Widow’s struggle is with moral deadbeats
The story features such pointless cruelty that it seems like it must be a mistake — the result of some paperwork error, perhaps.
As reported by my colleague Marco Chown Oved this week, Cyrilla Hamlet, depressed and suffering migraines after the murder of her son, found herself unable to pay her rent. The 67-year-old widow’s landlord evicted her when she bounced a cheque. That’s a cold-hearted bit of business, but par for the course in the home rental industry — if you can’t pay, you can’t stay. Those are the rules. That’s sad, but not exceptional.
But what happened next is some next-level wickedness. The eviction order from the landlord tenant board said that Hamlet’s landlord, MetCap Living Management, should refund her $27.54 of her deposit. Instead, they sent her a bill for $2,731.12. According to their reckoning, this woman whose lease they were unilaterally terminating, whom they were throwing out of her home, owed them rent payments in lieu of 60 days’ notice that she was leaving the apartment.
Think about that for a second. Why would she be expected to give MetCap notice that she was leaving? MetCap was the one who gave her 10 days’ notice that she was to leave, whether she wanted to or not.
You’d think it must be a mistake; that someone in the faceless corporate bureaucracy forgot to note in the computer that she’d been turfed and the wrong report was generated somewhere. You’d think wrong.
This, it turns out, is a calculated bit of cruelty, standard practice for a company that is one of the city’s biggest landlords. When they evict someone, they send them a bill for two months’ rent. As you’d expect, many do not pay.
You wouldn’t really expect them to, since: 1) They obviously have no money, which is why they’re being tossed out in the first place; and 2) The claimed debt itself seems so nonsensical on its face. “It’s not even real debt,” as Wesley Harness, another victim of the scheme, told the Star. When they don’t pay, MetCap’s in-house collection agency, Suite Collections, reports them to the credit bureau as deadbeats. Which means they can have trouble getting any kind of loan for years afterward.
In this world where your credit rating can determine whether you’re eligible for full citizenship — determining whether you can buy or rent a home, get a car, phone or the cards that are the standard currency in the online shopping era, even often influencing your employability — a mark on your credit rating is a particularly effective and lasting form of defamation. Bad enough that it honestly reflects your late payments, bounced cheques and eviction. Worse on another order that it says you abandoned a significant debt altogether.
It’s a form of punishment. But one not levied by the courts (MetCap, in the cases the Star investigated, declined to pursue these debts it claimed in court where their legitimacy would be judged by authorities) but by aggrieved parties and credit bureaus. In theory, everyone has the right to dispute claims that appear on your credit report. In practice, we’ve been told by people who have tried that unless the alleged creditor who put the mark on your record agrees it was put there in error, it is very difficult to eliminate the damage.
If it makes no sense, to many of us, that this debt has any legitimacy at all, MetCap’s defence is that it believes what it is doing is legal. Suite president Brent Merrill wrote in an email to the Star that tenants receive orders of eviction because they have breached the terms of their lease, so those tenants are responsible for paying out the notice period. “We believe that we are following the law in the Province of Ontario.” MetCap cites a 1993 precedent that interpreted the old Landlord and Tenant Act.
Never mind that that law was replaced by a new one, the Residential Tenancies Act, in 2007. And never mind that a lower court found, in 2013, that under the new law “where the tenant vacates after notice by the landlord no damages for lost rent are payable” — and that judgment specifically sites the 1993 decision and says “the (Residential Tenancies) Act has overridden the common law and eliminated the landlord’s option to terminate the lease and claim damages for loss of future rent.”
Never mind that the minister of municipal affairs and housing, Ted McMeekin, has said he does not think this practice is legal, and has said if somehow it is, he will ensure it is made illegal forthwith.
Never mind all the legal questions for a moment, because there’s a larger moral question. As a fellow landlord, Robert Gentile of the Quinte District Landlords Association, puts it, “I feel these guys need to be stopped in their tracks for this abusive practice.”
People who receive eviction orders are typically poor — the very reason they are kicked out is that they cannot pay their rent. They are now often without a home of their own and scrambling to come up with first and last months’ rent to get a new one, if they can overcome the bad reference. Why would you add to these people’s misfortune by manufacturing a theoretical additional two months’ debt that they owe, and then placing a punitive mark on their credit rating when they don’t pay it? Even if it were legal, as MetCap claims, why would you do that? Akelius, another of the other largest landlords in the city, has told us that they definitely do not do it.
I suppose there’s a certain strain of logic that says pursuing any money you could arguably legally claim is just good business. That’s the logic of evil. To screw over someone who is in desperate circumstances, knowingly, just because you think the law allows you to? Legal or not, good business or not, I think doing that makes you a bad human being.
If only there were a credit bureau to which you could report moral deadbeats. With files from Marco Chown Oved Edward Keenan writes on city issues ekeenan@thestar.ca. Follow: @thekeenanwire