Housing Justice Convergence

The so-called housing crisis – which in reality is just capitalism’s ongoing oppression and exploitation of renters – is driving people into desperation, poverty, and homelessness from Victoria to Halifax.

But renters are fighting back. Tenant unions are springing up across the country with the aim of levelling the playing field by bringing renters together in solidarity with each other and uniting them in opposition to the landlords – who, increasingly, are corporations. The Victoria Tenants Union (VicTU) is just one star in this constellation, which also includes the Vancouver Tenants Union, the West Broadway Tenants Committee in Winnipeg, the York South-Weston Tenant Union and the Livmore High Park Tenants’ Association in Toronto, Montreal’s Autonomous Tenant’s Union, and so on. All of these grassroots organizations are building tenant power in Canada, and through them poor and working people in this country can come together to protect themselves and each other from their common enemy: landlords.

Now these organizations are starting to work together.

In early March, 2025, representatives of these organizations – and many more – came together in Montreal for the Housing Justice Convergence: a weekend-long conference dedicated to “imagining a future beyond the housing crisis”, as well as to catalyzing nationwide collaboration between tenant organizers, academics, and policy experts who are fighting on the front lines. Over 230 people attended the Convergence, including Ricardo Tranjan, author of The Tenant Class (2023), and Tracy Rosenthal, co-founder of the Los Angeles Tenants Union (North America’s largest) and author of Abolish Rent (2024). Over three days participants took part in workshops, panel discussions, and caucuses, all the while getting to know each other and sharing ideas and inspirations.

The VicTU was invited to be part of the Convergence’s keynote panel on movement building along with tenant organizers from P.E.I, Quebec, and Ontario. The VicTU was represented by co-founding member, Nathan, who told the attendees about the struggle against corporate landlord Belmont Properties and developer Intracorp, who are in the process of trying to evict over 200 families from their affordable homes in Greater Victoria so that they can build unaffordable, gentrified, high-density buildings – cashing in on the housing crisis, and in the process exacerbating it, under the pretense of helping to address it.

Other tenants organizers present suggested some inventive tactics that the VicTU might use to help these families to stand up to their corporate landlord and save their homes.

Nathan also pointed out that the situation of renters in BC is in some ways even more dire than that of renters in other provinces or territories, since BC is the no-fault eviction capital of Canada, and is home to three of the four most expensive cities to be a renter in the country – namely, Vancouver, Burnaby, and Victoria (with Toronto being the sole exception). He went on to remind the audience that BC also has an ostensibly left-wing NDP government that has had plenty of time to prove that it is either unwilling or unable to remedy the situation. This, he said, demonstrates that no existing mainstream party in the country can be counted on to be an ally of renters, and that only a grassroots movement of poor and working people can rise to the historic crisis in which we now find ourselves.

Therefore, Nathan said, a long-term goal of tenant organizing in Canada should be to build such a movement through the ongoing day-to-day struggles against rent increases, renovictions and demovictions, and so on. In this way, tenant unions can eventually also win things like vacancy control, a massive expansion of public housing, and collective bargaining rights for tenants (just like workers have through labour unions), which the existing political establishment will never willingly give us.

Over the course of the Convergence a spirit of comradery developed between the tenant organizers, and they resolved to keep in touch and to continue assisting and collaborating with each other through regular meetings going forward.

This is bad news for the greedy corporate landlords, but good news for renters across Canada. The first step toward a nation-wide network of tenant unions has been taken. Let’s hope this is nothing less than the beginning of the end of the so-called housing crisis.