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Many of us who live in larger buildings know how hard it can be to get a hold of the actual landlord. Often there are layers of property management staff between tenants and the owners of buildings.

With that in mind, I found this 1991 article that describes a rowdy protest at Queen’s Park against rent control by (gasp!) actual landlords joined by construction contractors interesting.

Note the inventive protest techniques – maybe we can learn from them (LOL).

Rent-control protest went over the top

Ottawa Citizen – November 22, 1991
by Jim Coyle

Toronto — Housing Minister Evelyn Gigantes has seldom sounded so eloquent, rarely seemed so reasonable, probably never made her case so well.

And she didn’t say a word.

She couldn’t. The band of slavering landlords, construction workers and contractors who showed up Thursday at Queen’s Park to protest NDP rent control policy refused to let her speak. So much for reasoned debate and consultation.

Instead, several hundred demonstrators put on a spectacle of petulance and hatred that was almost frightening. Their imagery and rhetoric was positively puerile. They seemed at times on the brink of violence.

They brought with them a 20-foot screw, held aloft by a crane. They chanted, you guessed it, “Screw! Screw! Screw!” They told anyone who would listen that they had been screwed.

Then, they moved on in the songbook to that old high-school favorite: “Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit!”

They burned effigies of Premier Bob Rae, Treasurer Floyd Laughren and Gigantes. They did so with alarming gusto. When security guards intruded periodically to douse the flames, a landlord yelled: “Here comes the Gestapo.”

Some men stepped forward to stomp on the smouldering models. Others hacked at them with picket signs.”

One inventive soul rescued them from the inferno, ground the faces so they were charred and blackened, then mounted them on a seven-foot post to the cheers of kindred spirits.

“Yeah!” “All rights!” “Burn her head off!”

Read the full article here.