New housing regulations that came into effect in the Yukon this week were a long time coming – or too much too quick – depending on who you ask.

As part of a new Confidence and Supply Agreement (CASA) between the Liberal government and the NDP, rent control will continue into 2025.

As well, landlords are now required to provide a reason for evicting tenants.

Tuesday’s agreement, which provides NDP support for the government in a confidence vote in exchange for the advancement of third-party initiatives, will also lead to a review of the Residential Landlord and Tenant Act (RLTA) by June.

“We’re so proud of this,” NDP housing critic Emily Tredger told the Star Thursday.

“It’s going to make such a big difference for so many tenants.”

Kate Mechan at the Safe at Home Society agrees. She said she’s “heartened” the decade-old RLTA will be reviewed – her advocacy group has long called for updates that would better protect renters – and called the end of no-cause evictions “a game changer.”

“All that’s happening is the Yukon is following suit with the vast majority of the country in their approaches to evictions,” Mechan said Thursday.

Prior to an order-in-council that ended the practice this week, Newfoundland and Labrador was the only other province/territory that allowed landlords to end a tenancy agreement without cause.

Landlords were required to provide ample notice – three months for annual leases – but no reason. 

Ending this type of eviction was one of the 10 calls to action on housing that Safe at Home created last summer.

Tredger said she’s been thinking of the phone calls she’s received over the years from tenants who’ve had to leave their homes – without ever getting a reason.

She mentioned Darlene Pollard in particular.

As the Star reported last August, Pollard, a senior citizen, was given two months’ notice to leave her Whitehorse apartment after 20 years living there. Her landlord subsequently raised the monthly rent for that apartment by $500.

Pollard was one of nine tenants removed from the same building.

She was unable to find another rental she could afford, and took her story to the Yukon NDP and the media after moving in with her daughter.

“She said to me, ‘I know it’s too late for this to help me, but I’m hoping if I speak out, it can help other people,’” Tredger said.

“And it has. I am so proud that the next time someone calls and says, ‘my landlord’s evicted me with no reason; is there something I can do?’ I can say ‘yes, you’re protected.’”

Not everyone is excited about the new regulations, though.

Lars Hartling is president of the Yukon Residential Landlord Association. He says landlords have been blindsided and confused by changes that seemingly took place overnight.

“(The Liberals and NDP) came to this agreement internally, but without understanding the ramifications,” Hartling said in an interview this week. “We have a ton of questions that are unanswered. I’m getting calls all day long.”

The new rules on evictions, Hartling said, have landlords asking what they can evict their tenants for, or if they can sell their property as a non-rental if tenants are already living there. 

The order-in-council that removed no-cause evictions from the RLTA this week, he noted, only lists three reasons for evictions: property damage, unpaid rent or if a landlord or their family member want to move in themselves.

Hartling said he’s concerned that doesn’t cover noise complaints, smoking in non-smoking units or other breaches of contract as cause for eviction – leaving landlords powerless over their own property.

The RLTA does, however, list a number of causes.

Tenants cannot breach their lease contracts with impunity and landlords are still able to remove tenants for justifiable reasons, as they were before. The three causes listed in the order-in-council are just additional causes.

The confusion may be the result of what Hartling called a lack of consultation and communication.

Tredger said she’s been talking with individual tenants and landlords since becoming the third party’s housing critic, and has met with the residential landlord association multiple times.

“That’s really informed this decision to go ahead with this.” she said

The Star requested an interview with Premier Ranj Pillai, but he was unavailable before press time this afternoon.

But Hartling noted the immediate changes to rent control and evictions came with little warning.

He said, for instance, the government had assured landlords that rent control would end in the territory in early 2023.

Rent control was first introduced under the original CASA between the Liberals and NDP in spring of 2021.

That original agreement was set to expire this week, and Community Services Minister Richard Mostyn told the legislature in November 2022 that rent caps would be removed then.

But they’ve been extended into 2025 – and modified. 

Hartling said rent control has forced landlords in some cases to evict tenants just so they could raise their rents to keep up with rising mortgage, fuel and insurance costs.

Since 2021, landlords have been allowed to increase their rents once a year by a percentage based on Whitehorse’s Consumer Price Index (CPI).

Now, though that annual increase is still tied to the CPI, new caps have been added.

Landlords will be allowed to raise rents by two per cent if the CPI falls below that number, but will only be able to raise rents by a maximum of five per cent.

Last year’s CPI for Whitehorse was 6.8 per cent, meaning rents can go up only five per cent on May 15.

“We’re going to be subsidizing people’s units to keep them below the cost of doing business,” Hartling said. “At some point, these costs do need to get passed on.”

Yukon Party Leader Currie Dixon has also been critical of rent control in interviews he gave this week, saying rents should be returned to the free markets and the government should focus on building more housing to bring prices down.

Hartling said the landlords’ association isn’t totally against rent control, but landlords need to be a part of the conversation.

“If (rent control) must happen, (consultation) needs to take place, and it can’t happen in the backroom between two parties trying to figure out how they’re going to hold power,” he said.

“This is not how government should be operating.”

In lieu of an interview with the premier, cabinet spokesperson Renée Francoeur sent an email saying “the Yukon government has heard from a wide range of individuals since residential rent indexing was introduced in 2021, including landlords, tenants, business owners, non-governmental organizations and individual Yukoners.”

But Hartling said landlord concerns have been ignored in the new CASA and rent control is punishing landlords who, like tenants, are dealing with rising inflation. 

Hartling suggested rent control be removed, and the government instead provide rent subsidies for those struggling to make ends meet.

Mechan agrees that rent subsidies – which already exist for moderate- to low-income Yukoners – are part of the solution.

But she believes rent control and changes to the RLTA have to be part of it too.

“I think we need to be really cautious that we’re not subsidizing landlords and private sector with government money,” she said, saying it’s not sustainable.

“In the face of housing and homelessness crisis, we actually need to be using all the tools we have at our disposal.”

It’s not just the changes to regulations that have Hartling upset though; it’s the way they were changed, being implemented through a two-party agreement instead of legislative debate.

He said prospective landlords will be less likely to rent and potential real estate investors will be discouraged from spending money in the Yukon if the housing rules can change every few years under CASAs.

The Whitehorse Chamber of Commerce is also worried about how easily things can change.

“With a government in power that does not hold property rights in high regard, commercial property use could also be shaped by the ongoing Lands Act revision,” chamber president Ben Pereira said in an email.

“New investment into the territory across many sectors may be harder to find, with the tone this new government has set.”

Pereira said the new CASA is an improvement over the original, but the chamber believes it will deter landlords from taking risks investing in new rental properties under the new regulations, which could harm a rental market already in need of more housing stock.

Francoeur’s emailed statement said the upcoming review of the RLTA will “include a broad public engagement to ensure a modernized piece of legislation is meeting the needs of all Yukoners.”

Hartling and the Residential Landlord Association aren’t encouraged, though.

“The consultation is a farce at this point, because you can’t consult in good faith when you’ve just announced these are the regulations that you’re going to work by,” he said.

“We’re putting them in place today. And in six months, we’re going to consult. And all that means is they’re going to be put into legislation.”

Some or all regulations announced this week could be cemented into law following a review of the RLTA this year.

Mechan at Safe at Home said the main point is the rental market is becoming too exclusive, and renters and landlords need balanced protections. She said all parties should be working together to find solutions.

“These issues don’t need to be polarizing. It doesn’t need to be us versus them,” she said.

“Because everybody seems to be grappling with a layer of issues or facing barriers and we need to collectively figure out how to stimulate a healthy safe housing market.”