Today’s Winnipeg Free Press runs a Frontier Centre op-ed on a recent provincial government report about rent control.
It argues that the report is an unwitting concession that rent control is essentially pointless:
Altogether, Prof. Grant’s paper… concedes that rent control doesn’t work and that we don’t have it in any meaningful sense anyway. He claims that rent control brings stability to existing tenants without proving it really does so, or considering how that protection for incumbents means exclusion for apartment hunters.
If this is the best justification that a government staunchly in favour of rent control can commission, one wonders why we should have the policy at all.
Manitoba should be honest about the policy’s futility, and save the estimated $1.7 million of taxpayer money required to administer it, not to mention fees charged to landlords and tenants for rent rise approvals.
