Lack of tenancy enforcement creating 'a breeding ground for abuses,' says legal worker
CBC
When Patricia Celan bought her first rental property in Dartmouth, N.S., to help her get through graduate school, she thought it would be smooth sailing. But when she handed over the keys to her new tenants, things changed.
Celan's tenants provided her with cheques for the first month's rent and damage deposit, as well as post-dated cheques for the first year. But the first one bounced. The cheques were fraudulent.
As the weeks passed with no rent, Celan tried to go through the official channels to evict her tenants. After a hearing with residential tenancies, she received an order of the director that her tenants should pay her the missing rent and vacate the unit.
But months later, the tenants still haven't paid rent, and are still living in her unit.
"It's become basically a full-time job trying to figure out different ways to deal with the different components of this, dealing with the stress of it," she said. "The emotional impact is really, really overwhelming. It has completely drained me."
Celan is now on a leave of absence from her studies, and deeper in debt. She believes the slow process and lack of enforcement within residential tenancies can encourage people who break the law by letting them get away with it.
According to the province of Nova Scotia, when a landlord or a tenant has an issue with the other party that they're unable to resolve alone, they can apply to the director of the Residential Tenancies Program for mediation or a hearing.
If mediation doesn't work, the two parties can move to a hearing with a residential tenancy officer. Within 14 days, the officer will provide a decision. The other party has 10 days to appeal, then the order can be enforced in small claims court.
Kevin Russell, the executive director of the Investment Property Owners Association of Nova Scotia, said his organization has been asking for the government to create a compliance and enforcement unit since July 2021.
"Laws that are supposed to protect property owners and tenants from abuse need better enforcement from the Nova Scotia government," Russell said in a statement.
Ahmad Almallah is a renter who moved out of a Halifax unit last August. He said the unit was cleaned and there was no damage, and he received positive feedback from the unit's property manager, so he expected to get his $1,575 damage deposit back.
A year later, he has not received the money.
In December 2021, after going through the residential tenancy hearing process, Almallah made it to small claims court, but his former landlord still would not pay.
"It showed that the landlord is very bold in his stance where he knows that nothing is going to be enforced, nothing is going to happen against him," Almallah said.
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