A Halifax tenant is hoping that the provincial government will consider some form of rent control after her rent was increased by 20 per cent during the COVID-19 pandemic, a crisis that has reduced monthly income nationwide.

Carol Edwards had been living in her unit in northern Halifax for about four years. When she received the notice of a $200 rent increase in April, she started looking for somewhere else to call home almost immediately.

“It’s a huge increase and I just thought it was a little unfair,” Edwards said, calling it an unnecessary and unwarranted bump. If she had stayed, the price of her rent would  exhaust about 50 per cent of her monthly income.

In late November, her unit was bought by S.W.M Investments Ltd., which purchased all eight other units in a group of properties along Dutch Village Road. On April 24, they notified Edwards of the rent increase, effective Sept. 1.

“Halifax has hardly anything available and the rents just keep going up, and up, and up, just because they can,” Edwards said.

In Nova Scotia, S.W.M can legally  increase the rent on residential units by as much as they want, provided they only increase it on the anniversary date of the lease and give tenants a four months’ notice in writing.

Jenn Markey, the S.W.M property manager, said that the units were being rented significantly below market value when the company purchased them. Rent for current tenants will be increased from $795 per month to $995, a price which includes heat, hot water.

“You don’t want to be completely unreasonable with the tenant, but you do kind of want to get them up to somewhat of the market value; but $200 would be, I guess, just a friendly increase,” said Markey. “You don’t want to give the increase [of] let’s say three or four hundred dollars. That’s a lot to ask of somebody.”

Markey said the increase hasn’t affected renter interest, noting she’s received about 600 emails from prospective tenants for vacant units. They’ll pay about $1,150 per month for the units as new tenants.

In an email, Blaise Theriault, a spokesperson for Service Nova Scotia which manages residential tenancies, said they encourage residents with financial issues during COVID-19 to negotiate a compromise with their landlord.

Edwards said she called S.W.M to negotiate the increase and left a message, but never received a response.

The rental increase was something Markey said S.W.M was open to negotiating if people were under financial stress, even including the option on their notice — but Markey contradicted Edwards, saying they didn’t receive any requests from tenants for assistance.

When asked if they could have missed any requests, Markey insisted that they hadn’t.

If negotiations don’t pan out, the province recommends tenants begin looking for new accommodations.

In Halifax, that’s not so simple. The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation latest rental market report released in January shows a dismal rental vacancy rate of only 1 per cent.

Rental vacancy rates in major Canadian cities between 2018 and 2019.

Markey says that in her experience when tenants receive a notice of an increase, they tend to look elsewhere and tend to realize staying is the cheapest option.

Edwards found a new unit to rent in late July. She says it will cost about the same price as her current unit, but is larger, has a storage unit and a balcony.

“There’s nothing I can do, my rent is going to go up, so I may as well take the nicer place and the nicer landlord,” Edwards said.

She isn’t the only tenant who has been given an increase they don’t agree with, according to Lisa Roberts, the provincial New Democratic Party housing critic.

Roberts says she’s “seen a lot of people” being served rent increases during COVID-19, and finds it unfair that increases are being handed out while tenants are under financial stress.

A constituent’s daughter was given a 30 per cent rent increase during COVID-19, prompting Roberts to host a housing discussion with about a dozen people in Needham Park on Wednesday.

“People’s incomes have been affected and at the same time we’ve seen that the rental market has sort of acted, in many cases, like COVID doesn’t exist,” said Roberts.

“[COVID has] also made it more clear how unfair and unhealthy it is that we have people who are not securely housed at a time when we’re being told to all stay home.”

In March, Nova Scotia implemented a three-month moratorium on eviction, which expired on June 30. Roberts called on Premier Stephen McNeil to implement rent control twice in that month and says the NDP has asked for freezes on evictions and rent increases. She says their call have been ignored and calls the government response “dismissive.”

Now, Edwards is packing up her current home. It took her several months to find a new apartment but she and her two cats, Loki and Licorice, will move into a rental unit that will cost her about $1,070 per month — $75 more than her current housing will cost after the rent increase, and about 50 per cent of her monthly income.

According to the Canadian Rental Housing Index, when a rental unit costs more than 30 per cent of the tenant’s monthly income, before taxes, it’s considered unaffordable.

Edwards says that although she’ll be paying more each month, it’s worth it considering how she’s been treated by her landlords.