Ontario is leading the country in terms of the number of renters spending half or more of their income on housing, and it’s a problem that’s not confined to urban centres. That’s the takeaway of the Canadian Rental Housing Index, which has unveiled a new rental housing tool its creators hope will make it easier for some voters to decide how they can make a difference at the polls in next month’s federal election.The index has broken down how much of their overall income Canadians are spending on rent across all 338 federal ridings, and those findings, along with an interactive search tool was released Tuesday.Of the top 20 ridings with the highest proportion of renters spending 50 per cent or more of their income on housing, 11 are in Ontario, the index shows. Six are in British Columbia and the remaining three are in Manitoba, Nova Scotia and Quebec.“Ontario has the worst five ridings for the entire country in terms of housing affordability, said Marlene Coffey, chief executive officer of the Ontario Non-Profit Housing Association, speaking to the media at the YWCA Toronto Elm Centre, at Elm and Elizabeth Sts. on Tuesday morning. She said the province has been “hit harder than anywhere else in the country.”But, “This isn’t an isolated issue,” Coffey said. “There are communities in need from coast, to coast, to coast.”The Ontario Non-Profit Housing Association was part of a coalition of national housing providers who contributed to the report, including the BC Non-Profit Housing Association (co-founders of the index), the Canadian Housing and Renewal Association and the Aboriginal Housing Management Association. The data was sourced from Statistics Canada and pulled from the results of the 2016 long-form census. Coffey said the goal was to create a tool that both government and voters could use to understand what reality renters are facing in each of the country’s federal electoral rid ...
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