Landlord fined $490K for locking 14 tenants out of Sarnia apartments

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SARNIA — A company that illegally locked tenants out of a Sarnia apartment building after a fire has been dealt unprecedented fines by Ontario’s landlord and tenant board, says a representative with Community Legal Assistance Sarnia.

“The fact that the board member found the landlord’s actions to be so egregious that it amounted to the maximum fine on the 14 applications thus far is groundbreaking,” paralegal Melissa Bradley said.

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She said she can’t recall a landlord ever being fined the $35,000 maximum per application before, amounting to a total $490,000 fine.

Fines go to the board, she said, and are separate from damages board vice-chair Robert Patchett also awarded to individual tenants in his decision.

Patchett’s general decision is dated March 11, and individual decisions awarding damages per tenant were released in subsequent days.

Damages ranged from a few thousand dollars to around $20,000, including about $17,000 to one tenant in a family of four whose unit was undamaged when she left but was full of water, mosquitoes and stench when she returned, the decision reads.

The unit had also been boarded up by the time of her return, at the end of July, and was then deemed unfit for habitation, the decision reads.

The family had not been able to return as of a virtual hearing last October, the decision says.

The landlord, Mississauga-based Equity Builders Inc., is “wholly responsible” for the damages, Patchett said in the decision. There’s a 30-day appeal period, Bradley said.

The board last May found tenants had been illegally locked out after a fire at 721 Earlscourt Dr. in February 2023.

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An appeal was quashed in divisional court in July, and a sheriff for the Sarnia Court Enforcement Office let tenants back in a week later after the landlord failed to comply.

There was no immediate reply to an email sent Wednesday to Equity Builders, including principal Ash Singh and vice-president Tarang Shaw, requesting comment about the fines and asking about the timeline for remaining renovations.

A representative of Equity Builders said previously the company disagrees with the Landlord and Tenant Board decision, and that the tenants were being kept out for safety reasons.

A City of Sarnia order following the February 2023 fire restricted access to the building’s second floor, three units on the third floor and one on the first. None of the 14 tenants illegally locked out were in those units.

Equity tried to argue tenants couldn’t move back in because of needed asbestos abatement, but various testimony confirmed that work, in other areas of the building, could have been done even with the tenants allowed to return, Patchett said.

Patchett also found, on a balance of probabilities, that tenants faced threats, harassment and coercion, in the form of being required to obtain insurance to retrieve their belongings, being threatened with eviction if they did not obtain tenant insurance, and “abrupt and abrasive” communications with the landlord’s legal representative.

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Thefts also happened at the locked-down site despite the landlord hiring security showing a “reckless (disregard) for the landlord’s duty to preserve the contents of the building,” Patchett said.

Insurance continued to pay the landlord compensation for the lost rent, and there has been no effort to expedite repairs.

Work in three units still hadn’t started as of October, while the longest of the renovations at the outset was expected to take six months, the decision says.

“The repairs were not advancing in a timely manner … (and) certainly, there is no incentive on the landlord if they are being compensated for loss of rental revenue.”

The landlord’s “actions constitute an egregious disregard of the board’s authority and the (Residential Tenancies Act),” Patchett said.

Even knowing the board order to allow the tenants’ return, Equity refused to co-operate and “once possession was restored, proceeded to change the locks,” he said.

Five tenants, who were affected by the City of Sarnia order, are still waiting to return home, as repairs remain undone, Bradley said.

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Meanwhile, two one-bedroom units at 721 Earlscourt Dr. not affected by the city order were listed on realtor.ca as of Wednesday for $1,350 a month.

The listings had each been up for 89 days, and described the units as “newly renovated.”

But “these tenants remain sleeping on friends’ couches or sharing units with friends because they can’t afford rent anywhere else,” Bradley said, praising their tenacity in holding on for more than a year.

Another has moved on, she said.

“We can’t have landlords that would go around the laws of the province to cause more than a year delay and to just leave these people in limbo, in purgatory, waiting without explanation,” she said.

Bradley has said she hears almost daily about Sarnia “renoviction” cases in which a landlord tries to get a tenant to move out so the rent can be hiked.

Little thought was given by Equity, or their contractors and advisers, to the tenants’ right to return, Patchett said.

Patchett noted the landlord had also been found by the board to have illegally locked tenants out after a fire before, in 2010 in Mississauga.

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