Toronto already provides the people, the conduct, and even the convictions that demonstrate the double standard:
- James Regan, Toronto’s so-called “professional tenant,” was found guilty in June 2019 on three counts of fraud over $5,000 for living rent-free in three high-end Toronto homes for approximately two years — a conviction, and proof that this conduct is criminal when it is finally pursued.
- Gary Bachelor and Mandy Chapple were arrested by Toronto Police in 2021 and charged with seven counts of fraud over $5,000 and two counts of false pretences, accused of repeating the same scheme against eight landlords over roughly a decade: paying first and last month’s rent, ceasing all payment, and then advancing fabricated hardship claims to prolong each eviction before moving on to the next. There are additional LTB Orders showing that their actions have continued as recently as January 2024 in the higher Divisional Court file 599/23 dated January 8, 2024 in the amount of $24,800.
- Robert Babos and Adrienn Kompusz were arrested in September 2024 after allegedly renting a Toronto property, refusing to pay, and providing fraudulent information to the Landlord and Tenant Board.
If the objective is to make it easier to hold landlords criminally liable, then cases such as these should be no harder to prosecute. The law is already in place — fraud over $5,000 and false pretences under the Criminal Code — and Regan’s conviction confirms that it applies. What is missing is the will to invoke it when the victim is a landlord.
This is not an abstract grievance. SOLO’s members report the same experience almost daily: a tenant secures a unit through fabricated income or references, stops paying, damages the property, and then exploits every procedural avenue available — adjournment after adjournment, manufactured hardship, appeals — to extend a single eviction over many months, and in too many cases years. For an owner of one or two units, this is not a line item. It is tens of thousands of dollars in lost rent, further thousands in damage, and in some cases their own mortgage, savings, or retirement. These landlords are told only to retain a lawyer and wait.
The scale of the problem is a matter of public record. The following are ten recent Toronto LTB orders for unpaid rent, with names withheld and each identified by its file number. Please take special note that on July 24, 2026, the LTB provided 40,000 public Orders across Ontario that amounted to $200M in unpaid rent compiled by Openroom.ca. Yes, $200,000,000 and only during the period of January 2026 to May 2026.
| Arrears | LTB order |
|---|---|
| $119,144.65 | LTB-L-023229-26 |
| $126,584.10 | LTB-L-012873-26 |
| $5,926.54 | LTB-L-097320-25 |
| $14,311.58 | LTB-L-085377-25 |
| $12,906.00 | LTB-L-002708-26 |
| $21,412.21 | LTB-L-010903-26 |
| $41,086.00 | LTB-L-013393-26 |
| $12,793.50 | LTB-L-103830-25 |
| $10,325.14 | LTB-L-093494-25-AM |
| $14,568.00 | LTB-L-085912-25 |
That represents more than $379,000 in unpaid rent across ten orders, with individual orders as high as $126,584.10. All are civil matters. No charges were laid and because a tribunal money order is frequently uncollectable, most of these landlords will never recover any portion of it. Each entry may be verified by its file number in the public LTB record on Openroom.ca (select legal research) or the LTB Order Catalogue https://data.
Your own argument is that a victim should not be required to gather the evidence, pay the fees, and retain counsel while every other victim of a crime may simply call the police. That is precisely the position in which landlords are left today. We do not defend slumlords or bad-faith evictions; pursue them, and you will have our support. But a councillor establishing a mechanism to compile evidence and refer housing-related wrongdoing to law enforcement cannot, in fairness, direct it in only one direction. If RentSafeTO data can be used to flag landlord fraud and negligence, the same principle requires that tenant-side fraud and the deliberate abuse of the eviction process be treated as what they are — and that the Landlord and Tenant Board be resourced so that neither party waits years for justice.
Equal protection under the law, or it is not protection at all.
