We’re noticing an alarming trend in our housing law practice: corporate landlords are filing eviction applications against tenants based on nonexistent rent arrears. 

If we had only seen one case fitting this description, we would have written it off as an anomaly. But we’re seeing it over and over. 

Thankfully, when the Landlord and Tenant Board (“LTB”) is made to realize these landlords are mathematically incompetent or hopelessly disorganized (or both), it dismisses the eviction application, but it won’t impose any consequence on the landlord.

The tenants are relieved their tenancy is safe for the time being. However, they’re often saddled with thousands of dollars in legal costs because of an application that should never have been filed. And though the LTB can order landlords to pay up to $700 toward those legal costs, in practice it almost never makes them pay a penny.  

As a result, we’re taking these cases, spending copious time scrambling through paperwork, assembling defenses, and coaching tenants through the process. When it’s clear the application is based on bad numbers, we reach out to the other side’s legal counsel to try and reason with them. We send spreadsheets. Account statements. Emails and text evidence. Everything that should make it abundantly clear the landlord has made a very serious error. 

If we get any response at all, it’s generally something along the lines of: “We are very busy and will respond at greater length…never.” 

On the day of the hearing, the landlord’s representative will have submitted no evidence. They will have no idea what rent is owing or not. They will not understand their own case. So, they start begging the LTB for an adjournment or making up nonsense. In one case, for example, we saw a representative argue that the landlord secretly and for no apparent reason lowered the tenant’s rent without telling them, and that’s why the numbers on their N4 made no sense. 

We have a term for this approach: take all cases, prepare for none.

One would think, given the LTB’s infamous backlog, that adjudicators would be furious for the time and resources wasted by these garbage applications. In reality, adjudicators just dismiss the case or let the landlord withdraw the application as if it’s no harm, no foul. 

This is ridiculous – there has been harm and there has been foul. While the costs involved in these cases are negligible for large corporate landlords, for tenants they can be crushing and the experience is harrowing. They live with anxiety for months or years. They lose sleep. At the end of the ordeal, what do they have to show for it?  

Large corporate landlords may be playing a numbers game: file for enough bogus evictions and some will stick. Scare enough tenants and some will just leave voluntarily. Or you can drain tenants financially by means of the legal costs involved in fighting eviction, then they won’t be able to pay the rent.

Corporate landlords will keep running this playbook until our provincial government establishes real consequences for it - which is not difficult. Bogus arrears applications should result in an automatic legal costs award for tenants of at least $1,000. Furthermore, where a pattern of bad faith or inexcusably hapless eviction applications becomes evident on the part of a corporate landlord, the LTB and/or Ontario Rental Housing Enforcement Unit must impose (big) fines.

Otherwise, bad incentives will result in bad behaviour. And this bogus eviction tactic is just going to become business as usual for corporate landlords.