Ten months after the New Brunswick government unveiled a plan to curb high rent increases in the province, figures show that the situation has worsened rather than improved.

This increases pressure on the province to tackle the problem more aggressively, and New Brunswick’s housing minister has already acknowledged that previous measures to combat rising rents are not helping tenants sufficiently.

“We are discussing everything related to rent,” Housing Minister Jill Green said in Parliament last week.

“There are more and more options and things we are looking at.”

Jill Green, New Brunswick’s housing minister, told MPs last week that a number of initiatives were being considered to address New Brunswick’s rental problems. (Jacques Poitras/CBC)

Green was responding to a report earlier this month that the number of new construction projects in New Brunswick, particularly multi-family housing, was not meeting the province’s goals and was lagging far behind projects under construction in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island.

More bad news followed this week.

On Tuesday, Statistics Canada reported that average rents in New Brunswick rose 10.8 percent in April compared to a year earlier.

This is the second largest increase among other provinces after Alberta during this 12-month period and three times the overall inflation rate of New Brunswick, which stands at 2.9 percent.

This is also the largest increase in rents that tenants have ever experienced during the four-year housing crisis in the province.

Rents in New Brunswick rose 6.9 percent in the last twelve months to April 2023 and 7.3 percent and 6.1 percent in the two years prior to that.

Last summer, Green unveiled New Brunswick’s housing strategy, which included a goal of reducing annual rent increases in the province to “an average of 2.5 percent.”

Instead, they have risen to four times that level.

Killam, New Brunswick’s largest landlord, reported that average rents for its 997 apartments in Saint John rose 8.9 per cent in March compared to the same month last year. This was the largest increase in any Canadian city the company has ever reported, other than Calgary. (Robert Jones/CBC News)

On Tuesday, a number of questions to the province about why rent increases in New Brunswick are higher than in most other provinces and what the province could do to address this remained unanswered.

In an email, a spokesman wrote that “more time” was needed to respond.

Still, Green has indicated she is open to any solution to rising rents, including solutions the province has historically rejected, such as eliminating sales tax on newly constructed homes.

Two weeks ago, New Brunswick’s Ministry of Finance said it did not support a sales tax exemption for the construction of new multifamily housing, even though both Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia introduced such a rule last fall and reported three times as many new construction projects as New Brunswick earlier this year.

“After some government analysis, it is still not clear whether a refund of the provincial share of the HST for property developers who own properties built specifically for rental purposes would result in benefits for tenants,” the ministry said in a statement.

New Brunswick has repeatedly argued that building more housing is the answer to rising rental costs. However, the pace of development in New Brunswick is below its own goals and far behind Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia. (Alexandre Silberman/CBC)

Last week, however, Green said New Brunswick needs more housing and that she would seriously consider the idea if it could be achieved through a sales tax cut.

“It’s not off the table yet,” she told reporters.

“We are examining a number of different measures.”

New Brunswick has consistently argued that the solution to rising rents is to create enough new housing to rebalance supply and demand. The city has set a goal of building 6,000 new homes annually, but has failed to meet that number.

In 2023, 4,547 new housing projects were recorded, the lowest per capita rate among the three Maritime Provinces and a decrease of three percent from 2022.