If Eviction Is Legal, Defence Should Be Too
After watching what’s played out this year to renters, I’ve decided that if Canada can fast-track pipelines like they’re emotional support infrastructure for the federal government, then renters deserve free lawyers funded with the exact same urgency, panic, and blank-cheque energy.
Honestly, Mark Carney, should be pushing this faster than the science experiment we keep calling Carbon Capture. If we can throw billions at a giant Dyson for the sky, we can fund lawyers to stop people from being illegally tossed onto the freezing streets and dying every year.
Picture it: A National Rent Defence Pipeline™, no steel required. Just lawyers in hard hats yelling, “No, actually, you can’t evict someone for having an Air Conditioning unit.”
A large body of eviction research (mostly U.S. based) shows tenants with lawyers are up to 19× more likely to avoid eviction than those without legal representation; e.g., one study found 22 % of tenants with lawyers got final judgments against them vs. 51 % without lawyers (Homeless Hub, 2022).
Pilot it in the neighbourhoods with the highest eviction rates. If we can map every migratory bird flight path for environmental assessments, we can map where evictions hit hardest.
And here’s where it gets beautiful: With real legal support, we could actually enforce the housing and building codes landlords treat like the “terms and conditions” they never read. Plus, free lawyers could finally peel back the onion layers of liability companies to reveal the real humans behind “987654 Ontario Inc.” You know, the ones who insist they’re “small landlords” while evicting renters because their “grandparents” are moving back in.
Bottom line: Renters don’t need another task force, another pilot project about a pilot project, or another mayor promising to “look into it.” They need lawyers, funded like an emergency pipeline and rolled out faster than a carbon capture press release.
Because when evictions are the flood… free legal aid should be the sandbags.
