While I loved the musical Les Miserables, the song “Master of the House” always struck me as odd, when the cast sings: “Everybody loves a landlord. Everybody’s bosom friend.”

From my perch as a paralegal, it seems everyone despises landlords and wants to make them responsible for the government’s shortcomings.

Decades ago, residential landlord and tenant law was contractual.

People signed lease agreements and lived by them.

But starting in the 1970s in Ontario, the contractual model gave way to strict, complicated and onerous statutory ones, leading up to the present day Residential Tenancies Act.

Government bemoans the lack of affordable housing, the high rents charged in major cities and alternative rental models such as Airbnb.

But it’s burying its head in the sand by refusing to consider realistic solutions to the problem its own policies created.

Governments have effectively nationalized private residential rentals, with landlords footing the bills to administer their misguided public policies.

Ontario is the worst jurisdiction in Canada for piling impossible burdens on residential landlords.

The eviction process is painfully slow.

Tenants can use delays built into the system both at the Landlord and Tenant Board and the appellate courts.

To fix the system, the province must address issues such as the time it takes to evict non-paying and disruptive tenants, the prohibition on damage deposits and the reality of so-called “lease-breaking parties” that enable a tenant to break a lease simply by acting badly.

Then there’s the onerous obligations under the Human Rights Code that make landlords, rather than the government, responsible for societal issues.

Plus, the continuing refusal of government to make direct rent payments to landlords for tenants on social assistance.

On the flip side, perhaps it’s time to change the rent control exemption in current law that gives buildings constructed after November, 1991 an exemption from provincial rent control guidelines.

As a result, we now have 25 year’s worth of residential buildings, many in downtown Toronto, that are not rent controlled.

Recently, New Democrat MPP Peter Tabuns introduced the fourth private member’s bill since 2011 in a bid to eliminate this exemption.

Perhaps it’s time to have a sliding scale, phase-out period for the rent control exemption, during which allowable annual rent increases slide back to the provincial guideline 15 years after a new building is first occupied.

While we have an acute shortage of affordable rental housing, the Ontario government has largely washed its hands of the problem.

It is practically begging landlords to rent out residential units, despite the financial risks they must take and the unattractive environment the government has created.

To be sure, the 2011 Strong Communities Through Affordable Housing Act and the recently passed Promoting Affordable Housing Act, 2016, which promote inclusionary zoning, are honest government efforts to create more accessible and affordable housing.

But many smaller landlords won’t open up their homes to residential accommodation until some of the risk is mitigated and the playing field levelled.

Of course, many anti-poverty activists are satisfied with retaining tenant-centred policies that have helped to create the rental accommodation crisis.

They imagine that more non-profit housing, built and operated by government, will be the end result.

But government coffers are empty.

So are hundreds of thousands of potential basement apartments, that could otherwise become affordable housing, save for the current onerous rules for renting them out.

Fine is a Toronto paralegal and a former member of the Landlord and Tenant Board.