Tribunal sides with harassed tenants
Ruling grants $30K to residents targeted in anonymous posters
In what is being described as a precedent-setting ruling, the Human Rights Tribunal has awarded $30,000 to a number of tenants at a Scarborough co-operative who say they were targeted by vulgar posters nearly four years ago.
While the culprit who put up the flyers has never been formally identified, it was still the responsibility of the volunteer board of directors at Rouge Valley Co-operative Homes Inc. to promptly address the issue and communicate with the tenants about actions the board was taking, ruled tribunal vicechair Douglas Sanderson.
“The respondent (board of directors) was not responsible for the harassment, but was responsible for not addressing the harassment adequately,” he wrote in his 87-page ruling released last week, nearly a year after the hearing in the case ended.
“The respondent’s failure to take rea- sonable actions to address the harassment was objectively serious. The applicants felt completely unsupported by the respondent, and the harassment most likely would have ceased sooner had the respondent taken meaningful actions more promptly.”
The anonymous messages, put up over several months in 2012 in the co-op building, labelled tenant Theresa Savoie an “inbred” and her then-9-year-old son who has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair a “retarded monkey” who “should have been put down when he was born.”
Savoie told the Star this week that she was pleased with the tribunal’s ruling.
“It was a strong message that we sent to the members of the building, and it’s going to be a strong message that we’re going to be sending to the general public,” she said.
The board’s lawyer said it is considering an appeal.
“The tribunal’s legal rule for these situations was created for large company employers,” Kiel Ardal said.
“We are a little concerned that the tribunal seemingly failed to properly adjust this legal standard to the very different context of non-profit cooperative housing, run by a co-op-member board of volunteers . . . The co-op feels that this is an unfortunate decision.”
Sanderson ordered the co-op to pay $3,000 to each of the10 applicants, as well as to post the ruling on the building’s bulletin boards.
Most of the 17 pieces of offensive material were placed on the door of one co-op member, the tribunal was told. The complaints and the co-op’s response filed with the tribunal suggested that the posters were somehow linked to a dispute between current and former board members.
The posters stopped appearing in the fall of 2012 when security cameras were repositioned in the building, lawyers for both sides told the Star last year.
Resident Debora Crew was called “c----” and a “he-she half-man-halfwoman” in several posters naming her. She told the Star this week she was proud to have spearheaded the campaign to go to the human rights tribunal.
“They totally got what we were saying and basically sided with us,” she said.
“Up until that point, it was silence and no one listened to us. That was nice, that somebody understood what we went through.”
The decision has precedential value because it clearly outlines a housing provider’s obligations for dealing with harassment under the human rights code, particularly keeping tenants updated on what actions are being taken to address the situation, said Karen J. Sanchez, who represented the tenants before the tribunal.
“We heard (board members) testify that they didn’t know who put up the posters, but as far as a housing provider is concerned, that’s far less important than assuring the victims that they have a right to live free from harassment and to say ‘Here are the steps we are taking to try and safeguard that right for you,’ ” she said.