Monday, August 17, 2026
Managed Compliance
In Canadian provinces, residential eviction has been redesigned as administrative throughput. Phone hearings, written-only adjudication, and rapid sheriff enforcement now make the loss of a home a matter of minutes. This is not democracy. It is managed compliance.
Ten things
- In Toronto, Nemoy Lewis and colleagues mapped over 100,000 LTB filings between 2016 and 2021 and found that financialized landlords filed evictions at roughly 33% in Black-majority neighbourhoods versus 9.6% in white-majority ones.
- In 2021, University of Saskatchewan law professor Sarah Buhler set out to study how Saskatchewan’s Office of Residential Tenancies handled evictions during the worst public health emergency in a century.
- Roughly 124 First Nations have signed on to the Framework Agreement on First Nation Land Management and adopted land codes that displace the Indian Act’s land provisions; these codes can include their own tenancy regime and dispute-resolution mechanism.
- The work that has scaled — Nemoy Lewis’s mapping of over 100,000 Toronto eviction filings, Martine August’s tracing of financialized landlord behaviour — has required teams, grant funding, and years.
- Disaggregated tribunal data is thin — most tribunals do not collect or publish outcomes by race or Indigeneity — but the empirical work that has been done makes the contour visible.
- For Indigenous tenants off-reserve , rigorous case-level evidence does not yet exist, but the indirect signals — over-representation in homelessness counts, in shelter intake, in core-housing-need rates, in housing-clinic caseloads — all point the same way.
- The colonial overlay (federal jurisdiction, Indian Act paternalism, chronically underfunded on-reserve housing) means a clean cross-jurisdictional comparison is misleading: the two systems share the same outcome — tenants without recourse — through very different mechanisms.
- The receipts at the end of this page include the Framework Agreement and the Lands Advisory Board, because the most honest summary of the on-reserve picture is that some Nations have built better systems than any province has, and they have done it without the Indian Act’s help.
- Starlight Investments, one of the country’s largest financialized landlords, filed at 36.6% in Black high-income neighbourhoods — nearly triple their citywide rate.
- The answer is that Buhler is not the only person who has noticed — but she is rare in having published peer-reviewed, file-by-file empirical analysis of tribunal decisions.
Five questions
Which term completes this sourced statement? “In Toronto, Nemoy Lewis and colleagues mapped over 100,000 LTB filings between 2016 and 2021 and found that financialized landlords filed evictions at roughly 33% in _____ neighbourhoods versus 9.6% in white-majority ones.”
Which term completes this sourced statement? “Roughly 124 First Nations have signed on to the Framework Agreement on First Nation Land _____ and adopted land codes that displace the Indian Act’s land provisions; these codes can include their own tenancy regime and dispute-resolution mechanism.”
Which term completes this sourced statement? “_____ tribunal data is thin — most tribunals do not collect or publish outcomes by race or Indigeneity — but the empirical work that has been done makes the contour visible.”
Which term completes this sourced statement? “The colonial overlay (federal jurisdiction, _____ Act paternalism, chronically underfunded on-reserve housing) means a clean cross-jurisdictional comparison is misleading: the two systems share the same outcome — tenants without recourse — through very different mechanisms.”
Which term completes this sourced statement? “Starlight _____, one of the country’s largest financialized landlords, filed at 36.6% in Black high-income neighbourhoods — nearly triple their citywide rate.”