It was the summer of 2018 and rats were everywhere: running across Bloor Street in broad daylight; nesting in residential neighbourhoods, under garages, sheds and home additions; swarming backyards where grass seed had been sprinkled.
Rats were finding their way into parked vehicles and chewing on engine wiring or the food-stained straps of child car seats. They were taking over alleyways at dusk with a brazenness residents hadn’t seen before. They were tunnelling into homes and emerging through basement floorboards or nesting under bathtubs. They were chewing through the dense polyethylene shell of organic waste bins. One woman found rats in her kitchen, tearing apart bread bags. Several residents reported seeing rats emerge from their toilets.
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Maggie Kremin trapped dozens in her backyard that summer. The 72-year-old retiree, a devoted gardener with an immaculate property in Riverside, near the Don Valley, had lived in her neighbourhood for 30 years without seeing a single rat, but now she battled them daily. Kremin emailed her councillor, asking, “Is there an active city program that will be monitoring and controlling the rodent population?”
The Rat Detective, Part 1
America’s rattiest city has an official Rat Plan, a Rat Czar, and a twice-annual Rat Academy. In Toronto, Canada’s rattiest city, residents are
After that summer, council passed a motion asking staff to create a rat management strategy. Kremin and her neighbours were relieved. It seemed Toronto was finally prepared to take the problem seriously. But the report, due in 2019, was never finished.
Since then, rodent-related property standards complaints have shot up 70 per cent, prompting another wave of complaints to a new crop of councillors.
This month, councillors are asking staff — again — to create a rat management strategy, and to report back in 2025.
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Kremin said.
Kremin’s next-door neighbour, Mark Hierlihy, who empties rodent corpses from the snap traps for her — “I grew up on a farm,” he explains — said the city already knows what to do, and the time to act is now.
“If there’s a fire you catch it early and you put it out,” said Hierlihy, 56. “You don’t wait until it’s blazing.”
Toronto once had a strong rat management program with dedicated Rodent Control Investigators who responded to complaints, located the source of infestations and forced people to act. But the position was eliminated in the 1990s due to budget constraints.
Today, the city’s efforts in the battle against rats are siloed. Toronto Public Health monitors rodent reports in restaurants and public institutions such as long-term-care homes. Complaints about unkempt properties that may be providing rodent harbourage are dealt with by Municipal Licensing and Standards. Toronto Water manages the sewers. City parks aren’t monitored unless problems arise. Private property owners must fend for themselves.
At New York’s three-day Rat Academy, a rodent control training program for pest management professionals and city workers, I learned that this kind of “disorganized” approach will, over time, set Toronto on an irreversible path toward being a rattier city.
How did we get here?
Over 20 years, three different attempts have been made to address the rat problem — in 2006, 2018 and now in 2024 — and Toronto still doesn’t have a strategy. A review of staff reports and internal records sheds light on issues that got in the way, including concerns about funding for increased enforcement, a perceived lack of reliable data, and the flawed idea that rats outside of food service settings are “not a public health concern.”
In a 2006 report to council, Toronto Public Health recommended the city take no action on rats, saying “there is currently no conclusive data available to indicate that Toronto is experiencing an increase in the number of rat infestations which would justify an enhanced service.”
But there was a flaw in that assessment. It wasn’t that there was no data to justify taking action on rats. It’s that there was no data, period. The report did not recommend a data collection strategy.
The report added — wearily, it seemed — that any proposal for a publicly funded rodent control program “would have to be accompanied by additional funding for infrastructure and staffing.”
The 2018 report was the closest Toronto came to declaring war on rats. A Municipal Licensing and Standards policy team spent 18 months working on a strategy, but the deadline passed with no report. Then COVID-19 hit, and it was never finished.
Internal records show that during the research phase a manager at Toronto Public Health seemed to downplay the prevalence of rats, suggesting that private pest control companies “overestimate the rat problem in the city of Toronto.”
Yet data obtained by the Star shows a steady increase in rat complaints over the past decade, and a startling surge since the pandemic. Meanwhile, enforcement has not kept pace, with fines for rodent-related infractions rising slowly as property standards complaints surged between 2015 and 2018, internal records show.
A memo prepared for council by Toronto Public Health stated the department’s view plainly: “Rats are not a public health concern in Toronto.”
“In the city of Toronto the likelihood of the spread of disease by rats is very low and rarely do these diseases actually affect residents,” the 2018 memo said.
While it’s true that rat diseases rarely spread to humans, experts stress that rodents are a potential public health threat, and that preventing their spread is key to managing the concern. Beyond disease, rats can harm mental health, and they can have a greater impact on people living in precarious housing or experiencing homelessness.
The memo also suggested that private pest control services are “relatively low cost,” an assessment many would disagree with.
Complaint-based data most likely underestimates Toronto’s rat problem because reports from residents who have sighted rats on their own properties are not recorded.
Two Toronto councillors are asking city staff for a report on rat reduction strategies.
In Ottawa, a resident who calls 311 to report rats on their property is visited by a bylaw officer who will locate the source of the infestation and give advice.
In Toronto, residents are told the city can’t help and are instead advised to contact a pest control company. This approach has frustrated people with rat infestations that extend beyond their own yards.
This kind of siloed approach won’t work, said Caroline Bragdon, a New York City health department director who spoke at Rat Academy. “Rats aren’t a single-property issue,” she said. “They’re a neighbourhood issue.”
Traditional pest control alone — traps, poison bait and the like — will not be effective without a larger, co-ordinated effort.
Classic urban Integrated Pest Management programs emphasize the rodent detective work — monitoring, removing food sources and shoring up infrastructure weaknesses — as first steps, with chemical tools such as rodenticide baits meant to be a last resort.
But many cities and private pest control companies, under pressure to take immediate action, perform these steps backwards, starting with poison rather than investigating the root causes of a problem.
It’s easy to imagine why city staff and officials working with budget constraints and limited resources might view rats as a less urgent problem. But ignoring rats hasn’t made them go away.
In the years since 2019, when Toronto was supposed to get its long-awaited rat strategy, property standards-related rodent complaints have increased by a stunning 70 per cent.
At home in Riverside, Maggie Kremin has trapped four so far this summer. Her neighbour, Mark Hierlihy, pointed out that when Mayor Olivia Chow raised property taxes, she posed a question to residents as a rationale for the increase: What kind of city do you want to live in?
His answer: “A rat-free city.”
Susan Kao/Toronto Star illustration
A rat strategy for Toronto
I won’t claim to be an expert in city planning, budgeting or the inner workings of Toronto’s bylaw department, but my time at Rat Academy and my personal obsession with urban rat research has given me the confidence to make a few recommendations.
Leadership
Toronto needs leadership on rats. Whether a single person, like New York’s Czar, or a team that meets biweekly, like Ottawa’s Rat Working Group, there should be an individual or group accountable for the problem and focused on prevention.
Data
We need a strong data collection strategy to understand the scope of the problem, monitor it over time and identify hot spots where proactive measures can be taken. We can do this through 311 complaint data and proactive surveys of the city’s most rat-vulnerable areas, including parks, waterways, sewers and restaurant-dense neighbourhoods.
Complaints are an imperfect measure, but they have become the standard for assessing the burden of rats in North American cities. We can bolster our 311 complaint data by providing new guidance to staff on the most appropriate and useful questions to ask, and by encouraging the public to report rat sightings.
No one has yet figured out a reliable way to count the total number of rats in a city. “I’ve been studying rats for 30 years and I don’t know if there’s two million or eight million” in New York, says rodentologist Bobby Corrigan. More important is knowing if the problem is getting worse, and where.
Public education
We need a public education campaign that gets the entire city engaged in curbing rats. Having the mayor’s support and involvement is critical, said New York’s Rat Czar, Kathleen Corradi. The campaign should encourage residents to report all sightings, even on private property, to 311.
Enhanced enforcement
To shift from a reactive approach to a proactive one, the city will need specially trained bylaw officers, quicker response times, committed follow-up and higher fines for repeat offenders. Increased fines may help offset the cost of enforcement.
The city should also consider sending bylaw officers to private homes when owners request assistance, to help identify where the rats are coming from and educate residents on prevention.
Construction bylaw
Many North American cities, including Chicago, New York, Ottawa and Halifax, require construction companies to have a pest control plan before shovels hit the ground, to avoid sending rats fleeing from underground burrows onto neighbouring properties. Toronto has no such requirement.
A new attitude
Attitude isn’t a formal part of Integrated Pest Management, the doctrine that most pest management professionals follow. This recommendation is more feeling-based than science-based: Toronto should shift from viewing rats as a mere nuisance to seeing them as a public health concern.
The city should also acknowledge the mental health impact of rats and the equity issues that an increased population in Toronto may raise and consider the feasibility of subsidized or low-cost pest control options for seniors and people with low incomes.
