By David Reevley
An old, wry adage advises that we should never attribute to malice what can be explained by carelessness. Applying that wisdom to Ontario’s Tenant Protection Act suggests its designers were very careless indeed.
The law, which came into effect under Mike Harris’s Tories in June 1998, replaced a raft of landlord-tenant legislation. One of the most important things it did was to move rental disputes out of the courts and into the brand-new Ontario Rental Housing Tribunal. It has acquired a reputation as an eviction factory and the Tenant Protection Act has come under fire as a spectacular case of misnaming.
Is the tribunal’s reputation justified? Yes and no.
Laws on throwing people out of their homes have to be designed carefully. Political scientists will tell you that the government has a monopoly on the legitimate application of coercive force — on telling people they’d better do something, or else. The rental housing tribunal’s biggest job is to determine when that monopoly can be used for certain private citizens: landlords. Eviction, turning people out in the street, is a use of force only one notch below locking them up.
The worrisome part of the Tenant Protection Act has to do with a technical rule governing the length of time tenants have to respond to their landlords’ formal allegations.
If you’re a tenant and your landlord files to evict you (let’s say it’s because you’re two weeks late with the rent), you have only five days from the time you’re notified to produce a formal written response to your landlord’s application. Miss the deadline and you lose by default.
Then, you have 11 days to clear out, or the bailiffs will come and help you do it.
According to the tribunal’s statistics, more than 50 per cent of its cases are decided by default, turning people out of their homes into the tightest market Ottawa has ever seen.
Almost by definition, people who live in rental units tend to be less established than people who own their homes. They’re less plugged into the province’s regulation systems.They tend to be of lower socio-economic and education levels. And many are new Canadians, who don’t yet have a handle on their rights and how to assert them.
All of these people are likely to have trouble understanding and responding to a landlord’s application, especially given the bureaucratese the documents are written in.
Here’s how the tribunal’s documents explain to tenants how they can stop the proceedings against them:
“If the landlord makes an application to the Tribunal, the tenant can pay all of the rent in arrears, compensation and costs owing to the landlord or into the Tribunal (sic) at any time before an order under the application becomes enforceable.
“If this occurs, the part of the application relating to the eviction of the tenant, arrears and compensation will be discontinued and any order under it will be void.”
Right. That’s tough enough if your English is perfect. (Sneaky landlords might deliver the documents in French.)
Apparently, many people misinterpret the five-day deadline as a notice that they have to appear before the tribunal on that date. If they come without their written grounds for dispute, it’s already too late.
That’s a terrible way to make decisions as important as these.
Landlords have a clear and important right to kick people out of their rental units for good reasons, and not paying the rent certainly qualifies.
Their use of Ontario’s coercive force to do so, however, would be a lot easier to stomach if their tenants got fair chances to make their cases.