Technological barriers leave low-income renters at risk of eviction under COVID-19

Crystal Dorman and Ron Wood have had a lot to worry about this fall. 

Crystal's 80-year-old mom lives at a long-term care facility that has had one of Hamilton's worst COVID-19 outbreaks. Ron works as a personal support worker at a home for people with disabilities. They collect social assistance to fill in the gaps.

Then, late last month, they got a call from the sheriff. Their landlord was trying to evict them. 

"The panic that ran through me was incredible," Wood said. "I've got a lot of things I'm worrying about now that I really shouldn't be." 

Though Ontario suspended evictions earlier this year, the ban was lifted in August. Many local tenants have been caught in an evictions "blitz" that lawyers for low-income people say is "unconscionable." 

While COVID-19 still rages, the Ontario tribunal that hears complaints and considers measures like eviction is conducting its business online, which poses technological challenges for tenants without internet or with limited phone minutes.

All this while winter is nearing and the weather is getting colder. Advocates are lobbying Premier Doug Ford to reinstate a ban on evictions through the winter.

"The stakes are high," said Stephanie Cox, a lawyer at Hamilton Community Legal Clinic. "This is losing your housing in the middle of a pandemic."

A spokesperson for the tribunal said the Landlord and Tenant Board "strives to conduct itself in accordance with the values of independence, transparency, accountability, fairness and timeliness" and said it's "digital-first strategy" is intended to "enhance the quality" of dispute resolution.

At a hearing conducted virtually Tuesday morning, Dorman and Wood were successful in having their eviction stopped. But it was a complicated and stressful road to get there over the last few weeks.

They had been working with their landlord throughout the year to catch up on some rent payments they were behind on. Usually their rent was paid straight from social assistance to the landlord, but when Wood takes home more pay from his healthcare job, he gets less social assistance and the mechanism for automatically paying the landlord stops. 

They hadn't realized they'd fallen behind on rent, but when they found out, they had been working to pay it back, they said. 

With the sheriff's phone call, they scrambled. They called a worker at the nonprofit Good Shepherd who'd been trying to help them manage their back payments, who called lawyers at the Hamilton Community Legal Clinic. 

That was a Thursday. The sheriff was supposed to come the following Wednesday. 

Legal clinic lawyer Mohamad Bsat warned them that they might not get a chance to fight. But they put together a letter showing that they'd been trying to repay the back rent, and he sent it in by fax to the Landlord and Tenant Board. 

Before COVID, the tribunal would be able to confirm that day or the following day that a document had been received, Bsat said. But by the day before the sheriff would be coming, they checked in and tribunal staff said they hadn't received the fax.

"It was a giant scramble on that day to try to figure out what we can do to prevent them from being evicted," Bsat said. 

"Because this is essentially an eviction by design," he said. "It wasn't the fact that their arguments in the submissions weren't adequate, it was just that the actual process had failed them. And Crystal and Ron are not the only people that face this issue." 

'An insane amount of legal resources'

Bsat found an email address for a higher-up at the board, and emailed her, arguing the justice system was failing the clients. This was their only chance to tell their side of the story.

Then, at 7 p.m. the night before they were to be evicted, Bsat heard back. Tribunal staff had "found" the fax that had been sent the week before, and the eviction proceedings could be paused. 

The next morning Bsat went to the courthouse to catch the sheriff at 8:30 a.m. to keep him from enforcing the eviction order. A new hearing was scheduled for Dorman and Wood to present their case and try to avoid eviction.

"It needed an insane amount of legal resources, because of the fact that the system itself is broken," Bsat said. "And it doesn't give people like Ron and Crystal a fair shot at being able to stave off (eviction)."

The fax being found gave Dorman and Wood, Bsat and lawyer Katie Remington a chance to get the hearing rescheduled for this Tuesday. Dorman and Wood went to the legal clinic office downtown to call in to the hearing together. 

By Tuesday, they were behind just $93.50 on their rent, and Good Shepherd is helping them pay it, Remington said.

"I'm so happy that our clinic and Good Shepherd could collaborate on this case to stop this unjust eviction from happening," Remington said. "I am very worried about the number of evictions that are happening in unjust circumstances like these where folks don't have such community support and collaboration."

Andrew Choubeta, who represented their landlord in the hearing, declined to comment.

'It's a nightmare to be evicted in COVID'

The Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario said that across the province, there were more than 6,500 evictions hearings at the Landlord and Tenant Board tribunal in November. That was an increase of 21 per cent from the same month in 2019. 

And they say there are 7,000 more eviction hearings scheduled in December and January. 

Many low-income clients have tenuous internet access, or limited phone minutes, or no access to any device to participate in the hearings. Some tenants aren't receiving the notices alerting them to the hearing because they go to the wrong email address. Others do try to call in, but get disconnected or confused about the jargon used in the hearing. 

"It's painful," Cox said. "It's very difficult to advocate in this climate. The manner in which they're proceeding on these is unconscionable." 

In Niagara, many low-income people live in motels, where wifi is "notoriously unreliable," said Aidan Johnson, executive director of the Niagara Community Legal Clinic. 

"The fact that low-income people are sometimes on the receiving end of procedural injustice because the system hasn't figured out all of the technology is a real concern to us," Johnson said.

"It's a nightmare to be evicted in COVID."

Not all indications point to a worse year for tenants than years past. The city has had "reduced demand" for one of its key assistance programs for tenants facing eviction or their utilities being shut off due to unpaid bills, according to Rob Mastroianni, the city's manager of Emergency Shelters and residential care facilities programs.

A city fund to help tenants, called the Housing Stability Benefit, went "underspent" in 2020. City staff in charge of the program believe there were a few factors that helped some tenants be more stable in their housing this year: The federal government's COVID-19 income supports, the province's eviction ban earlier in the year, along with rent freeze action and flexibility from utility companies.

But the city doesn't expect that to last into next year. They expect people to face some challenges in the spring near tax time as taxes on those federal income support payments come due.

In a meeting of the emergency and community services committee last week, councillors on the committee endorsed a plan that would see $500,000 for 2021 to be applied to the city's "rent bank" that tenants can apply to if they're in danger of eviction, or their utilities are going to be shut off.