On September 17, 2023, Calgary City Council approved a housing strategy, Home is Here, made up of 98 actions the city and its partners can take to address a housing shortage that was classified as a housing crisis, though Calgary’s 2023 Housing Needs Assessment. One of the action items is “To support residents in rental housing experiencing higher than normal increases in rent, investigate rent control models used in other jurisdictions, and provide the Government of Alberta with a summary of the findings”, suggesting that rental housing price regulation, commonly known as rent control, is a possible solution to rising rental housing prices. Critiques grounded in basic economic principals and modelling, argue that price ceilings are an over simplistic regulatory intervention that distorts the rental housing market and creates unintended consequences, further exacerbating the housing shortage and does not fully address the issue of increasing rents. Advocates for rent control view regulation as a measure to protect affordable rental housing prices, offer predictable price increases and create a more equitable market. Given Calgary’s 2023 Housing Strategy commitments, the conversation on how to stabilize increasing rental housing prices during a housing crisis, and the varying ways that Canadian provincial jurisdictions have applied rental housing price regulation, this paper is an in-depth compilation and review, characteristic comparison and outcome analysis of the approach of rental housing price regulation in the provinces that have enacted regulations, alongside with Alberta, a jurisdiction that does not have rental housing price regulation.

Here we show, key differences between policy structure and restrictiveness, and market outcomes in nine census metropolitan areas. It was discovered that PEI has the most restrictive regulations, where rent controls are applied to the rental unit, not the tenant, limiting price increases between leases, unlike all other jurisdictions that employ rent control as a regulatory measure. Manitoba’s rent control regulation is the most nuanced, with exemptions for newly available rental units and price threshold deregulation. Other regulations are moderate in nature.

Market outcome analysis suggests that the argument in support or in opposition of rent control is not easily made and that there is a lack of compelling evidence to show market outcome differences between markets with rent control and without rent control. The evidence suggests that rent control does not have a significant effect on stabilizing nor preventing dramatic increases in rental housing prices and rental housing markets with a lack of rent control regulation (Calgary and Edmonton) do not experience extraordinary spikes in rental housing prices in comparison to markets with rent control (Vancouver and Toronto). As well, contrary to the argument that rent control disincentivizes new rental housing stock, the market outcome evidence suggests that markets in jurisdictions with rent control, with guidelines for increasing rental housing prices and markets without rent control all experience an average increase in rental housing supply over the 10-year period examined.