CELPIP Reading Part 4 Practice Test: Toronto Rent Control Debate

When Kwame Mensah moved into a one-bedroom apartment near Toronto’s Liberty Village in 2023, he paid $2,250 a month. This summer his landlord announced an increase to $2,650, and, to Mensah’s dismay, it was entirely lawful: under Ontario’s rules, units in buildings first occupied after November 15, 2018, are exempt from the annual cap that protects most other tenants. Having paid punctually and never complained, he must now choose between financial strain and abandoning his neighbourhood.

Cases like his have revived a contentious, long-running quarrel. Rosa Delgado, an organizer with a west-end tenants’ association, wants the exemption abolished, along with vacancy decontrol, which permits landlords to hike rents without limit once a tenant departs. As long as rents can be reset between occupants, she reasons, landlords have every incentive to push people out. “Rent control without vacancy control,” she quips, “is a screen door on a submarine.”

Jonathan Whitfield, whose company has built four rental towers since 2019, credits the exemption with making those projects viable. Construction costs, interest rates and development levies have all escalated. “Financiers want assurance that rents can keep pace over thirty years,” he notes, “and if you remove that, capital decamps to condominiums or leaves Ontario altogether.” Rental construction in Toronto, he points out, reached its highest level in decades after the exemption took effect.

Helen Cho, a University of Toronto economist, describes the research as fairly consistent: rent control benefits those already housed, who stay longer and pay less, but gradually shrinks the rental supply, inflating rents for everyone still searching. The underlying problem, in her assessment, is that the city has not built nearly enough homes. Debating rent control, she remarks, resembles “arguing over how to slice a pie that is far too small.”

Councillor Amrit Gill accepts that supply is pivotal. “I just don’t see private developers producing homes ordinary workers can afford,” Gill says, pressing instead for municipal rental housing on public land, with rents tied to tenants’ incomes. Sceptics recall that comparable projects spent years on the drawing board and that the city has missed several of its own construction targets.

Queen’s Park has shown no appetite for revising the rules. Mensah, meanwhile, is looking for a roommate.

I sympathize with Mr. Mensah, but I doubt Ms. Delgado’s remedy would help him. Scrapping the exemption would only 6. Choose…raise rents for sitting tenantsinvite more evictionsforce more people into sharingdeter new rental construction, if Mr. Whitfield’s financiers mean what they say. The rental industry has 7. Choose…stalledboomedlevelled offmet the city’s targets since 2018, and that hardly looks like a coincidence. My own search for an apartment took two years, so I do not say this lightly. Arguing about controls, as Professor Cho suggests, is like fussing over the slicing of 8. Choose…a pie paid for by landlordsa pie everyone already ownsa pie that won’t feed everyonean ever-growing pie.

Still, I wouldn’t leave everything to developers. Councillor Gill’s plan to 9. Choose…put the city in the landlord businesscap rents in every building, new or oldend vacancy decontroltie rents to building costs deserves support, even if such projects have often been 10. Choose…too costly to rentshoddily builtvetoed at Queen’s Parkslow off the mark. We need more homes of every kind, not more rules about the few we have.