Why Commercial Rent Reform?
Canada is losing its entrepreneur class.
A generation of small business owners built the main streets, the local jobs, and the community wealth that hold our neighbourhoods together. Now they're being squeezed out — by a year of tariff disruption, rising fixed costs, and a commercial rent system with no rules, no limits, and no recourse.
It's time to invest in the businesses that actually employ our neighbours, anchor our communities, and keep local economies alive. Commercial rent reform is how we start.
Businesses Have No Protection
Canada's commercial tenants operate in a system with almost no rules. Unlike residential renters, business owners face:
- No limits on rent increases — landlords can raise rent by any amount at renewal. We regularly hear about 50%, 100%, even 300% increases.
- No standard leases — every landlord has a unique document. First-time business owners have no baseline to know what's fair and what's predatory.
- No affordable dispute resolution — the only way to resolve a landlord dispute is to sue. That's not an option for most small businesses.
- No right to offset — even when your landlord owes you money, you still have to pay full rent or face eviction within 15 days.
Your local coffee shop owner is often negotiating with a billion-dollar landholding company. They need leverage too.
Practical Reforms at Every Level of Government
Commercial rent reform isn't one policy — it's a set of practical changes at three levels of government that work together to stabilize small businesses and strengthen main streets.
Municipalities set the ground rules for how main streets function
Cities and towns can:
- Require right-sized retail in new developments — micro commercial units designed for small businesses, not chain tenants. Toronto's Mirvish Village is a working model.
- Fund more building inspectors to enforce landlord-responsible repairs, so tenants aren't stuck paying for obligations their landlord is ignoring.
- Use Development Potential Relief Programs to provide property tax relief in commercial districts being hit by rezoning or gentrification — as Vancouver and Victoria have already piloted.
Provincial governments control commercial tenancy law
We're asking provinces to:
- Create a Commercial Renter Bill of Rights — standardized leases, rent increase caps, affordable dispute resolution, and the right to offset rent when landlords owe tenants money.
- Modernize Commercial Tenancies Acts to reflect current market realities — not the assumptions of decades past.
- Reform Triple Net Leases to prevent landlords from passing unlimited, undefined costs to small tenants.
- Implement commercial vacancy taxes to discourage landlords from leaving storefronts empty while waiting for higher-paying tenants — already endorsed by the Union of BC Municipalities.
The federal government shapes the financing and support landscape
We're asking Ottawa to:
- Modernize the Canada Small Business Financing Program — Canada's primary small business lending tool hasn't kept pace with property values or succession needs. A coalition of business organizations, banks, and senators is pushing for reforms that give owners a real path to purchasing their commercial spaces.
- Create a micro-business designation — businesses with 0–9 employees and under $2M in revenue — so governments can better measure and target funding and support programs to the 77% of businesses that make up Canada's main streets.
Good Jobs Are Hard to Create When the Rent Is This Volatile
Small businesses are the engine of local employment. They hire locally, train workers, invest in their communities, and keep main streets alive. But none of that is possible when a business can't predict one of their largest costs from one lease to the next.
BWA's Fixed Cost Crunch analysis found that for a typical Toronto micro-business, rent increases cost more per year than wage increases. The difference: wages deliver returns through better retention, productivity, and customer service. Rent increases just extract.
When rent goes up, that money leaves the community. It flows to landholding companies and investors who may have no stake in the neighbourhood. Unlike wages — which recirculate locally through spending, transit, and local services — rent increases extract wealth from the communities that generate it.
When Canadian businesses create good jobs, those investments in wages, paid sick days, and benefits recirculate back into neighbouring businesses. Those investments build the local spending power that keeps main streets alive. But when unpredictable rent increases wipe out a year's margins overnight, businesses can't make those investments — and the whole community loses.
Get Involved
Whether you're a business owner navigating a lease, a policymaker exploring reform, or a property owner building better tenant relationships — we have resources for you.
Support the Commercial Renter Bill of Rights
Four practical reforms that empower businesses while maintaining a functional commercial real estate market.
Learn About the Bill of Rights →