How Canadian media covers renoviction — and what it misses
A new study published in Housing Studies has examined how Canada’s mainstream print media frames renovictions — the practice of evicting tenants under the guise of renovation — finding that coverage has grown alongside the housing crisis but often stops short of interrogating the deeper structural forces driving the phenomenon.
Researchers Julia Woodhall-Melnik, Tobin LeBlanc Haley, and Chloe Reiser of the University of New Brunswick’s Housing, Mobilization and Engagement Research Lab (HOME-RL) conducted a media analysis of articles drawn from five prominent Canadian print news outlets. Their findings, published in the journal’s January 2026 issue, map how renovictions are presented to the public and policymakers — and what that coverage leaves out.
What the media gets right
The study found that Canadian print media does a reasonable job of capturing the surface dynamics of renoviction. Coverage tends to document the common justifications landlords offer for displacing tenants, the particular vulnerabilities of those who are evicted, the downstream consequences on housing stability, and tenants’ attempts to resist or halt evictions through legal channels and organizing.
The term “renoviction” itself has entered common usage relatively recently, coined to describe a landlord’s use of planned renovations — often genuine in name only — as a pretext to clear out long-term tenants paying below-market rents. In provinces with security of tenure regimes that restrict no-fault evictions, renoviction has emerged as one of the few remaining tools landlords can legally deploy to reset rents to market rates.
A crisis hiding in plain sight
The scale of the problem has grown substantially in recent years. In Ottawa, ACORN Canada documented a 545 percent rise in eviction notices between 2017 and 2022. Legal advocates working in tenant rights report significant increases in caseloads, and surveys of housing-insecure populations have found that a substantial share of people losing housing cite renovictions or related tactics as the cause.
Despite this documentation, the researchers argue that media coverage often treats renovictions as a series of individual disputes rather than as symptoms of broader housing commodification — the process by which housing is treated primarily as an investment asset rather than a social good or human right.
Housing as commodity, tenants as collateral
The study’s theoretical contribution centres on the relationship between renoviction and housing commodification. Where housing markets are highly financialized, the logic of profit maximization creates strong incentives to displace lower-income tenants in rent-controlled units in favour of new tenants who can be charged market rents — particularly in tight rental markets where vacancy rates are low and rents are rising quickly.
The media, the study suggests, presents renoviction as a problem of bad actors or regulatory gaps rather than as a structurally predictable outcome of treating housing as a commodity. This framing matters because it shapes what solutions policymakers and the public consider appropriate — licensing regimes and bylaw enforcement rather than deeper reform of how rental housing is owned and financed.
Policy responses accelerating
Several Canadian cities have moved to address renovictions through local licensing requirements. Toronto passed a renoviction bylaw in late 2024, requiring landlords to obtain a municipal licence within seven days of issuing an eviction notice for renovation, obtain relevant building permits first, and demonstrate that vacating the unit is genuinely necessary. Hamilton implemented a similar model earlier. Ottawa is exploring one.
British Columbia has taken a broader approach, committing $500 million to a rental protection fund aimed at preserving affordable units from financialized conversion or displacement. New Westminster’s experience with stronger tenant protections has shown that renoviction applications can be reduced to near-zero when regulatory barriers are significant and consistently enforced.
The federal NDP has called for a national rental protection fund as part of federal housing commitments, though the federal government has not adopted the proposal.
What the coverage misses
By focusing on individual cases and municipal policy responses, media coverage tends to amplify tenant vulnerability as a series of human interest stories rather than probing why the incentive structure that drives renoviction exists and who benefits from it. The study argues that a fuller accounting would examine the role of real estate investment trusts, financialized landlords, and the broader deregulation of rental markets in creating the conditions under which renoviction becomes rational landlord behaviour.
The authors suggest that the discourse shaped by media coverage — the information diet of the policymakers and advocates who respond to public pressure — matters in real terms. Framing renoviction as a regulatory compliance problem produces different policy responses than framing it as a consequence of housing commodification.
The paper calls for expanded media analysis that addresses how media narratives shape and constrain the range of policy interventions that get taken seriously in response to housing crises.
Source: “Renovate to evict: an analysis of media discussions of renoviction,” Julia Woodhall-Melnik, Tobin LeBlanc Haley, Chloe Reiser. Housing Studies, Vol. 41, No. 1 (2026). DOI: 10.1080/02673037.2024.2446716
