An Ontario Landlord Story Part 2 “Dealing With the LTB and the Sheriff”

When she did not vacate the property, nor pay rent for December, I filed an L3 – Application to Terminate a Tenancy:Applicant gave Notice or Agreed to Terminate the Tenancy.I did not, on the advice of the LTB customer service person, file any additional issues at this time, as these were likely, he said, to prolong the process by requiring hearings.

This application was accepted and I received an eviction order within two days! For all the good it did us. When I spoke to the Sheriff’s Office it became clear that there would be no immediate resolution in spite of the order. The earliest they might possibly trouble themselves to come out and serve her with the notice of eviction was “sometime late January.”

I found this extremely problematic, and did a great deal of research online, only to discover that delays of weeks, or even months, are apparently quite common in Ontario.

The Sheriff has a monopoly on evictions, and eviction orders only say “on or after” … they don’t set any sort of guidelines for what “after” might mean. Phone calls to my MPP’s office, the Ontario Ombudsman, and the Ministry of the Attorney General which oversees this “service” had no impact.

In any case, on the day which the eviction order could be turned into the Sheriff’s Office I (stupidly!!!!) I did exactly that, paying $401 for the Sheriff to not do his job. When I arrived at home, I discovered that the tenants had stopped by to serve us with a notice of a hearing and a stay of the eviction order.

The hearing date given on that set of papers was a Monday, but in Mississauga – an interesting choice, given that the Barrie office is significantly closer – but since I did not teach on Mondays, I was fine with that.

Since we were having a hearing anyway, we decided to cover all of the issues and I paid another $170 to file an L1 re: nonpayment of rent, and an L3, notice to evict based on the second N5. I also included a note asking that, due to my teaching schedule, hearings not be scheduled on Thursdays or Fridays, and a copy of my timetable.

When I received my notice of hearings, they were scheduled for not one, but two consecutive Thursdays – and when I called to complain about this, I was told that the tenant had requested that the initial hearing be moved and that this was also scheduled, now, on a Thursday, although not either those on which mine were scheduled.

Apparently, no one at the LTB thought anything of forcing me to miss work not once, but on three consecutive Thursdays. If I was stupid enough to rent to deadbeats, clearly I deserved to also lose my job – although how they think that landlords will be able to continue to pay all the bills for the deadbeats without employment is beyond me.

They would not even consider rescheduling anything until I obtained written permission from the tenants!

This is a ridiculous requirement – the tenant certainly did not obtain my permission to move the initial hearing from a date on which I could attend without placing my job at risk to one which did exactly that – nor did she ever bother to notify me of the change.

Presumably she thought I would like to drive to Mississauga to find out that the date had been changed…