Rat Infestations Multiplying in Cities Across Canada

Rodents gather outside of the Burrard SkyTrain Station in Vancouver on Feb. 7, 2024. The Canadian Press/Ethan Cairns

Pest control companies and city councils across Canada are troubled by a radical explosion of rat populations in recent years, leaving them scurrying to rationalize why the surge is happening and come up with solutions.

“We’re seeing 10 to 20 percent increases every single year. It’s in every city across Canada. They just keep on growing and growing,” Bill Dowd, CEO of Skedaddle Humane Wildlife Control, which has locations in B.C., Ontario, Quebec, and Nova Scotia, said in an interview.

Several other pest control companies also say the trend is clearly upward.

“Since I started 13 years ago, it’s definitely increased,” Sherwin Baghani, operations manager at S.O.S. Wildlife and Pest Control in Toronto, told The Epoch Times.

It started increasing about five years ago, Baghani said, and he thinks it might have something to do with construction on the Eglinton Crosstown LRT and Ontario Line.

Rats are “masters of tunnelling” and mostly live underground, he said, and the vibration and noise from the construction may have forced them to seek out new habitats.

In 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns reduced activity in the city, the rats came to the surface seeking new food and shelter, Baghani said.

With restaurants closed and putting out less garbage, rats moved to residential neighbourhoods.

Canada’s rapid population growth over the last few years, an additional four million people from 2020 to 2024, may also have contributed to rising rat populations because of increased garbage, Baghani said.

“The city wasn’t prepared for it, I would say, because now if you go drive around the town, you see the city garbage bins are overflowing and all on the ground,” he said.

Waheed Ahmed of Pesticon Pest Control in Toronto says increased construction of apartment buildings, subway stations, and roads has disrupted the nesting areas of rats and forced them to find other places to live.

During the pandemic, some municipalities reduced the frequency of garbage removal, which allowed rat populations to grow, he added.

“When you alter their natural habitat, basically you are playing with nature,” he said.

While many Canadian municipalities don’t have detailed figures on rodent sightings available, some city councils are observing a growing problem. In July, Toronto Deputy Mayor Amber Morley and Councillor Alejandra Bravo said they’d been contacted by communities with concerns about rats, which had become an “increasing challenge for a number of complex reasons.”

In response, Toronto City Council directed staff to report back with an “interdivisional action plan for the reduction of rats in Toronto.”

In a statement to The Epoch Times, Bravo said the creation of a Rat Reduction Plan would help the city be proactive and “get ahead of the problem.” She noted that North American cities like New York, Chicago, Washington D.C., and Ottawa have recently taken action.

“I believe it’s time for Toronto to take similar steps. People in my community, and people across Toronto, have told me they agree we need to see action,” she said.

Ottawa an Outlier in Tracking Rat Numbers

Since Ottawa City Councillor Riley Brockington was first elected in 2014, he has “wrestled with rat issues” in his ward. Yet beginning in 2022, he saw the issue get much worse.

“There was one neighbourhood in particular that had rats for the first time, and when I went door-knocking in that election, it was just a constant, and I wasn’t seeing any improvement,” he told The Epoch Times.

Brockington, who represents Ward 16, said the issue became so severe that he led the charge to bring back the city’s dormant Rat Mitigation Working Group, in which eight to 10 departments share information on pinpointing rats’ locations and getting rid of them.

“It’s not reinventing the wheel, there’s no silver bullet here, but where the city can have a positive impact, they are doing more,” he said.

In an email response, the City of Ottawa said while it does not track the size of its rat population, it investigates and keeps track of bylaw service requests involving rodents on private property. The city saw 206 service requests in 2017, 161 in 2018, and 510 in 2019.

The number of calls involving rodents shot up to 842 in 2020 and 1,197 in 2021, before declining to 840 in 2022, and 747 in 2023.

While the number of requests so far this year is 446, that’s still 200 percent higher than in 2017.

A city spokesperson said that prior to 2019, only service requests related to neighbouring or rented properties were logged. In 2019, the process was changed to include callers reporting issues about their own properties, resulting in an uptick in numbers in 2019, 2020, and 2021.

Several cities had less data on their rat populations. Health unit spokespersons in Mississauga, London, and Kingston either didn’t collect data or were unable to confirm increasing infestations.

A City of Vancouver spokesperson said the city doesn’t monitor or collect data on its rat populations, although there were 271 rat sightings reported to its phone and online reporting systems in 2023, and 371 so far this year.

Potential Solutions

Ahmed believes municipalities should put more emphasis on integrated pest management, which involves removing rats’ food sources and modifying their habitat. Municipalities can make garbage removal a priority and require construction sites to put more effort into pest control measures.

Dowd says people should take more responsibility for rat control. People must “animal-proof” their homes by properly sealing any ventilation or entry points, and ensure their garbage is disposed of properly and not left out overnight, he said.

“We get over 1,000 calls a day,” he said. “Everybody, the first thing they think is, ‘Shouldn’t the city be helping me?’ Well, if your toilet leaks, you’re not going to call the city.”

While attempts to reduce rat infestations have typically focused on killing them, the city of New York is taking a novel approach for its estimated 3 million rodents. Beginning in 2025, the city will begin placing contraceptive pellets in certain areas in an attempt to lower the rats’ birth rate.

‘Rat-Free’ Alberta

Municipalities trying to deal with rats might want to look to Alberta, the province that has been mostly rat-free since the 1950s.

Due to Alberta’s isolated geography and harsh climate, rats did not enter the province until the 1940s. The minister of agriculture authorized legislation mandating the control of pests by every person.

Through measures such as a Rat Control Zone along the eastern border with Saskatchewan, widespread public education, an arsenic rat-poisoning campaign, and fines for property holders who failed to control rats, the province was able to reduce rat infestations to fewer than five per year by the 1960s.

A City of Calgary spokesperson said despite Alberta’s “no-rats” policy, the rodents do enter the province in trucks, and there are periodic infestations at facilities. Businesses are expected to address the problem and “considerable improvements are being made,” the spokesperson said.

On Nov. 5, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada announced a $110,000 billboard and outreach campaign to encourage Albertans to report rat sightings.

Lindsay Harvey, assistant communications director for Alberta Agriculture and Irrigation, said the campaign’s goal is to remind people coming to Alberta that it “takes constant vigilance to keep rats out of our province.”

There were 26 confirmed rat sightings in 2020, 31 in 2021, 27 in 2022, and 435 in 2024, Harvey said. The province has no data on rat sightings prior to 2020.