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About Us

ACORN is a versatile mass-based union of low-to-moderate income tenants that builds the large-scale collective power needed to win. On the neighbouhrood or building level, ACORN does direct action and strategic campaigning against landlords to stop evictions, win repairs, and get the respect tenants deserve.

At the city-wide, provincial, and federal levels, ACORN consolidates the power built in the neighbourhoods and buildings so that we can win legislative campaigns to expand the tenant rights and social programs that our communities are demanding and need.

Housing is a place to live, not a commodity or investment product. Tenants are struggling to find affordable, secure, safe and healthy homes. That is why ACORN is fighting for tenant protections and community controlled housing. This is not an easy fight to win, and ACORN fundamentally believes that it will never be won by any one local group no matter how strong they are. To win, tenants need to be united across communities, across cities, across provinces, and across the world. Tenants want to come together, get organized on a large scale, and demand systemic change. ACORN organizes to make this happen. We are stronger together as tenants!

This platform is for tenants who want to fight back against the corporate greed that is ruining housing in Canada. It offers first step tools and resources to act collectively. Join ACORN to connect with tenants across your community, city, province, and country who are already fighting back. Building large scale community power in your building, and across your city, province and country is the best way to organise for change. This platform helps you do that.

Current Victories

  • Millions of dollars won nationally in repairs!

    Since our inception in 2004, ACORN has been extremely successful in getting hundreds of thousands of tenants in buildings who are struggling with roaches, bedbugs, mould, plumbing issues etc. to do actions. While some tenants have waited for years to get changes in their buildings, direct actions by tenants have resulted in quick and concrete changes. These actions have not only exposed the landlord’s negligence in maintaining their buildings but have helped tenants win millions of dollars in repairs.

  • Emerald St tenants in Hamilton win at the LTB!

    In March 2025, tenants of 103 Emerald St S received news from the Landlord and Tenant Board (LTB) that their eviction was being dismissed!

    The landlord, Endless Property Holdings, issued N13 renoviction notices to all tenants of the 30-unit building in September of last year. Tenants at the building voted to organize with ACORN at their first tenant meeting in October 2024.

    In December, the group successfully petitioned the LTB to combine all of the eviction applications into a single hearing. The 21 remaining households stood before the LTB in solidarity and pleaded their case. Months of preparation and hard work paid off as the adjudicator determined the eviction to be in bad-faith.

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  • ACORN Members in Kitchener Beat Renoviction

    In 2022, landlord — Mike Beer Investments — attempted to push out long-term tenants paying under $1,000/month, claiming they needed to vacate the building for major renovations. But the landlord couldn’t even provide the required permits for sed renovations. Tenants knew the truth: this was a renoviction attempt in disguise, part of a growing trend where landlords evict tenants, slap on some renovations, and jack up the rent for new tenants.

    With support from ACORN tenants pushed back hard. They demanded a group hearing and stayed organized, despite delay after delay. In March 2025, ACORN members at 267 Traynor Ave. won the right to stay in their homes.

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  • BC ACORN secures a historic win to stop Additional Rent Increase in New Westminster

    Tenants at Skyline Towers in New Westminster were happy to see their broken elevators finally being replaced, only to find out that their landlord Bayside Properties intended to have tenants pay for the entire $1,000,000 bill with a rent increase. Under the BC Provincial Housing legislation, landlords can now apply to the BC Residential Tenancies Branch (RTB) for an Additional Rent Increase (ARI) to pay for major repairs needed in the building. With her neighbours, ACORN Canada leader organized an ACORN Tenant Union in the building and started to fight the ARI. The Tenant Union worked tirelessly to prove to the RTB that due to decades of neglect, Bayside Properties should bear the costs to repair the elevator. The RTB ruled that the  landlord pays all the costs for the elevator repairs making Skyline Tower ACORN Tenant Union the first tenants to defeat an ARI dispute at arbitration in BC.

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  • Ottawa ACORN stops Manor Village displacement and wins against renoviction

    Smart Living Properties, a property management company  along with Forum Equities decided to buy Manor Village. It issued N13 eviction notices to tenants for unnecessary renovations with the intention to convert these affordable homes into high-end student housing, tripling the rent in the process. They refused to meet with tenants as a group, neglected maintenance, verbally refused the right to return and offered aggressive buyout offers. Although some took the buyouts, many stood firm. This all came to a head when weeks before Manor Village tenants and Smart Living’s scheduled hearing at the Landlord Tenant Board, Smart Living rescinded their eviction notices to let tenants stay in their homes! 

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  • Ottawa ACORN wins replacement units for 5 years

    In August 2022, Ottawa City Council voted 13-11 in favour of demovicting 142 Nepean tenants for a 30 space parking lot! This happened primarily due to the information provided by the property developers Glenview Homes and Taggart Realty Management on what is affordable housing. Councillors traded in the 6 affordable housing units at 142 Nepean St, the few affordable units in Centretown for 25 “affordable” units being built at 108 Nepean St by Glenview and Taggart. However, those “affordable” rents are defined as below average market rent which is already over $2000+ for a two bedroom in Centretown AND wouldn’t be subject to rent control. While this doesn’t help the affordable housing crisis and the tenants, due to the pressure by Ottawa ACORN, tenants were offered $15,000 and replacement units at the same rent for 5 years.

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  • Hamilton ACORN forces the city to stop funding a developer that displaces tenants

    Malleum, a developer in Hamilton, is known for displacing tenants. Several ACORN members lost their homes due to the developer’s predatory tactics to evict tenants. Elizabeth Ellis, Hamilton ACORN member, spoke to the city about how she felt “bullied” into taking a buyout to leave her apartment at Barton Street East and Sherman Avenue North. Hamilton ACORN took up the fight and because of ACORN’s campaign, Hamilton councilors rejected $152,000 worth of grants to Malleum. In a  5-4 vote, councilors rejected five other applications Malleum submitted after former tenants urged them not to approve the public handout to help the firm cover its renovations. 

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  • Anti-Renoviction Bylaws Across Cities in Ontario

    In January 2024 Hamilton Council voted unanimously in favour of an anti-renoviction bylaw. This was the result of a 5-year long ACORN campaign that started in 2018 when the first Hamilton ACORN member facing renoviction joined the campaign followed by relentless pressure through a series of press conferences, deputations, city hall meetings, rallies and townhalls based on the success of policy from New Westminister, BC.

    Since then, multiple cities in Ontario are following along, with similar bylaws being passed in Toronto and London. Meanwhile ACORN continues to fight in Ottawa and the Waterloo Region to have similar policies implemented by municipal governments.

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  • ACORN Hamilton and allies win expansion of subsidized AC support program for low-income tenants

    Hamilton ACORN pushed for expansion of subsidized AC support program and won. The Committee voted 13-1 in favour of expanding and aligning the eligibility of the existing Ontario Works air conditioner subsidy of $350 toward the purchase of an energy efficient air conditioner, currently available to households receiving social assistance, to include all low-income households who are most vulnerable to heat because of a severe medical condition.

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  • Peel ACORN wins RentSafe in Mississauga

    The city of Mississauga started implementing the Mississauga Apartment Rental Compliance in July 2022. The city is implementing it as a 5-year pilot program. Too many tenants are living with mold, pest, and untreated repairs in the city. It took numerous actions, outreach days and meetings with city councillors by Peel ACORN to secure the MARC program. The program made a significant step forward towards tenants’ right to access to healthy and safe homes through proactive inspections. It will impact 337 buildings with 2 stories or more and 6 units or more, totaling 30,322 units.

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  • Halifax ACORN wins landlord registration

    In early 2023, Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM) voted 13-1 and passed Bylaw R-400 Respecting Registration of Residential Rental Properties. With this new regulatory system, the bylaw department can now proactively inspect and enforce the HRM’s M-200 Respecting Standards for Residential Occupancies bylaw to get repairs done! Next step is to ensure that the HRM establishes the strongest possible framework for proactive building inspections.

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  • Toronto ACORN wins a Permanent Municipal Rent Grant to Prevent Evictions

    In May 2021, the city introduced a pilot rent bank program and suspended any loan repayment requirements for existing Rent Bank clients during the period of the pilot program, which ran until March 31, 2022. ACORN members continued to pressure the city to make the rent grant permanent and in 2022, these changes to the rent bank were made permanent. Additionally, the city made provisions for forgiveness of loans issued prior to the pandemic, in case the repayment results in undue financial hardship. The program represents an additional funding of $5 million for Toronto Rent Bank, which was approved in the City’s 2022 budget.

    Through the pilot program, a total of 1,744 households were able to avoid eviction by receiving a grant during the pilot period. This was an increase of 52% over 2020 – or an additional 594 households.

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  • BC ACORN’s stop demovictions campaign wins a strong tenant assistance policy in Burnaby

    In 2019, Burnaby ACORN’s hard work on the Stop Demovictions campaign resulted in Burnaby’s Tenant Assistance Policy, which is now the best municipal housing policy in Canada. If developers want to demolish our members’ homes to make way for development, they must provide tenants with a unit at the same rent in the new building, as well as pay a rental top-up to cover any added rent the tenant will pay during the construction of the new development.

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  • New Brunswick Gets Rent Control!

    New Brunswick will be putting in a 3% Rent Cap starting February 1st, 2025. New Brunswickers are celebrating this achievement, after months of campaigning and ACORN members meeting with Liberals on the campaign trail to talk about putting a rent cap in. As the province of New Brunswick advances its progressive plan to protect tenants by capping rents, it is crucial that complementary legislation and regulations are enacted to avoid the common pitfalls associated with rent control on occupied units. Clear financial incentives exist for landlords to use bad-faith eviction methods—such as renovictions, landlord-use evictions, and cash-for-keys agreements—to flip units and increase rents beyond the rent control guidelines. NB ACORN continues to fight for stronger protection to keep tenants in affordable homes.

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  • Nova Scotia ACORN secures a temporary rent cap

    Nova Scotia ACORN, after persistent campaigning and organizing, secured a huge victory in 2020 when the province announced a temporary 2% cap on rent increases in through February 2022 or the end of the state of emergency, as well as a temporary ban on renovictions. NS ACORN members continued their fight for a permanent and real rent control. The province hasn’t introduced a permanent rent cap but members won amendments to the Interim Residential Rental Increase Cap Act which extended a temporary rental increase cap of 5% to December 31, 2025.

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  • BC's Renoviction Ban

    For years BC ACORN was fighting the rise of no-fault renovictions in BC. Landlords were using the guise of renovations to terminate tenancies in order to get around the rent cap in the province (if a unit is vacant, there are no controls on increases). The campaign work moved the NDP government in BC to enact an effective renoviction ban in the process, not a small consolation. If a landlord wants to evict a tenant to renovate, new legislation in BC requires the landlord to prove the renovations are needed to uphold the structural integrity of the building and that the tenant is required to vacate the building. Due to all the renovations being done in bad-faith, there are close to zero applications being approved by the RTB in BC for eviction due to renovation.

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  • NSF Fee lowered to $10 by Federal Government

    After years of relentless organizing, the federal government has officially announced the implementation of capped Non-Sufficient Funds (NSF) fees at $10. This is a major win for low- and moderate-income Canadians who have long been gouged by fees as high as $48 for a single declined transaction. Over the next decade, this cap is expected to save Canadians over $4.1 billion in unnecessary fees.

    This new policy will:
    ✔ Cap NSF fees at $10, ensuring that banks can no longer charge exorbitant penalties when someone’s account is short on funds.
    ✔ Stop banks from stacking NSF fees, prohibiting multiple charges within a two-business-day period.
    ✔ Protect against small overdrafts, ensuring that banks cannot charge NSF fees if an account is only short by less than $10.

    The policy won’t take effect until March 12, 2026. ACORN is pushing to fast-track implementation.

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  • Lowering the criminal interest rate for installment loans

    Failure of banks and governments is forcing hundreds of thousands of people to borrow from predatory lenders such as Money Mart, Easy Financial and others that charge predatory interest rates. ACORN’s research in 2021 found a 300% increase in the uptake of installment loans – higher amounts of loans that carry an annual interest rate of 60% plus insurance, and fees. Members have been doing direct actions and sharing their experiences with predatory lenders which have got wide media coverage. After years of campaigning, ACORN won a commitment from the federal government to lower the interest rate of installment loans from 47% APR to 35% APR in January 2025.

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  • ACORN wins changes for tenant centric retrofit financing

    ACORN has been tirelessly organizing against the rent hikes happening in buildings owned by Avenue Living, Western Canada’s fastest growing Real Estate Investment Trust. Avenue Living got millions of dollars in low-cost financing from Canada Infrastructure Bank (CIB) to undertake retrofits. After persistent organizing, ACORN won a meeting with CIB.

    At the meeting, the CIB officials told ACORN leaders that as a result of ACORN’s work, moving forward they are now putting affordability and anti – eviction covenants on new funding agreements.

     

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  • Affordable, high speed internet for low-income people

    In 2016, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) declared that broadband internet access was a basic service. ACORN members played a key role in this ruling. Members delivered 400 testimonials to the hearing, detailing how vital home internet access is, yet how unaffordable internet services are.

    ACORN kept pushing and finally won the federal government Connecting Families program in 2018 to provide $10 a month internet to some families that receive maximum Canada Child Benefit. As the pandemic hit and so many low-income people and seniors were left without the internet, ACORN members ramped up our organizing and in 2022 won improvements to the Federal Connecting Families program. The Connecting Families 2.0 covers low- income seniors and will offer higher speeds of 50/10 mbps with 200GB of data usage for $20/month.

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