A provincial watchdog is warning that the glacial pace of Ontario’s overwhelmed landlord-tenant dispute system is denying justice to thousands of people — causing many to take desperate measures.

“Then you get self-help,” Kathy Laird, a Tribunal Watch Ontario committee member, told the Star. “Tenants who can’t get repairs done on their building might stop paying rent. Landlords who can’t get their tenants out might start taking other steps to get a tenant out illegally. Those things happen more than they used to.”

As rent prices climb and landlord/tenant disputes grow increasingly hostile, a largely provincial domain issue has spilled into the federal election campaign.

The NDP said this week they would implement national rent control if elected.

The party said it would also introduce a Renter’s Bill of Rights, and tie federal housing funding to rent control, tenant protections, and acting against “exploitive” landlords.

Canadians are eagerly waiting to see whether the Bank of Canada (BoC) will cut its lending rate again at its upcoming April 16 announcement.

In March, Canada’s central bank cut its lending rate by 25 basis points, bringing the rate down to 2.75%. The cut was the BoC’s second rate reduction this year, as it also cut its lending rate by 25 basis points in January.

So, will there be a third consecutive cut in 2025? According to TD Director of Economics James Orlando, the BoC could go either way and announce a rate cut or a rate hold.

Lee said that, after weeks of President Donald Trump threatening to impose tariffs on Canadian exports, consumer confidence is already taking a hit.

He said fears about job insecurity tied to tariffs are likely filtering into the housing market, chilling investment demand and limiting hopes for a rebound this spring.

“We still have a bit of a slow market despite the fact that interest rates are coming down and we would expect that’ll continue to worsen as the trade war continues, if it does,” Lee said.

Canada has responded to Trump’s trade salvos with retaliatory tariffs targeting $30 billion worth of U.S. goods, with billions more in counter-tariffs set to follow in three weeks.

Two of Canada’s largest banks say interest rates could fall faster and ultimately end up lower than previously predicted, as the consequences of a trade war with the U.S. are set to ripple through the Canadian economy.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s executive order imposing a 25 per cent tariff on most Canadian imports, with a carveout for energy products that will be taxed at 10 per cent, came into effect as of 12:01 EST Tuesday.

It triggered chaos in global financial markets and caused Bank of Montreal to revise its economic and interest rate forecast, saying it expects at least twice as many interest rate cuts from the Bank of Canada this year compared to previous estimates.

“We now look for the quarter-point pace to continue in each of the next four meetings until July, taking the rate to two per cent,” wrote Douglas Porter, the bank’s chief economist and managing director of economics, in a BMO Economics note published Tuesday.

“The net risk is that we eventually go even lower, if the (Bank of Canada) is comfortable with the prevailing inflation backdrop later this year.”

The grand expansion of Hamilton’s John C. Munro airport is underway, with operators TradePort International announcing plans this month for upgrades and enhancements of the terminal facilities, as well as introducing daily flight from new partner, Porter Airlines.

The City of Hamilton and TradePort International signed off on a $400 million, 49-year agreement in September to develop and expand the airport over the next 50 years, a deal that has already started to pay dividends.

Upgrades happening include a terminal interior spruce up from check-in to baggage claim and enhancements to the exterior frontage.

Future improvements will better connect the terminal to the planes with new passenger bridges, as well as other infrastructure enhancements.

TORONTO — Some developers say looming U.S. tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum could be detrimental to the housing sector due to higher costs of key construction materials.

The Ontario Home Builders’ Association, which represents more than 4,000 companies offering services such as development and renovation, said the tariffs could prompt an economic slowdown and lead to decreased investment in residential real estate.

The group’s CEO Scott Andison warned that could be “a brutal blow to the housing sector and therefore to housing affordability.”

“When you throw something as dramatic as trade tariffs into an environment that’s already suffering from low margins, high interest rates and high input costs, the potential for costs … going up makes builders quite nervous,” he said in an interview

“This is just something that puts the development market into a bit of chaos.”

U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Monday to levy 25 per cent tariffs on steel and aluminum imports to his country beginning March 12 — a move that Canadian Chamber of Commerce chief executive Candace Laing called “wrong on so many levels.”

Uncertainty around tariffs and a potential trade war with the United States were the likely culprits behind home sales falling off during the last week of January, according to the Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA). That weakness pushed national sales down 3.3 per cent compared to December, CREA said in its latest housing report.

At the same time, newly listed properties jumped 11 per cent month-over-month in January — uncommon for the typically slow winter season — reflecting “the largest seasonally adjusted monthly increase in new supply on record going back to the late 1980s,” the report said, aside from swings during the COVID-19 pandemic.