Five years after first getting an eviction order, residents of a trailer park in Simcoe have one last chance to stay in their homes.
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The trailer park sits on Queensway West — a busy commercial street — on land zoned “commercial service,” but the park is grandfathered in as a nonconforming use.
Residents were ordered out in 2019, but an error in the order remained proceedings for a year. The tenants then appealed the revised eviction order to the provincial Landlord and Tenant Board.
The property owner, Simcoe business owner Robert Kowtaluk, told LTB that he wants to clear the property and lease it to his daughter’s heavy equipment business as a vehicle showcase.
The board sided with Kowtaluk in 2022, ordering the tenants off the property by October 2023.
The tenants’ lawyers appealed that decision to divisional court, and more than a year later, after filing written arguments in April 2024, their appeal will be heard in late January.
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Over that time, some tenants moved away, leaving 10 of the 11 trailers still on-site occupied.
“Our position is the eviction should not have been granted to the landlord,” said Joel Yinger, a lawyer with the Community Legal Clinic Brant Haldimand Norfolk, who is representing the tenants.
“We are advancing an argument that the tribunal made legal errors when they initially decided in the landlord’s favor, and those same errors were upheld on review.”
The situation is complicated because the tenants own their mobile homes, but not the land on which they sit.
So to leave, they would need to pay to move their aging homes to a new site and find another trailer park with places to put them — no easy feat in Ontario, especially for seniors on fixed incomes and people surviving on social assistance, which describes most of the tenants.
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Under the Residential Tenancies Act, Kowtaluk must give his departing tenants $3,000 or one year’s rent, whichever is less.
The tenants pay $350 in monthly rent, well below market rent for a one-bedroom in Norfolk, where the vacancy rate for rentals is virtually zero.
“This is one of the reasons we’re going to the lengths that we’ve been going,” Rosalea Thompson, staff lawyer with the Advocacy Center for Tenants Ontario, told the Spectator.
“These are these people’s homes. They own the thousands of trailers, they’ve put dollars into the trailers, and there’s nowhere to take them.”
Some of the trailers have sat on the land for over a decade and are impossible to move without damaging them, Thompson noted.
“These are factors that the Landlord and Tenant Board has to weigh in the balance — the hardship of eviction for these tenants,” she said.
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“These are people who built a community. They all settled in thinking they would live out their days here. In the context of a housing crisis, it’s quite the far-reaching effect on these tenants and their families.”
Kowtaluk’s lawyer, Matthew Harmes of Simcoe firm Cobb and Jones, did not respond to an email seeking comment for this story.
After the tenants’ appeal was filed in October 2023, Harmes told the Spectator the tenants had their day in court and the LTB’s ruling in his client’s favor was “appropriate and correct.”
“Our client intends on contesting the appeals vigorously and is confident that the decisions will be upheld,” Harmes said at the time.
JP Antonacci is a Local Journalism Initiative Reporter based at the Hamilton Spectator. The initiative is funded by the Government of Canada.
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