Article content

Payday lenders could be treated like strip clubs in Ottawa by the end of the year — restricted to a few parts of the city and gradually squeezed out of downtown.

“They bring nothing to the streetscape of our communities,” Mayor Jim Watson said in a city council meeting on Wednesday, where councillors voted unanimously to ask city planners to work up new zoning restrictions that would keep new payday lenders from opening.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Reevely: City plans to treat payday-loan shops like strip clubs with new rules coming soon Back to video

It’ll take about nine months, the city’s general manager of planning Steve Willis said. His department has already started research.

Our councillors really, really don’t like payday lenders, and the rules the planners work up probably won’t go as far as many of them would like.

Payday lenders specialize in extremely short-term loans — a couple of hundred bucks for a week or 10 days, till your next payday. Ontario lets them charge $15 for every $100 a customer borrows. Not a lot in actual dollars but that can work out to sky-high annual interest rates, especially if someone rolls one loan over into a new one. They’re much, much worse terms than you’d get on even a high-interest credit card.