Quantifying evictions for renovations

In Ontario, the Residential Tenancies Act governs the relationship between landlords and tenants, including the process for evictions related to renovations or repairs. As a first step in this process, landlords issue tenants an N13 eviction notice, also known as a “Notice to end your Tenancy Because the Landlord Wants to Demolish the Rental Unit, Repair it or Convert it to Another Use.”

N13 eviction notices are used for three reasons:

1. Demolition of a property
2. Renovations or repairs of a property that require vacant access
3. Conversion of a property to a non-residential use

To obtain an order ending the tenancy, the landlord must file the N13 notice with the Landlord and Tenant Board along with an eviction application, and the Board would then schedule a hearing to determine whether the application is valid and whether to issue an eviction order.

Documented evictions for renovations or repairs

Staff have obtained the total number of N13 eviction notices filed at the Landlord and Tenant Board through Access to Information requests to Tribunals Ontario. This data includes all N13 eviction notices filed between January 2010 and June 2025 for addresses within the city of Ottawa. These are represented by the blue line in Figure 1.

As the scope of this review is focused specifically on evictions related to renovations or repairs, staff also obtained the total number of N13 eviction notices that were filed for this reason, as represented by the red line in Figure 1. There has been an annual average of 30 N13 eviction notices filed for renovations or repairs since 2022. Tribunals Ontario advised that their record management system did not track the reason for filing an N13 eviction notice prior to 2022 and therefore this data was not available.

Figure 1. The total number of N13s and N13s related to evictions for renovations or repairs between January 2010 and June 2025 for addresses within the city of Ottawa.

The data also included the reason for why each case was closed. Table 1 lists those reasons and their frequency for each case that involved an eviction for renovations or repairs.

Table 1. File closure reason for N13s related to evictions for renovations or repairs between January 2022 and June 2025 for addresses within the city of Ottawa.

Staff searched each case in the Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLii) database. The Landlord and Tenant Board has made only a small number of their decisions available, and it was not possible to determine an overall trend in how the Board ruled or to determine the outcome of most contested hearings. In addition, the City has no information as to why the other reasons for file closure may have occurred.

Undocumented evictions for renovations or repairs

Based on consultations with landlord, tenant, housing and community legal groups, staff are aware of approximately 50 undocumented evictions for renovations or repairs since 2020. These are instances where the N13 eviction notice is never issued to the tenant in the required form, or is issued and never filed with the Landlord and Tenant Board. It is challenging to quantify and validate these instances because they are not formally documented, and so the full extent of undocumented evictions for renovations remains unknown.