BRADFORD - It’s every landlord’s worst nightmare — a tenant who stops paying rent and refuses to leave.
That was the reality for Bradford’s Michelle Taddeo and her partner Tony Natale for more than two years. Worse still, even after they were finally able to get an eviction order from Ontario’s Landlord and Tenant Board and have the tenant removed, they discovered their fully finished basement apartment had been badly damaged, leaving them with an estimated $10,000 in repairs on top the $25,890 in unpaid rent identified by the tribunal, plus about $3,390 in legal fees.
“This place, we’re not going to rent it anymore, because of what happened,” she said.
Taddeo took BradfordToday on a tour of the damages including a broken bathroom faucet, toilet and vanity, broken kitchen blinds, faucet, cupboards, floor, ceiling tiles and damaged refrigerator, plus multiple holes in the bedroom door, as well as various walls.
On top of all that, Taddeo said it took her almost two weeks to clean an unidentified mess that had been baked onto the inside of the oven.
“He broke everything,” she said.
BradfordToday is not naming the tenant because his current contact information was not available, but among the mess he left behind were court and tribunal documents showing he had been in legal hot water with other landlords in the past.
When asked what she plans to do now, Taddeo was blunt.
“Not much,” she said, adding that applying to small claims court doesn’t seem worth it.
“I’d be wasting my time, because even if I get the bloody order, I can’t collect from him,” she said.
Meanwhile, Taddeo and Natale are still without any rental income from the apartment, and as a result may need to make changes to their lifestyle.
“What can we do? We need to stretch the budget,” Taddeo said. “It hurts. It hurts a lot.”
She’s been sending messages to Premier Doug Ford and York-Simcoe MPP Caroline Mulroney over the years, asking them to change the laws and regulations surrounding the Landlord and Tenant Board to make things more fair and to recognize that when it comes to landlords and tenants, there are good and bad examples on both sides.
The town council also recently acknowledged the problem and passed a motion calling on the province to protect renters and small-scale landlords, but the issue isn’t confined to just Bradford.
Since provincial changes during the COVID-19 pandemic, delays at the tribunal have impacted people across the province, with some recent examples in Ramara and Collingwood.
Stories from other landlords are also shared on the website for the Small Ownership Landlords of Ontario (SOLO), a not-for-profit lobbying group that started in the spring of 2020 in response to issues at the tribunal, and now claims to include more than 8,000 independent landlords in Ontario.
Based on self-reporting, SOLO claims their members have lost roughly $21.46 million combined as of March 14, and estimates between 50 and 75 landlords leave the Greater Toronto Area each month.
Situation turns sour
For Taddeo and Natale, initial issues started shortly after the tenant moved into the unit in 2020.
Despite posting notices on the door at least 24 hours in advance, Taddeo said their tenant wouldn’t allow them or technicians from Enercare entry to service the furnace, which is located in a room accessed from the apartment.
That problem became more frequent than otherwise necessary as Taddeo recalled regularly smelling the odour of cannabis smoke coming up through the vents, despite the lease including a no-smoking clause.
Calling or emailing would have been an easier way to provide notice, but Taddeo said the tenant refused to provide her with accurate contact information after moving into the apartment.
Along with the smoke also came the frequent sounds of shouting and banging as Taddeo recalled the tenant and his girlfriend regularly argued for 10- to 15-minute bursts for the first two years, during which time the girlfriend seemed to be living there as well.
Then, in September 2022, the tenant missed a rent payment, but resumed paying for the next three months before missing both January and February 2023.
At that point, the pair informed their tenant that if he couldn’t pay, they would need to pursue eviction.
“He came and cried to us that he couldn’t pay,” Taddeo said.
Out of sympathy, they decided to give the tenant a second chance and agreed to a payment plan.
That seemed to work a few more months, but by August, Taddeo recalled the tenant claimed he had no money, and when he gave the same excuse in September, she applied to have him evicted.
Long road to eviction
Having been a landlord since 1985, Taddeo said she’s only had one other tenant who caused enough issues for her to seek an eviction, but that was in the mid 1990s, when she said it only took about one month to go through the tribunal process and another month’s notice, after which the tenant left voluntarily.
This time, her experience was completely different.
Taddeo suspects her tenant had learned how to take advantage of an over-burdened system, and a report the Ontario ombudsman had found the average wait time to hear a case at the tribunal had then ballooned to eight to 10 months.
The Bradford landlord didn’t get a hearing until February 2024, five months after she applied, but because of an error in the dates on the application, it was dismissed.
At that point, despite having experience with the tribunal before, Taddeo decided it was best to hire a paralegal, just in case.
To her surprise, Taddeo recalled the paralegal insisted she offer the tenant $5,000 to move out — a practice referred to as cash for keys — citing the delays at the tribunal and lack of recourse for landlords.
Reluctantly, the pair agreed, but Taddeo said the tenant never responded to the paralegal’s offer, and instead asked the pair for $20,000 plus moving expenses and three month’s time.
“I said to him, ‘Get lost. I’d rather pay the lawyer,’” Taddeo said.
They were eventually scheduled for a second hearing at the tribunal in August 2024, but that was put over until Nov. 13, when the tribunal finally granted their eviction order. Still, Taddeo said they had to waive almost two years worth of rent and give the tenant until Feb. 2 to vacate.
After all that, Taddeo said she still had to make the trip to Barrie and pay a court officer, known as a sheriff, $400 to come perform the eviction, because Ontario’s Residential Tenancies Act specifies only those officers can enforce evictions, not police officers.
Taddeo feels it’s unfair to charge residents extra for the service from a special officer when they’re already paying taxes to fund both the courts and police — the latter of which she thinks could do the job just as well.
Picking up the pieces
Through it all, the process of dealing with both the tenant and the tribunal became so stressful that Taddeo and Natale were both seeing a psychiatrist for anxiety and depression.
Despite having no plans to put her Bradford apartment back on the market, Taddeo is still renting out a house she owns in Toronto to a trusted tenant.
She also knows several other landlords in the city who have told her their own stories, some of which she recalled being even worse than hers.
She said they all remain very concerned about the rental regulations here in Ontario and are hoping for change.
Meanwhile, Taddeo’s advice to others considering renting out their properties paints a bleak picture for the future of the rental market.
“The best thing is not to rent anymore, especially in the same house,” she said. “I know the rent is helpful, but it’s not worth it.”