Tenant likely not entitled to compensation for A/C outage

Q: I live in a highrise apartment building in the west end of Ottawa. Over the past few months there have been occasional problems with the building’s air conditioning system that serves all tenants’ units, although last summer it worked just fine. Recently, for some of the hottest days of the summer, the A/C broke down entirely. We were without cooling for five days. Am I entitled to compensation from my landlord for the discomfort?

A: Based on what you indicated, the answer is probably not.

The Residential Tenancies

Act requires that an apartment’s rental units and common area amenities be kept in a good state of repair. However, that does not mean that the landlord guarantees that nothing will ever break down. Instead, the landlord’s obligation is to perform a reasonable amount of preventive maintenance and then to reasonably quickly repair building elements that break down.

A reasonable amount of preventive maintenance is what neutral experts in different industries recommend for the equipment they provide and maintain, or what most rental providers do (which is usually pretty much the same thing). The most common kind of neutral experts are consultants, often engineers.

Repairing building elements reasonably quickly means doing what is sensible to do the repairs. In the summer, there is no rush to repair a heating furnace or boiler. In Ottawa in April, there is not much rush to repair air conditioning, but in July or August, there should be a rush to repair air conditioning.

When the air conditioning breaks down in July or August, a landlord should call in their air conditioning contractor immediately. Especially in a large building, one would expect the contractor to respond the day they are called or the next day at the latest. What may have held up the repair for the few days is the need to obtain parts. Often, even the best repair person cannot perform an immediate repair without key replacement parts.

Parts sometimes have to be ordered from another city, which then takes a few days for them to arrive. In the worst case, major parts may have to be manufactured specially, which can impose a delay of several weeks or more.

For such a delay, the landlord would only owe tenants compensation if the landlord had failed to live up to their obligations. That could arise by not performing reasonable preventive maintenance, by not calling in a repair contractor quickly or by not replacing the cooling system when that needed to be done. However, in your case, you indicate that the air conditioning worked fine last summer. That suggests that it did not need to be replaced.

ONTARIO RENT GUIDELINE FOR 2020

The guideline for residential rent increases taking effect between Jan. 1, 2020, and Dec. 31, 2020, is 2.2 per cent, based on the increase in the Consumer Price Index. To take a rent increase, landlords need to provide the tenants of each rental unit 90 days written notice using the form approved by the Landlord and Tenant Board. Until April 2017, rental units in buildings first occupied after 1990 were exempt from the guideline. However, now, in general, only units occupied as rental units after November 2018 are exempt from the guideline.