Gregor Robertson, Canada’s new housing minister, was likely tapped for the job on the basis of his decade as Vancouver’s mayor, where he introduced zoning changes, incentives for rental construction and the country’s first empty-homes tax.

Those moves nudged supply but fell short: housing designed specifically for renting trickled in slowly and the city’s homeless count hit a 13-year high of 2,181 in 2018.

Robertson once blamed the housing shortfall on tight-fisted provincial and federal budgets. Now that he controls part of that money, he can test his claim. He can plug a hole his municipal toolkit never could by being, as he vowed in 2018, “more abrasive and more vocal”, and by coupling fresh federal dollars with legal protections that empower tenants to bargain collectively.

The urgency is clear: one-third of Canadians rent, yet tenant unions, though legal to form, have no right to negotiate.

This absence of statutory protection for tenants is often treated as a policy oversight. By withholding legal recognition, lawmakers preserve a model that allows landlords to negotiate from a position of structural dominance as tenants confront systemic harms — rent hikes, unsafe conditions and evictions — all on their own.

Soaring rents and evictions have been described as a temporary “housing crisis.”

But researchers at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives counter that the market is not broken; it works exactly as designed. Calling it a crisis justifies “extraordinary” fixes — most often lower interest rates that lure first time home-buyers to take on debt larger than they should, according to Canadian policy scholar Ricardo Tranjan in his book The Tenant Class.

The results are structural, not temporary: median national rent for a one-bedroom dwelling now tops $2,000, vacancy rates sit below two per cent and

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