Can an Ontario Landlord Put Cameras on a Rental Property? The Law That Actually Decides It Isn’t Privacy Law

Most people reach for a privacy statute the moment a camera appears. In Ontario the rule that actually binds the landlord — and the only one that gets a tenant a real remedy — sits in the Residential Tenancies Act.

A tenant comes home, glances up, and there is a small camera over the shared entrance that was not there last week. Nothing was announced; no sign went up. The first move is almost always a scramble to name the privacy law that must have just been broken.

That scramble tends to go nowhere — not because the tenant is wrong to feel watched, but because it starts in the wrong statute book. The landlord who mounted that camera was probably solving something real: a break-in, dumped garbage, a disputed entry. Whether the camera crosses a line turns almost entirely on where it points and what it is doing there — and remarkably little on any statute with the word privacy in its name.

The place where this actually gets decided is one most people never open until they are already in a fight over it. So let me skip the label everyone reaches for and go straight to the single clause that does the real work — the one sitting in a law you would never guess governs a camera.

The question that matters isn’t “is it legal”

Ask whether a landlord can install a camera and you get a shrug, because a camera by itself isn’t illegal. The question that decides real cases is narrower: what happens when a tenant objects — who hears it, and what can they order? In Ontario the answer almost never runs through a privacy regulator. Federal privacy law (PIPEDA) may not reach a private residential landlord at all, and Ontario’s public-sector privacy watchdog (the IPC) has no jurisdiction over private landlords whatsoever. The body that actually handles these disputes, day in and day out, is the Landlord and Tenant Board — applying the Residential Tenancies Act, not a privacy statute.

Section 22: why a hallway camera can still be a problem

Section 22 says a landlord must not substantially interfere with a tenant’s reasonable enjoyment of the rental unit “or the residential complex in which it is located.” That last clause is the whole game. Reasonable enjoyment doesn’t stop at your apartment door — it extends to the shared parts of the building: hallways, the lobby, the elevator, the yard. So a camera trained on your unit’s door, logging exactly when you and your guests come and go, can fall under s.22 even though it never sees inside your unit and sits in a “common” hallway. The widespread landlord assumption — “if it doesn’t film inside the unit, I’m fine” — simply isn’t what s.22 says.

Section 23: a camera used to lean on a tenant clears a lower bar

Section 23 is the anti-harassment provision: a landlord must not harass, obstruct, coerce, threaten or interfere with a tenant. Watch the threshold difference — s.22 requires substantial interference, but s.23 needs only interference, and it names harassment and coercion outright. So when a camera stops being about building security and starts being about one tenant — positioned to stare at their door, paired with repeated confrontations — s.23 often fits better than s.22. The question was never the hardware. It’s what the hardware is being used to do.

What people reach for vs. what actually delivers a remedy

So does PIPEDA apply at all? An honest grey area

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC) does publish landlord-facing guidance: post signs, explain the purpose, don’t capture the inside of units, secure the footage. That reads as though PIPEDA governs. But there’s an unavoidable precondition — PIPEDA only applies to personal information collected “in the course of commercial activity,” and whether a private individual renting out a property is engaged in commercial activity has no settled answer, least of all for someone leasing a unit or two. So the honest position is: follow the OPC’s guidance because it’s good practice, but don’t build your case on “the landlord must obey PIPEDA or they’re breaking the law” — that foundation is soft. And even where PIPEDA does apply, the Commissioner mostly investigates and recommends; it isn’t the route that gets a tenant a remedy. For that, you’re back at the Board.

The Criminal Code, and why it almost never applies

There’s a scary line that circulates online: a landlord’s camera could be a criminal offence. That stretches the statute past what it covers. Criminal Code s.162 — voyeurism — is real and carries up to five years, but its elements are narrow: the recording must be surreptitious, in circumstances with a reasonable expectation of privacy, and fall into one of three sexually-oriented situations — a place where someone would be nude (a bathroom, a bedroom), or done for a sexual purpose. An ordinary camera in a hallway, a driveway, or a backyard meets none of that and is not a s.162 offence. Calling routine security footage “criminal” is both wrong and unhelpful — it pulls attention away from the RTA route that actually works. The Criminal Code is for the hidden bathroom camera, not the one over the front door.

What a tenant actually does about it

The path is unglamorous but clear. First, put your concern to the landlord in writing and say what you want changed — the Board will weigh whether you raised it before applying. If nothing changes, file a tenant application with the Landlord and Tenant Board arguing that the landlord substantially interfered with your reasonable enjoyment, or harassed you. If the Board agrees, it can order the landlord to stop, order the camera removed, and where warranted award a rent abatement or any other remedy it considers appropriate. Notice what’s absent from that sentence: any privacy commissioner. That’s the correction this whole article is built around — this is a tenancy-law problem, not a privacy-law one.

Arthur Zhao

Real Estate Broker · FRI · ABR · SRS · PSA · MCNE · E-PRO · CLHMS & GUILD Elite · REAIS

VP & Branch Manager, Bay Street Group Inc.

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