The Ontario government is seeking input on a package of tweaks to the Residential Tenancies Act (RTA) to establish various timelines and conditions for allowing or disallowing evictions. Authority for these new rules has already been established through earlier adopted legislation, but they won’t go into effect until enabling regulations are finalized. The public can comment on the proposed regulations until May 1, 2026.

Nearly three years have elapsed since the provincial government revised the RTA to impose a maximum period in which owners or their family members must occupy a dwelling that a tenant has been forced to vacate to make way for the landlord’s use. However, that period has not yet been defined in a regulation. It’s now proposed that permissible occupants take residency within 60 days of the tenant’s departure or the notice of eviction, whichever is later.

If that condition is not met, the tenant could apply to the Landlord and Tenant Board (LTB) and it would be presumed the landlord had acted in bad faith. It’s also proposed that the LTB would retain flexibility to make exceptions, depending on the circumstances.

RTA amendments adopted in November 2025 require tenants to pay landlords at least 50 per cent of the funds in question before they have leeway to challenge an eviction order or an order to collect arrears based on arguments about maintenance deficiencies and/or illegal rent charges. The proposed regulation specifies that the payment to landlords must occur at least seven days before an LTB hearing can consider the matter.

Another regulation would define what qualifies as “persistent late payment” for the purposes of triggering eviction orders to tenants of either private rental accommodations or a non-profit housing cooperative. It’s proposed that the LTB should interpret “persistent” as at least three late rent payments within a six-month period.

Two other proposed regulations address the LTB’s abilites to:

• set aside eviction orders that flow from an initial landlord-tenant consensus about the tenant’s departure; and
• postpone the enforcement of an eviction.

The RTA currently negates the requirement for an eviction hearing, known as an ex parte eviction order, in cases where tenants give notice that they wish to end their tenancies or the landlord-tenant have agreed to the departure, but the Act also allows tenants to subsequently appeal to the LTB for cancellation of the eviction order. The proposed regulation specifies that the LTB cannot consider “a change in the tenant’s circumstances” as grounds for doing so, and can only set aside an eviction order if it “would not be unfair” in regard to all the circumstances of the case.

Similarly, it’s proposed that the LTB must consider fairness to the landlord and/or other tenants when determining whether an eviction can be postponed. That would apply for both no-fault evictions related to the landlord’s renovation, demolition or own use plans, and at-fault evictions for non-payment or persistent late rent payment or other criminal, destructive or aggressively hostile behaviour.

However, the LTB could still postpone an at-fault eviction if it found “compelling grounds” after weighing all the circumstances. As well, evictions could be postponed with the landlord’s consent.