'Flimsy' N5 notices evicting scores of London tenants, tenant group says

Should her landlord be successful in ending her 20-year tenancy, 66-year-old Lea Donaldson can only think of two possible destinations. 

"I'll end up on the street or in a shelter, and I'm not doing that," she said.

Donaldson lives with her brother on the fifth floor of a rundown apartment building at 80 King Edward Ave. in south London. The building, along with a handful of neighbouring apartment buildings on the same property, were sold in February for $18,800,000. 

The purchaser was Eagle Apartments Ltd. The vendor was Vangar Properties Inc., who'd purchased the buildings in 2012 for $6,258,000.

Over this past year, Donaldson and more than 50 of her neighbours in her building and others at 84-96 King Edward Ave., have been issued N5 forms. The N5 is a legal notice which indicates a landlord's intention to evict because the tenant is causing damage, overcrowding or interfering with others.

But Donaldson, who has health issues and uses a walker, said she's been a model tenant over the past two decades. So why is she now facing eviction? According to the N5 filed by the landlord, she failed to tidy up and move furniture and appliances away from walls as required for a spraying for cockroaches the landlord had notified her about a week earlier. 

"The tenant had not completed the preparations as required, causing the landlord's contractor to not be able to treat the unit in its entirety," the notice says. It lists other issues, such as the garbage in the suite was not taken out, the floors were dirty and dead cockroaches from previous treatments were still on the floor.

Donaldson denies this and says she did prepare, although admits that moving furniture and appliances isn't something she can do. She thinks the real reason for the notice has more to do with the fact she's only paying $800 a month for a suite that could rent for much more on the open market. 

"They want to double the rent," she said. "In some cases, they want to triple it."

Without approval from the Landlord and Tenant Board, landlords in Ontario are only allowed to increase rent for most existing tenants by the province's annual rent increase for inflation. This year that guideline is set at 1.2 per cent.

But when suites become vacant, landlords can reset the rent to any amount new tenants are willing to pay. 

CBC News reached out to Eagle Apartments and to Universal Property Management, the Waterloo-based company that manages the building. Neither responded to a request for an interview. 

If Donaldson suspects the N5 is not about preparation for the bug spraying appointment, she's not alone. 

Jordan Smith is with the London branch of the tenants' advocacy group ACORN. His group interviewed more than 60 tenants on King Edward who received N5s following bug spray appointments since the building changed hands.