My story is quite unique. I am being swindled by a group of professional fraudsters who own 1/2 million dollars worth of luxury cars (I know that for sure) plus whatever they cannot park in front of the house. I am a senior, and I am not their first target, I have documents proving that it is their “career”.
It must be said that as of May 19, 2021 they owned 1 Cadillac CT6, 2 (yes, two) Cadillac Escalade, and 1 Aston Martin. A total of a cool 1/2 million basic price, Canadian dollars, not rupees. The last 3 parked in front of the house for a few months. OK, the Aston-Martin was searched extensively and towed out by the police in the middle of the night just 10 days ago.
Now my question that you do not have to answer is: Why do they want to live in my mediocre house? Would that have anything to do with them going to the “Sonya’s Parkette” across the street (a known venue for drug trafficking) up to 6 times per day/night?
This is the type of tenants the LTB “protects from homelessness”, by making me wait 14 months before reviewing the stay of their eviction.
Background:
The house is a duplex, one apartment is upstairs, another is downstairs. The furnace room is a locked room (not rented to anyone) located inside the lower apartment.
The upstairs tenants managed to get one of their friends to rent the lower apartment, and he illegally sublet it to them and he did not pay rent after the first month, in July 2019. So, the whole house has been occupied up to July 2021 without a penny of rent paid to me.
My L1 application regarding the downstairs unit also was stayed by the LTB to save the occupant from “homelessness”. In the stay application he claims that he mostly lives with his girlfriend elsewhere. In a few medical certificates he lists yet another address.
Back to the upstairs unit story. My tenants who did not pay rent for the past two years submitted an appeal to the Divisional Court when (finally) the LTB lifted its stay on my L1 application (after ignoring it for 14 months). Of course my tenants hoped that, with the help of the expensive lawyer they retained, they could get another stay while waiting for the Divisional Court gears to move. We had a telephone conference on July 2, 2021, that was announced as procedural: when to meet, what for, etc.
The surprise that made me jump on my chair was that the Judge, when he heard of the 2-years with no rent, started to yell that he would lift the stay immediately, unless the tenants paid $25,000 (yes, twenty-five thousand) to the Court in trust. When the tenants’ lawyer asked for one month to get organized, he yelled: “not a minute”, and used the word “egregious”, repeatedly to describe this case. Then, realizing that it was Friday and the sheriffs would not act during the long weekend, he allowed the deadline for the payment to be Wednesday July 7 at noon. Also, he said that he did not think they would pay that amount just to stay another couple of months. Essentially, he pre-judged the final outcome of their case. And that Judge has a really powerful bass voice. At the end of the conference the judge wished us to have a very good weekend. I replied “I will” and he agreed. What a difference is made by changing the court! What a lesson the tenants are getting!
Just as a follow up: My tenants paid that $25,000 in 4 days, and paid the monthly rent for August on time, following the court order. It took the Divisional Court to re-train them.
Facts:
After the tenants paid the initial amount, the subsequent meeting was mostly procedural, but the judge said that any money paid to the Divisional Court should be paid to me.
FYI, all together there are more than 15 applications for that house. The upstairs unit is mostly the subject of this story. Together with the downstairs unit sublet to the upstairs, they have been dragging on at the LTB for more than 2 years. What I can understand is that the LTB is not organized to deal with complicated cases. The first testimony of the first witness for the tenants started on 7 November 2019, and has not finished yet: I have not reached the point of cross-examining him.
The Divisional Court Judge wants to see ALL the applications for ALL the units at 50 Oxford Street, upstairs and downstairs, to understand what is going on, even though he does not have any jurisdiction on most of the stuff. What a refreshing attitude! But how long will it take?
The application being considered does not apply to the first 6 months of rent, as that application was dismissed because of matters relating to Section 83. When the Judge learned that the lawyer objects to the application regarding the first 6 month, he asked (again) whether rent was paid, and whether they still object to the application when it was not paid, and he was openly laughing. Wow! In the past I worked as a court interpreter, I had never heard a judge laugh, not even at the most outlandish claims.
So, all being said, now the conclusion of this case will be scheduled for May or June 2022. In the meantime, the tenants have to pay rent every month, and I get to cash the initial bundle of $$, plus any rent accrued every three months.
Upstairs tenants’ complaints
The tenants’ game is to avoid paying rent by complaining about building deficiencies and my “awful” behaviour.
However, for the past two and one-half years the upstairs tenants did not let me enter into the unit to assess what needs to be done.
| Complaint | But | |
| The staircase leading to the apartment was missing a railing | They did not let me enter to assess the situation | |
| One of the tenants slipped and fell, causing a worsening of his hernia condition | I contacted my insurance company immediately. After two years it closed the case, because it never received a medical certificate. It must be noted that, in time, his hernia migrated from a groinal hernia (preventing him from having relations with his fiancée) to umbilical (around the navel). | |
| They sued me for religious discrimination, for disparaging their religion, preventing them from exposing a statue in front of the house. | Their religion, and the “Holy High Priest” in charge, do not appear in any official list of ordained ministers. Their case was dismissed because of: “Abuse of process”. | |
| They accused me of spying on them, by looking into their windows from the backyard. | Their windows, on the second floor of the house, are a full 13 feet above ground. I am not that tall, I have a regular size neck, I did not have any devices to do that looking. | |
| They accused me of spying on them by looking through a crack in a door, they recognized that I was the one by looking at the shadow of my feet under the door, that had a 1” gap at its bottom. | I wonder what is so peculiar about my feet, to make them recognizable in a shadow. Besides, a picture of the door in question (it was temporary, it was later replaced by a fire door) does not show any crack. Also, they had a camera on top of that door, no footage was ever produced from it. | |
| They accused me of stealing some precious stones from the premises. | No proof of ownership was ever produced. The theft was of different stones, of different descriptions, at different times depending on the document and/or the time of their testimony, and in different places. One of the places was a different apartment, officially, routinely attended by no less than 7 people plus its tenant. | |
| They accused me of entering into the premises too many times, unnecessarily. | This is interesting: I, and contractors, entered a few times into the lower apartment of the same house to take care of an order to upgrade the interconnected fire/CO alarm system. This order was prompted by the upstairs complaining tenants, who called the inspector because of some noted deficiencies in that system. So: they caused it, then complained, but it was not even the unit rented to them. It must be noted that, when the inspector came, he noticed that their upstairs alarm was ripped off its wires, and they admitted doing it, something that the inspector wrote in his report. | |
| They accused me of using disparaging language with reference to them. | In most of their correspondence, with me and with their legal counsel, they called me: “The crone”. | |
| They accused me of denying their right to stay beyond the end date of the initial rental agreement, and of showing the apartment they occupied to other interested parties. | Actually, it was the other apartment in the house, that was vacant during the first three months of their stay. In fact, the “Holy High Priest” in one occasion came out of his door, with loosely fastened underwear, to tell the visitors that “there are rats and cockroaches in that house”. One of the visitors was a young woman carrying on her arm a 4-year old girl. | |
| They complained because I did not start the central air conditioning system. | They have not let me access the furnace room (that is a locked room inside the lower apartment) for the past 17 months. The 21 year old furnace will need to be re-started soon, probably without maintenance. I have contacted the RHEU for follow-up. If the furnace will catch fire because of the poor maintenance status, I will sue the LTB. | |
| The tenants have removed some of the furniture from the rented apartment without my permission (they mention my missing permission in their documentation). Since then, they repeatedly asked me to pay for storage charges. | Removal of goods without permission is the legal definition of theft. I refuse to pay for that storage. I asked for the furniture to be brought back, it has not been done yet, after two years. The tenants produced some pictures of the stored furniture. I asked to see it in person, I received no answer. I have no key of that storage space. | |
| They accused me of entering illegally at other times. | No proof was ever provided, the tenants have 5 cameras in and around the premises, plus the ones in their cell phones. | |
| There are rats in the property. | This is interesting: last July CBC announced that City Council has approved a ban on pigeon feeding in the whole city, and is working to implement it in March 2022. As I learned about it, I contacted CBC with my complaint about these same tenants who feed pigeons by throwing seeds form a broken second store window. Then rats come out to eat the leftovers: they are 8” long, plus the tail, and they are really plump. CBC interviewed me, produced an article that might still be in their website (if not I will send it to you) and gave me about 10 second of prime time on July 20, then ran the spot again on August 30. I, and several neighbours, tried MANY TIMES to make my tenants stop the feeding, with no results. | |
| Other accusations, that I consider minor. |
The downstairs tenant has given a power of attorney for property to one of the upstairs tenants, and the two have the same legal counsel, so the downstairs case is a carbon copy of the one upstairs, but much behind in time: it has not reached an eviction order yet. My first L1, submitted on July 2019, was found to be invalid and dismissed after having been found valid during 18 months.
Money
In total, because of judicial procedures and delays, as of today I am still waiting to get my money from the Divisional Court, that at this point should amount to $29,800.00, for the upstairs apartment.
Even after that, I will be missing $37,400.00 from the upstairs unit, and a whopping $64,800.00 from the downstairs unit. And the LTB has a limit of $35,000.00 per application….
