009 the federal government announced $2.1 billion in new funding for affordable housing over a two-year period, plus another $5.7 billion for homeowners in middle- and upper-income brackets.

By 2011, these short-term measures were terminated, and there was a 39 percent reduction in affordable-housing funding compared with the previous year.

Since most federal dollars were matched by provinces, territories, municipalities, non-profit and private housing organizations, the combined loss added up to more than $3.5 billion in one year.

Included in the federal cuts:

97% cut in Affordable Housing Initiative (new affordable homes) from $452 million to $16 million;

94% cut in national low-income housing repair program from $674 to $37 million;

27% cut in on-reserve Aboriginal housing from $215 to $156 million;

5% cut in assisted housing from $1.7 to $1.6 billion.

In 1992, the year before Ottawa cancelled funding for new affordable housing, various levels of government contributed 0.57 percent of the gross domestic product to housing.

Fifteen years later, Canada’s GDP had doubled, but housing spending had shrunk to 0.29% of GDP.

Adapted from the Georgia Straight, "Steven Harper lies to world on housing," Nov. 2012