Long’s lengthy battle with his former landlord — a self-described community advocate who has positioned himself as an anti-homelessness leader — has been an uneven fight, one similar to that faced by many Ontario tenants. A series of hurdles can make it nearly impossible for tenants to get anything resembling justice, and even three years after Long’s victory he’s still waiting for the money he’s owed.

The City of Toronto is increasing registration fees and bolstering the vetting of short-term rental hosts in an effort to make it harder to evade the rules.

Last year, a massive blaze consumed several illegal Airbnb units in Montreal and killed seven people. The tragedy shone a harsh light on the Wild West of Airbnb in Canadian cities—and the battle to regulate it has just begun.

The building is splattered with different shades of paint. Its doors and windows are covered with posters. The message is as clear as the graffiti sprayed across its walls: the crowd who gathered around the building on Wednesday doesn’t want Airbnbs in their neighbourhood and to them, it is a brick-and-glass symbol of the housing crisis.

An Airbnb owner west of Edmonton estimates she’s out more than $200,000 after her property was ransacked during a booking.

The morning of Jan. 21, Jocelyn St. Onge got a strange text from a neighbour. He told her the hood of her truck at her property outside the lake town Wabamun was raised.

That Sunday, two guests who had been renting her acreage for one week were scheduled to check out.

As Toronto tries to clamp down on short-term rentals to maximize housing supply in the midst of a housing crisis, a cottage industry of short-term rental hosting companies continue to help investment property owners evade the city’s rules, a Star investigation has found.

Nancy Paine’s short-term rental business is dead in the water. As co-founder and CEO of Victoria-based Superhost, Paine said she had been at the forefront of the Airbnb revolution for seven years, acting as a “liaison” for homeowners needing help with the logistics of running a listing on the accommodation site.

OTTAWA A narrowly focused fall fiscal update coming Tuesday from federal Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland includes a measure designed to make it less lucrative for people to use their properties as short-term rentals, the Star has learned.  

A Canadian Airbnb watchdog has sounded alarm bells over the number of condo buildings in Toronto acting as “ghost hotels.”

Addressing the housing supply shortage is a pressing policy issue for any level of government in Canada. Our inability to produce housing fast enough to accommodate new Canadians has dominated recent headlines. Scarcity drives up costs, so the argument goes, and makes housing less attainable and affordable to those in need of long-term accommodation.