Edmundston man 'surprised' as SCAN warning leads to eviction

An Edmundston student says he’s been given no right to defend himself after a warning from provincial investigators prompted his landlady to evict him.

Jimmy Thibault found out about the investigation when a notice was posted on his door from an officer working for the provincial government’s Safe Communities And Neighbourhoods unit.

“I was really surprised,” he says.

“I didn’t even know who those guys were. I thought they were cops but I didn’t really know. I was kind of lost.”

I’ve never taken drugs in my life, OK?- Jimmy Thibault

Thibault, 22, says the warning prompted his landlady to ask him to move out, even though no evidence has been presented in court and nothing has been brought before a judge.

The SCAN unit investigated after an anonymous tip from a neighbour that they suspected drug activity was going on at Thibault’s apartment.

“I’ve never taken drugs in my life, OK?” Thibault says in a 12-minute video he posted to YouTube.

Thibault’s landlady wouldn’t agree to an interview, but one of his neighbours, Veronica Basariga, told Radio-Canada she’d never seen anything suspicious at the apartment.

“No, nothing. They’re just neighbours. I don’t hear anything or see anything. They’ve never done anything wrong,” she says.

“They go to work, they come home from work, and nothing else. No noise. Nothing.”

SCAN unit started in 2010

The SCAN program was passed into law in 2009 and started operating in 2010. It’s designed to let authorities go through civil, not criminal, courts to push drug dealers and other criminals out of neighbourhoods.

​That means the burden of proof is not as high.

“It’s a smaller investigation with lots of reward and the problem gets fixed a lot faster,” says Mario Déry, a SCAN investigator who did not work on Thibault’s case.

“We can move them out pretty quick and the neighbourhood is pretty satisfied.”

Déry says the unit is made up of former police officers with experience investigating drug offences.

They only issue warnings after an investigation and only if they witness firsthand evidence of drug activity, he says.

And he says he’s confident if Thibault and his landlady received warnings, they were based on solid evidence.

“There’s no question there,” he says.

“The evidence is there, yes.”

Warnings can be challenged

People named in SCAN investigations have a right to challenge their evictions in court, but only after the fact.

“We ask them to leave. If they don’t want to leave, they have a choice to go to court and fight it,” Déry says.

But in cases involving landlords and tenants, he says, most cases never even go to court because the landlord evicts the tenant before it gets to that point — when SCAN issues a warning.

“There’s nothing to go to court with,” Déry says of Thibault’s case, “because it’s only a warning.

A lot of times, the landlord will turn around on his own or her own and use this to get the people out. But it’s not us that gets the person out, it’s the landlord.”

But Thibault say that makes it impossible for him to challenge the case in court.

“They don’t even need to prove there are drugs here,” he says in his YouTube video.

Thibault says friends of his may have smoked pot outside his apartment occasionally, but he has never consumed or sold drugs in his life.

Déry says the SCAN unit has evicted 20 to 25 people since it began operating in 2010. Only one case has gone to court, and the eviction was upheld, he says. The unit has issued 270 warnings.

In 2013, a Court of Queen’s Bench judge in Saint John quashed two evictions by NB Housing, the provincial government’s social housing agency, that it launched after SCAN investigations.

Justice Peter Glennie’s ruling was against New Brunswick Housing for not giving the tenants the chance to challenge their evictions, not against SCAN itself.

Still, Glennie said in his ruling that the SCAN investigations were “inadequate and superficial,” pointing out the investigator never spoke to the tenants themselves.

Déry confirmed that SCAN investigators don’t speak to the targets of their investigations because it might allow them to conceal their alleged drug activity.

But he says their investigations still must meet a certain standard before they issue a warning or begin an eviction.

“We have to convince ourselves that there is illegal activity happening at that location,” he says.