The following is a written interview conducted with the East Scarborough Tenants Union (ESTU), a people’s organization fighting for working-class tenants in Scarborough Ontario. It outlines the perspective of ESTU, sums-up a few of their experiences so far, and provides valuable insight into the lessons they have learned through their experience organizing for working-class tenant power.

We hope that this interview can help inspire tenant organizing in Ottawa, and that those who read it will follow and support ESTU. Tenants are facing many similar challenges across Canada, and we will be stronger if acting in solidarity with one another.

You can follow ESTU on instagram at:@estu.to

1. Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your organization? How did your organization get started? How did you become motivated to start organizing in the first place?

We’re the East Scarborough Tenants Union (ESTU), an organization of tenants and tenant organisers in – you guessed it – the eastern part of Scarborough, Ontario. Our organization consists of a loose communication network of hundreds of tenants across the buildings we’re active in, and we maintain a more active organisational life, with regular meetings, political education and organizational training for tenants who are interested in being more active in changing their circumstances, in developing working-class tenant power.

Our organization got started at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic after lockdowns led to mass unemployment, where so many people were unable to pay their rent at the beginning of April 2020. We widely surveyed people throughout our community at the time and found that about 50% of working people were out of work and couldn’t make rent that first month of the pandemic. Not surprisingly, the big landlords in our community were entirely unwilling to concede any rent relief or a delay in rent payments – despite the exceptional circumstances. Some landlords callously sent “N4” eviction to tenants just days into April 2020. So we joined the “Keep Your Rent” movement in Toronto and put up a fight. Those rent strike attempts didn’t reach critical mass in those conditions (emergency benefits kicked in the next month), but our efforts weren’t for nothing. We identified many tenants in dire circumstances and facing eviction, and we also started confronting landlords around other issues, like lack of maintenance and repairs. We’re proud to say that our collective actions have stopped a number of evictions and even forced some landlords to get moving on repairs – small accomplishments, but accomplishments that had never been done before in our neighbourhood. The bigger accomplishment, however, has been in building and sustaining a people’s organization like our own. So, that’s ESTU’s origin story (which, at that time, was still known as Markham and Eglinton Unite, or “MnE Unite”), and we haven’t stopped since.

As for our personal motivations, we’re responding to this interview as a collective, but one of our members had this to say:

“I realised that our neighbours were very isolated during the pandemic, and had no means to ask for help. We thought that we were alone, but after we started talking to our neighbours and starting to organise, it was clear that if we united we could get things done.”

2. Why do you believe tenants need to get organized? Why isn’t the current system able to provide tenants with a fair deal on its own?

The current system is proving to us that landlords, like other big capitalists, screw over and profit off of working-class people in ways that are both perfectly legal and also often completely outside of municipal regulations and standards and provincial law–and the system has been set up to ensure the existing legal structures serves the ownership class and turns its attention away from all manner of abuses against the working class. Where does that leave us? Certainly not relying on this system to come to the rescue of the working-class majority. This is why tenants, the majority (but not all) of whom are working-class people, need to get organised and assert our class interests. The current capitalist system is not and cannot do that. Rather than be idle and accept this as some kind of eternal fate, we choose to struggle, to build unions that are willing and able to fight against these conditions and for a better future for the majority. We can either write our own future, or that future can be written for us by a tiny class of people whose only concern is boosting their own profits and accumulating more private property.

3. In a system where landlords and investors hold the power and resources, how can tenants win victories? What strategies allow tenants to succeed?

It’s crucial to be well-informed about our rights as tenants. Not that those rights are automatically enforced like some law of nature. But knowing what you’re entitled to can empower you when you’re dealing with landlords who take advantage of people not knowing their rights.

Most important for us is that tenants have a right to organise with their fellow tenants. Collective action carries a lot more weight than individual effort and can provide a stronger negotiating position when in a struggle with a landlord. Also, the sense of community that comes from working together can also serve us when new problems arise, as it makes it easier for tenants to regroup and find solutions faster. If necessary, seeking legal advice from organisations or services that support tenants can be very helpful (though we should beware of misdirection coming from legal experts who oppose people’s struggles). Sharing experiences on social media or other community forums to raise awareness and potentially put pressure on landlords is another tactic that can be used.

4. What kinds of strategies and tactics do landlords use against tenants when we get organised?

Let’s give an example from one particular struggle that’s just wrapping up as a win for one of our tenant unions. In 2022, the 25 Cougar Court Tenants Union assembled and began alerting tenants about a pending 10% in above-guideline rent increases (AGIs). Tenants amassed in the building lobby meetings and started building a tenants’ union to fight this increase. Our steadfastness took the landlord by surprise because this was the first time that 25 Cougar Court had assembled in such numbers after many years of people dealing with the crap of successive landlords. When the landlord became aware of our assemblies, they immediately retaliated against tenants in an attempt to discourage people from organizing and in the hopes that the union would fall apart. Some members were targeted directly with anonymous calls that ranged from harassment to aggressive threats. These calls profiled people very specifically, which suggests the work of management and the use of its surveillance footage to carry out its operations. In one case, a tenant was told that her daughter was going to be targetted for sexual assault. In another case a tenant received a fake desperate appeal from a woman claiming to be facing some physical threat from her husband across the street from the building, which the tenant correctly read as an attempt to draw her into the lobby or outside the building. Another tenant got a call from two men claiming to be part of a white supremacist organisation who, again, tried to lure the member outside of the building. Most of these calls happened in the span of a few days, which is what reveals their coordinated nature. But some people continued receiving calls for weeks or much longer. None of these threats actually materialised and the whole thing just proved to be a pathetic and disgusting intimidation tactic. Some tenants called the police–but, not surprisingly, to no avail. Even the superintendent was involved in harassing tenants; however, due to our successful efforts and campaigning, months later, he was one of the first heads to roll.

Here’s another landlord tactic that we could tell you about from that same struggle. After we started building the union in 25 Cougar Court, the building was immediately “sold” by Starlight to one of its subsidiaries. That building is managed by MetCap, but to this day, tenants were never formally notified of who the actual owner of the building is. We did our own investigation to confirm that it indeed remains under the control of Starlight. Anyways, through this “sale”, maintenance work requests that had been submitted by tenants going back years through the company’s online portal suddenly “disappeared.” These unfulfilled maintenance requests were wiped from the system through that “sale,” a sale that came maybe a few weeks after our tenant union activity really started to pick up, thus allowing the “new” landlord to have no record of past maintenance requests, placing the burden onto tenants to present their own receipts of past landlord neglect.

After all these intimidation tactics, the upper management of MetCap finally agreed to meet with tenants and they have since negotiated down a significant reduction in the AGIs that were planned (the details of which are being ironed out as of February 2024).

Other tenant organising efforts of ours across the buildings in the neighbourhood and the broader area have also had the police called on them a number of times, especially if ESTU tenants showed up at management offices with more than a few people.

Another tactic the landlord uses that is worth mentioning is bribery and favouritism, where the landlord or management will target certain tenants with the promise of repairs or appliance/fixture upgrades, but only if they stop organising or collaborate with the landlord in helping disrupt and take down the tenant union. We’ve seen this tactic deployed in multiple buildings that we’ve organised, and we’ve definitely had to exclude some people from our organising who were playing this kind of role.

5. Are there any personal successes in your organizing efforts that you would like to highlight?

We’ve seen a number of modest successes in our organising, including property managers expediting repairs and maintenance requests due to tenant activism, negotiating down AGI rent increases, and halting or averting evictions. We say modest successes because we’re not going to pretend like we’ve significantly changed things in our buildings or in our city: they’re still largely owned and run by the same financial entities whose only motive is profit maximisation. The biggest success of our work, as mentioned above, has been building and sustaining a people’s organization that exists and can fight for the people when it’s needed, and maybe even be able to fight for something even bigger than that in the future.

6. Any shortcomings or “lessons learned” in your organizing efforts that you would like to highlight?

First of all, you don’t have to win over every single person in a building to be successful in a campaign. In fact, you definitely cannot win everyone. You don’t necessarily even need a majority to advance a campaign (though of course, the greater your numbers, the better). What you need is a critical mass that becomes too hard for the landlord or management to break apart or deal with.

Over the course of organizing a building, we invariably come across a wide range of people: those who are activists and enthusiasts, the more passive but still supportive, the more neutral, the indifferent and even the oppositional. Being able to discern how people fit into these categories is a really important part of being able to organise people. Of course, people can shift across these categories, and we may even misread some people from time to time. But it’s our job to try to move them from a more passive, disorganised and not-fully-conscious state to one of consciousness, activity and being organised. The method we employ in organising people is to, as we door knock and flyer and mobilise people through events, bring together the most advanced and committed, first and foremost, and then to get back out there and organise and mobilise the rest of the supportive, neutral and more passive elements to the greatest extent possible. As for the oppositional elements, not always but often these people have some kind of special relationship to the landlord or management. Or, they may just be really backward and/or anti-social, perhaps because they hold some racist views or think that they’re better than everyone else. People like this we just work around and try not to deal with, while still being as neighbourly and friendly as we can, if there’s room for that. Anyone who has openly collaborated with the landlord against the people, however, we basically have to see as being in the enemy’s camp.

Another lesson is that you have to focus on building up and training the leading tenants in a building early on. A past shortcoming of ours has been to not put in enough effort to build up our most promising contacts, by not engaging them sufficiently in political conversation, discussions and/or meetings that are more than just about the nuts-and-bolts of a campaign. People definitely need the political education and training to up-end the default resignation or playing-by-the-rules orientation that our society imposes on us. People need to be trained into being effective organisers, which follows from that. It’s important to engage people and build up their skills to play a more leading role to the greatest extent that they are willing and able.

Also, you can’t be afraid of struggling with people to win them over. This requires building relationships with people and having some rapport so as to better understand their concerns and perspectives. When tenants express feelings of hopelessness or passivity or doubt, we use the concrete evidence and experience that we have to challenge those ideas. It’s easy to be cynical when you just look at the world as it is, as opposed to what it can be or has been when the masses rise up and exercise their power. Struggling with people is ultimately how we separate the more resolutely indifferent from those who can be won over and moved from passivity to greater activity through greater consciousness.

Also, you need to identify tactics that can engage as much as your base as possible – not just those who are already organised. You need to think creatively based on the demographics of your campaign. For example, low-risk, low-stakes campaigns like a phone zap can help engage tenants who work long hours or mothers with kids who have difficulty participating in person. More expressions of participation give us more opportunities to identify people who want to do something. Petitions are also useful for registering people’s support and gaining contacts broadly, but we should be prepared to bounce right back with the next point of escalation if, or when, that petition proves to be wholly incapable of shifting the position of an adversary. We should also be ready to admit to the person who rejects petitions as useless as a correct viewpoint in general terms, but a useful tactic to get to know neighbours and to quantify people’s sentiments.

Also, you must engage with in-person actions at management offices or even at corporate headquarters in order to get results. This is what we mean by not playing by the rules that have been set up as traps for us. Showing up at a landlord’s house helps expose tenants to the contradiction with that landlord. Going collectively as a group and seeing how the landlord reacts to your concerns and demands will be an emboldening experience that will motivate tenants and show them that collective action works.

Also, we’d say it’s important to just overall “know your enemy” well. Know what their fears and weaknesses are. Some landlords we’ve faced in the past have been very wary of their public image being smeared, which in those cases made social media campaigns quite effective. Not-so-public landlords, on the other hand, like slumlords run by some real estate mogul family (we have a couple of these types of landlords in our neighbourhood) who have no major public profile in corporate terms, may be far less susceptible to these kinds of public exposure campaigns. In which case, showing up at that landlord’s personal home or offices in protest can be a more effective means. Whatever the case, try to know your enemy.

7. Often, the first response people have when facing a housing issue is to try to get in touch with a lawyer or an elected politician. Is this useful? How do you approach this kind of work?

Sometimes people think that because they voted for a given politician that that person will understand them and has some kind of duty to them. Sometimes people think that the speeches and promises that politicians made during elections means that they’re beholden to that. And sometimes the people we’re organizing advocate just working through elected officials. We have to be patient in struggling with people around these ideas. In our experience, these politicians only ever channel people back into the Landlord and Tenant Board processes or some other “official” or sanctioned channels, like calling the city at 3-1-1. Sometimes these politicians have even reached out to our union. But we know that these gestures have had a lot more to do with profiling our membership and trying to gather information on us (such as whether we may be a challenge to their future campaigns for office), because when we’ve responding by asking these local politicians if they would assist us in bringing landlords to the negotiating table in the midst of our fights, our requests have been ignored or deflected.

As far as lawyers are concerned, there are definitely community lawyers out there who try to work for the best interests of the people, and who may work in a way that’s sympathetic to tenants waging a struggle outside the LTB parameters. But in our experience, this is a very, very small fraction of lawyers and, honestly, we need to find a lot more of these kinds of lawyers, because the vast majority of lawyers are not willing to be associated with tenants unions that refuse to play by the rules of a system that has been carefully constructed against them. In other words, most lawyers are entirely system-loyal. That’s not to say that we’re breaking the law or anything like that – indeed, we have a political right to assemble and organise. But our adversaries don’t want us to exercise that right, and many lawyers aren’t even willing to acknowledge that collective action gets results better and faster results. Why are so many lawyers unwilling to recognize this? Because it proves that they’re ultimately not decisive and at best secondary in the overall struggle. Most lawyers are not willing to abide by tenants utilising other political means at our disposal in order to win their campaigns. With all that said, the assistance of someone with some legal knowledge or expertise is certainly helpful, even necessary, when taking on tenant struggles. But that doesn’t have to come from a lawyer or a paralegal. As the tenant movement in the Greater Toronto Area has grown in recent years, we’ve seen the emergence of a lot of more lay people who know their rights and know how to fight with the requisite legal knowledge at hand.

8. What would your response be to those who say that the solution to the housing crisis is just to “build more homes”?

Any response or action that does not remedy the cause of the housing crisis will only amplify the problem, and may even create more trouble. Simply building more homes or houses is not the answer, because these units are being built by profit-makers in a hyper-inflated housing market that’s absolutely dominated by large developers and capitalist financial entities. Certainly, more housing construction is necessary, but to whose benefit if the majority of the population can’t afford those homes? If people can’t afford to buy those homes, they’re just going to be bought up by investors looking to profit, not people in need of more homes.

The housing crisis won’t go away if the root cause of the crisis isn’t addressed. For decades, federal and provincial governments have been amending legislation in the interest of big landlords, giving rise to the accumulation and concentration of housing in the hands of real estate investment trusts (REITS). Getting at the root of the problem means confronting who controls housing in this country: it’s not the people, but the economic elite. Any policies that fail to address this inequality head-on will be a band-aid solution at best–or, more likely, is just a cynical lie to get you to vote for this or that electoral party. Or worse, we’ll continue to see people getting scapegoated for the housing crisis, like how international students, who are so overworked and exploited in this country, are now being blamed for the housing crisis. A couple years ago, the big bad bogeyman was “Chinese foreign investors,” which was another convenient scapegoat that served the elite, given their own global power struggles with capitalist China. But guess what? The people who control our housing are not foreign investors or immigrant working-class people: it’s the economic elite of this country. They have names and addresses that are not so hard to look up.

9. More and more, we have been hearing this argument that the housing crisis is caused by immigration. How do you deal with this myth when it comes up?

The majority of immigrants coming to Canada are coming into the working class, they are struggling to find housing, and they are being ripped off by insanely inflated rents and miserable housing conditions. In our buildings the vast majority of people are immigrants for whom homeownership is a distant and fading reality. These people aren’t the ones buying up all the housing stock. To the extent that any foreign money is buying up real estate in Canada, well, if you look at Canada’s relationship with the countries those people are coming from, we’re sure that you will find an imperialistic relationship whereby big Canadian money is buying up a lot of that country’s wealth. So, it’s a question of which class is buying up and accumulating this asset that should be a right to every single human being.

There is ample housing in this country, and lots of other infrastructure suitable for residential housing. The problem is that the capitalist system commodifies housing, has made it into an asset for investors, and thus it has become unaffordable to most people. The accumulation of wealth on the one, small side of society has led to the accumulation of misery for the majority on the other side.

So we fight this myth about immigrants being the cause of the housing crisis with facts – facts concerning how all the ruling political parties in this country over the last three decades have played a role in bringing us to the situation we’re in today. All levels of government have divested from building public housing or social housing, rent caps have been removed by provincial governments, legislation has been written to pave the way for the rise and domination of REITs. Now, all levels of government look to their crony developer friends and investors to “solve” the problem when in fact the construction of more housing in this system is just creating more assets for the ultra-rich to get even richer off the backs of the rest of us, making their solutions precisely that – their solutions.

Finally, housing crises are common throughout the whole history of capitalism. It’s nothing new. We’ve just been made to forget the these crises have existed before, and the working-class has been getting screwed and extorted on this front for many generations.

10. Whenever there is talk of any pro-tenant legislation, we see stories in the media about ‘mom and pop’ landlords (supposedly smaller, friendlier landlords who are not exploiters but simply trying to get by). Does this reflect the reality facing most tenants you talk to?

As far as we’re concerned, the only ”mom and pop” landlord is, literally, the homeowner or mortgage holder who has to rent out rooms or space in their homes to afford their mortgages and interest-rate hikes or to supplement their retirement income. But often the media smuggles into this category those real estate dynasty families who may own thousands of rental units with an ownership structure that is entirely under the control of a single family. Obviously there’s a big difference between the retired couple living above their tenants and a big real estate dynasty slumlord. We have two examples of this sort of landlord in our community, and you can see how we’ve exposed some of them by looking at our social media on Instagram @estu.to. As for the disposition of these kinds of landlords, so far as generalisations can be useful, they tend to behave in one of two opposing ways. First, because these real estate dynasties may not be dictated by the market force of profit maximisation as the big REITs and corporations are (who have to account to their shareholders on a regular basis), these kinds of landlords can be a bit less aggressive in their rent-boosting tactics, or a bit less methodical in how they evict people. On the other other hand, these slumlords can also be the very worst, lacking any real concern for their public reputation, perhaps running their properties like the wild west. In our neighbourhood, an example of this kind of slumlord family is the Premji family, a notorious slumlord in our neighbourhood that consists of a series of brothers and a father (and maybe some of his relatives as well) who own the properties at 15 Cougar Court, 3400 Eglinton Ave East, 555 Brimorton, 960 Markham Rd., and a number of other high-rise buildings across Toronto and Dallas, Texas. This landlord is definitely one of the worst that our union has ever come across.

11. Is there anything else which you believe is important to touch on when focusing on these topics which we have not already covered in these questions?

By way of conclusion, it’s worth noting that tenant struggles are somewhat of a reemerging thing in this country. As we’ve acknowledged, housing crises are nothing new under capitalism, and of course people have been fighting on this terrain throughout the whole history of capitalism in many parts of the world. But today, this form of people’s struggle is just emerging once again. In a few short years, we’ve seen how our organising is reshaping and interacting with a very quickly shifting landscape. For example, one of our allied tenant unions in Toronto was fighting a large wave of eviction cases during the pandemic in the completely new and dystopian terrain of Zoom hearings at the LTB. They began recording these hearings and using those recordings to expose how grotesque these proceedings were, and very quickly that tactic was criminalised and made punishable by fine of tens of thousands of dollars. All this to say that this is a relatively new front of people’s struggle and we’re all still learning and trying to keep up. But from everything we’ve done to date, we know that we must keep fighting and we have a very long way to go. One day soon, we hope to have tighter connections and clearer political unities with tenant organising efforts as far away as yours in Ottawa and beyond. Step by step, we’ll get there.