The Scarborough Rat Problem: What the City Is Doing and What You Must Do

Scarborough is the east end of the City of Toronto, and rats have become a more common sight here than they were a few years back. In 2025 the City approved a formal Rat Response Plan to coordinate how it handles them, and that plan applies across Scarborough the same as anywhere in Toronto. For a property owner, two facts sit side by side: the City is now organizing its own side of the response, and you remain legally on the hook for keeping your property clear of rats under the rodent and property standards rules. This page covers why rat activity is climbing in the east end, what the Rat Response Plan actually does, what your duty is, and how and when to report rats to 311.

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Why are rats rising in Scarborough?

Rats are rising because the three things they depend on, food, water, and cover, have all become easier to find at the same time, and because digging and construction keep turning out the colonies that were already living here. Scarborough adds its own pressure on top of that: the district is threaded with ravines. Highland Creek, the Rouge, and the smaller valleys that run down toward the Bluffs give rats a permanent green corridor to travel and burrow along, and the many lots that back onto those ravines and onto parks sit right at the edge of it. The City's Rat Response Plan report points to a mix of drivers rather than any single one.

The main ones, as they play out in the east end:

• Construction and excavation. Digging disturbs established burrows and drives rats out into the surrounding streets to find new harbourage. The transit and sewer work along corridors like Eglinton East and the Kingston Road stretch is exactly the kind of long project that pushes colonies onto nearby residential blocks.
• Ravines and older sewers. Highland Creek, the Rouge valley, and the aging east-end sewer network give Norway rats water, cover, and travel routes straight into the postwar neighbourhoods built around them.
• Organic waste and food. Green-bin organics, backyard compost, dropped fruit from the mature trees on Scarborough's big lots, pet food, and overflowing garbage all feed a colony and let it grow.
• Warmer conditions and mild winters that stretch the breeding season, so numbers bounce back faster year over year.
• Aging housing stock, including the 1950s-to-70s bungalows and back-splits with older foundations, which offers rats easy shelter and entry.

None of these sits inside one homeowner's control, which is part of why the City moved to a coordinated plan instead of leaving it all to individual complaints.

What is Scarborough's Rat Response Plan?

There is no separate Scarborough plan. Scarborough is part of Toronto, so the plan that applies here is the City of Toronto Rat Response Plan, approved through Council in 2025 to coordinate how the whole city reduces and manages rat populations across divisions rather than chasing rats one isolated complaint at a time. It sets up a more joined-up approach to prevention, response, and public information, and it treats rats as a shared city problem, not only a private pest issue on one lot.

In practice the Plan is about coordination: lining up the divisions that touch rats, from waste and water to bylaw enforcement and public health, tackling rats around construction and City property, and giving residents clearer guidance on prevention and reporting. That matters in Scarborough, where a colony displaced by ravine-edge or roadway construction can move through several backyards before anyone reports it. The full detail is in the City's Rat Response Plan report.

The Plan changes how the City organizes its own response. It does not remove your legal duty to keep your own property free of rats. Those are two separate things, and it is easy to assume the first cancels the second. It does not.

What is a property owner's duty under the rodent bylaw?

Under Toronto's property standards rules, which cover Scarborough, the owner is responsible for keeping the property free of rodents and for clearing the conditions that harbour them. That duty stays with the owner no matter what the City is doing at the neighbourhood level, and it can be enforced.

The City's rodent control and property standards page spells out the expectation, set in Toronto Municipal Code Chapter 629: property must be kept free of rodents, and the conditions that attract or shelter them, such as accessible garbage, harbourage, and unsealed openings, have to be dealt with. An owner who lets a rat problem run can face a property standards order and enforcement on top of the infestation itself.

What do you actually have to do?

You have to strip out what feeds and shelters rats on your lot, close the openings they slip through, and deal with any active infestation instead of letting it run. That is the practical shape of the legal duty, and on a ravine-backing Scarborough lot the cover side of it takes real attention.

The concrete steps:

• Cut off the food. Secure garbage and green-bin organics in bins with tight lids, keep compost rodent-resistant or enclosed, gather fallen fruit from the yard trees, and never leave pet food outside.
• Remove the cover. Clear woodpiles, debris, and dense ground growth against the foundation, under decks, and around sheds, and pay particular attention to the ravine-side and fence-line edge of the yard, where burrows start out of sight.
• Seal the openings. Close gaps around pipes and utilities, foundation cracks in the older postwar builds, and holes under garage doors and at door corners, using metal and mortar a rat cannot gnaw through.
• Deal with an active infestation. If there are burrows, droppings, or runs, treat and collapse the burrows and knock the colony down, then keep the property maintained so it does not come back. Burrow work and exterior sealing are the heart of the job, which is why we cover them in detail on the rat control page.

Because rats move between properties, doing your part counts even when the source is next door or down in the ravine: a maintained lot is far less inviting, and it is the part the City can hold you to.

How and when do you report rats to 311?

Report to 311 when the problem touches City property, a City service, or a situation beyond your own lot, such as rats around a City construction site, in a park or ravine, tied to a sewer or roadway, or on a property that looks like it is not meeting the property standards rules. 311 is Toronto's central point for service requests and routes the issue to the division that handles it. Scarborough residents use the same Toronto 311, since Scarborough is part of the city.

You can reach 311 by phone at 311 within Toronto, or online through the City's 311 service. When you report, give the exact location and what you are seeing, burrows, droppings, sightings, so it lands with the right division. For rats kept to your own private property, 311 will usually point you to prevention and control, since clearing the infestation there is the owner's job, but flagging a wider source, such as an unmaintained property, a ravine-edge burrow field, or a construction site, is exactly what the City wants to hear so it can act on the shared part of the problem.

Integrated pest management and the move away from poison

Both City policy and modern pest control now point the same way: integrated pest management, which means cutting rats down by removing food and harbourage and sealing entry points first, and reaching for rodenticide sparingly and carefully rather than leaning on it. This reduced-rodenticide approach exists because poison on its own does not solve a rat problem and it carries real risk, a risk that matters near Scarborough's ravines and parks where poisoned rats become food for owls, hawks, and other wildlife.

Health Canada, through its Pest Management Regulatory Agency, regulates rodenticides and requires them to sit in tamper-resistant stations near homes, because loose bait poisons pets, children, and the wildlife that eats poisoned rats. The integrated approach leans on the parts that actually hold, sanitation and exclusion, and treats bait as a controlled supplement, not the plan. It is the same logic behind why a serious rat job is mostly burrow work and sealing rather than dropping poison and hoping.

Common questions

Reviewed August 2026.

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