New homeowner homeless in Nova Scotia

By all accounts, Tony Faulkner is a hard-working guy who pays his bills on time, plays by the rules and, like most of us at his age — he’s 37 — he’s just trying to get ahead.

Today, Tony and his wife are homeless — couch surfing, despite buying their first home earlier this year. It’s a three-unit apartment house in Dartmouth, and they planned to move into one of the units when the sale closed on April 2. In fact, as a condition of both his mortgage and insurance, Tony is supposed to be living there.

In January, when Tony bought the place, the former owner served the tenants in one of the three units with the required three-months notice to vacate so that Tony could move into that unit when the sale closed.

On April 2, Tony and his wife, who’d given up their previous abode, arrived with their worldly possessions ready to move into their new home.

But the tenants — three adults — hadn’t vacated the apartment and made it clear that they had no intention of so doing. Since January, when they’d received and signed the eviction notice, the relentless march of the coronavirus had brought COVID-19 to the province. It became their shield against eviction, and a club that could pound poor Tony Faulkner to financial pulp.

Buying your first home, while stressful, is supposed to be a joyous time, a momentous event in your life.

Unfortunately, for Tony, it’s a nightmare that won’t end.

He’s got the law on his side and all the legal documents to prove it, but no one is enforcing the law, and the COVID-19 crisis is the reason, or the excuse, depending on which side of the door you’re standing.

When the tenants now ensconced in Tony’s apartment received and accepted their eviction notice almost four months ago, the coronavirus was virtually unknown in Canada. It was causing a worrisome pneumonia-like disease in a Chinese city named Wuhan.

By April 2, it was a pandemic. The disease had a name, COVID-19, and was ravaging whole nations. Nova Scotia was under a state of emergency.

Because of the disruption to the economy, no new evictions were to be initiated in Nova Scotia if COVID-19 was a factor.

Theoretically, evictions unconnected to COVID-19, and certainly evictions that pre-dated the emergency were legal and were to be carried out. Tony’s situation clearly falls into the latter category, but that’s not doing him any good.

He turned first to the Halifax Regional Police to have the tenantsturned-squatters removed, but the cops landed on the side of the apartment’s occupants. Possession, it seems, in the time of COVID-19 is 100 per cent of the law.

Tony’s lawyer assured him he has every legal right to take possession of his property, but the police told him if he tried to do so — by changing the locks, for instance — it was him, not the people living in his home, who’d face charges.

So, Tony looked to the residential tenancies board for relief. After all that’s the provincial government bureaucracy whose sole reason to exist is to resolve problems like the one Tony is having.

But he was told that residential tenancies is only dealing with emergencies at the moment, and as far it was concerned, a homeless family, barred from their own home by former tenants who are disregarding a legal eviction notice, isn’t an emergency.

I suppose it isn’t, for the bureaucrats. They’re working from home at full pay. But it is one hell of an emergency for Tony Faulkner, who’s an essential worker going out into the world every day. His financial future hangs in the balance and the bureaucrats whose job is to help him, won’t.

Indeed, no one in the Nova Scotia government seems very concerned about Tony’s plight or his rights. Service Nova Scotia — the name is not meant to be ironic — can’t even muster a response on this issue, given more than a day to manufacture one.

So Tony’s paying to keep the family’s belongings in storage. He’s responsible for mortgage payments and utility bills, both of which are coming due. He’s nearing the end of his financial rope.

It’s been suggested that Tony and his wife may be collateral damage of the COVID-19 crisis. That’s a cop-out. They are victims of a lethargic, impotent bureaucracy that’s unable to walk and chew gum at the same time.