Last Saturday, the group Resistance and Resilience Guelph gathered over 50 people on the fourth floor of 10C to cook up possible directions for a union to represent renters in the city. Over one-third of Guelph residents rent the place they live, and those residents are under incredible pressure with some of them under a very real threat of losing their homes. Is unionizing Guelph’s renters the best way to fight back outside of government action?

The stories in Guelph have become quite familiar. From Brant Avenue to Cedar Street, there have been numerous high-profile renovictions that have made the news, and many, many more that have not. The Guelph-Wellington Legal Clinic has report that there’s been a 245 per cent increase in the use of N13s since 2020, translating into 500 people losing their housing in a combined 280 units, and that’s just this one very specific type of landlord/tenant interaction.

City of Guelph staff are now in the process of working on a renovicton bylaw, over their own objections, and are aiming to get it done by sometime later this year. There’s also still a desire to press on the provincial government to take action, as it would be so much easier for them to make those changes. But in the wake of governments unwilling to act quickly, or just unwilling to act, a Guelph group is trying to build a new movement, and this week, we will check in on their progress.

Janice Folk-Dawson, a long-time labour activist, former federal candidate and now one of the main orgainzers of Guelph’s new, under construction tenant union joins us this week to share those details. She will tell us what a tenant union is, what it will do for renters in the city, and what their immediate priorities are. She will also talk about what came out of Saturday’s meeting, what comes next, and the role of a tenant union in the political system and a coming municipal election.

So let’s talk about building a tenant union on this edition of the Guelph Politicast!

You can find Resistance and Resilience Guelph on Facebook and Instagram, and you can send them an email at rrg [at] gmail.com. Save the date of Saturday May 2 for the next public portion of the tenant union’s development, and you will find those details when they’re released on RRG’s social media feeds. In the meantime, if you need legal advise about your rental situation, you can reach out to the Legal Clinic of Guelph and Wellington County at clinic [at] gw.clcj.ca or by calling 1-800-628-9205.

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Photo courtesy of the York—South Weston Tenant Union.