Right name, wrong house: Liens slapped on 14 properties registered to men with same name

Jaswinder Singh Brar owns one of 14 Manitoba properties that had liens placed on them. However, he wasn't the one who owed money and says the onus shouldn't have been placed on him to prove it.

Brar received notice in March that a lien of $127,800 had been placed on his Winnipeg home because another man with the same name defaulted on payments on a leased semi-trailer. 

It turns out Jaswinder Singh Brar, a software engineer, shares the name with a man who owes money for the big rig — and he's not the only one. Several other men with the same name received notice that a lien had been put on their property, too.

Brar says when found out about the lien he became so rattled he immediately took his blood pressure medication.

"It was hell for me," Brar said. "My daughter and my wife, they were calming me down."

It didn't take much for Brar, who works from home designing apps, to find the U.S. Department of Transportation records of Jaswinder Singh Brar, the president of H and JB Transport Inc., which, according to a court judgment, owes money for a semi-trailer lease. 

The address listed for H and JB Transport was among 14 properties owned by individuals named Jaswinder Singh Brar. A Winnipeg lawyer placed liens on all of them on behalf of TFG Financial, a company that finances semi-trailers.

TFG Financial won a default judgment against H and JB Transport in February. 

Brar contacted TFG Financial's lawyer who asked him to send his photo ID to prove he wasn't the Jaswinder Brar who owed money.

Once he provided proof of his identity, Brar said, the claim against his home was rescinded. 

"Maybe they just went after all the Jaswinder Brars in Winnipeg," Brar said. "And they are now ruling them out on a case-by-case basis after verifying their identity, which doesn't seem right." 

Brar feels wronged because the onus was on him to prove he wasn't the one who owed money. 

"You're supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, so this is a total reverse of that principle," Brar said.

Lawyer Barry Effler, who was the registrar general for land titles in Manitoba between 1996 and 2019, says he came across situations such as Brar's but it wasn't "a terribly common circumstance."