Did 37 Year Old Broke Loser Get Evicted?

About a year ago now, I posted my how to become a 37-year-old broke loser video. It's been a bit over a year now, and many of you have asked me, "So, did you get evicted yet?" Well, the legal process is still ongoing, but I have a lot to fill you in on. In this video, I'll be candidly criticizing a large number of powerful people and organizations. So, if I suddenly die under mysterious circumstances, you can use this video to build a long list of potential suspects. I'll also be making use of this tinfoil hat. To briefly recap my situation, last year the apartment building that I live in was taken over by a new landlord who promptly started evicting tenants using N13 notices. This practice is a common tactic to avoid rent control obligations in Ontario. Now, some of you will say rent control is communism, but I already covered that in this video. I always pay my rent on time, and the law says that I have no obligation to give up my cheap apartment, and mathematically I simply can't afford to. And some of you will ask, "Why am I, an able-bodied person living on welfare, taking up social housing for the poor? Why don't I just get a job?" Well, I have a job. I pay all of my taxes and payroll obligations. I also have a business that pays corporate income tax, the same corporate income tax that funds your beloved social services. I also don't live in social housing. The building that I live in is just a regular market rate apartment building that I found by googling apartments for rent 8 years ago. So, a lot of you out there are probably facing a similar situation to mine right now. And hopefully this video can help you if you're also experiencing a renovation. So, I think the best method is to just do a review of the timeline that I have here on my laptop. So, starting from the beginning, the building that I live in was purchased by its new owner on November 15th, 2023. And I think it was sometime around the start of November when I heard some rumors that the building had actually been sold. And I kept asking the previous superintendent for updates on what was going on with who actually owned the building. And it was actually on November 15th that the previous supers posted a note in the hallway saying that the building had been sold and not to try and contact them. The previous landlord had returned our rent checks for December. And for the next week, there was no sign of or communication from the new landlord. With the month of December just over a week away at this point, we were confused about where we should be paying our December rent to. Now, it was around this time that I got the first of many letters through my mail slot talking about the potential threat of renovictions. And this was something that I'd heard of before, so it did concern me a bit. And initially, I didn't really pay too much attention to these letters. And I kind of just hoped this was a a general issue that happened to someone else and maybe this problem would go away and it wouldn't happen to me. Now, this letter here is one of the first letters that I got that mentioned an organization called Acorn. And overall, I think the letter does have some really useful information in it, especially for the older tenants who would have a lot of difficulty researching what their rights are in this situation. Now, the letter itself was addressed as being from a fellow tenant, and the contact email is a fairly generic Proton email address. Proton Mail is an encrypted messaging service that's often used by people who want to communicate anonymously. When I saw that the letter was sent anonymously, that was something that made me not pay too much attention to it. If I had gotten a letter like this addressed from my next-door neighbor, I probably would have paid more attention to it. But from my perspective, getting an anonymous letter like this could just as easily have been sent by the landlord himself. A few days later, on November 21st, I received a notice from building management stating that the building had been sold. The last page of the notice included a direct deposit form to send rent payments to 1524256 Ontario Limited. Around this time, a woman from the social development center came by and handed out some flyers with some information about renovations. A few days later, on the 4th of December, I received a notice stating that the power would temporarily be off on the 7th of December. And the reason for this power outage was because the very first thing that the new owner did was uh replace the electrical panels. So, in this building, everyone's lease agreement explicitly includes the cost of electricity and water in the cost of monthly rent. And predictably, the new landlord wanted people to pay for these expenses themselves and in addition pay even more rent. A couple days later, on December 8th, I received a notice stating that there would be power disruptions on December 12th and 13th and also that they would need entry to my apartment on these dates. A couple days later, on December 11th, I got another notice for a general inspection on December 14th that would also need entry to my apartment. Now, for the winter of 2023, I was actually away during Christmas visiting family. So, I was actually kind of concerned that while I was away for those 3 weeks that maybe they might evict me from my apartment and I'd come back to find it empty or find my stuff not there. But when I finally got back in January, I was happy to see that I didn't get any eviction notices. So, at that point, I started hoping that maybe we're in the all clear. But unfortunately that was not the case because on January 31st everyone in the '07 apartment vertical slice got a N13 eviction notice. Now since I was not among the first group of people in the building to get an N13 eviction notice, it took me a little while to get up to speed on what was actually going on. Throughout the month of February 2024, I heard lots of commotion and discussions in the hallways. 15 days after my neighbors got their first N13 eviction notice was the first ACORN meeting on February 15th, 2024. Now, I actually missed this initial meeting, so I'm not quite sure how it went, but I believe that this is the point where ACORN started to get involved and try and set up some sort of tenant union in the building. Now, a couple weeks later on February 28th, the tenants held a rally in the lobby. And I guess the point of this rally was to protest the renovations. Now, I do recall hearing about this protest happening at the time, but I've never really been into protesting. In my opinion, the way to actually win these sorts of issues is to do so in a courtroom. I didn't attend this protest, but apparently the landlord called the police on the tenants that were in the lobby. About a week later on March the 7th was the very first tenant union meeting. Now, from what I recall of this meeting, it was very well attended. The room was completely packed. This was also the first opportunity I had to observe how many elderly people are in this building. Now, from what I recall of this meeting, I remember a lot of very encouraging and positive statements being made. There was lots of rhetoric about how we were all going to work together, how we were going to fight this and stay in our homes. There was also a lot of emphasis about how the landlord had no legal justification to do what they were doing. They also encouraged us to take extremely detailed notes and document everything. The meeting was run by two women who I had never seen before, as well as a number of other people who connected remotely over a Zoom call. Although this initial meeting was a confidence booster, I also found it very disorienting. Since my background is in software engineering, I have a lot of experience dealing with complicated systems. But even I found it very difficult in this situation to figure out which organizations everyone there belonged to. Many of the communications that we got by flyers were simply anonymous. And even if we did get a person's name, there was no picture to go with the name. So there was no way to associate the name with the person at the meeting. This was also the first meeting where we were introduced to a number of other social organizations. One of the first things that I started to look for at this event was other people who I could trust and count on. In particular, there were a few tenants there who I recognized because I had seen them in the hallway over the years. Clearly, anyone who was a pre-existing long-term tenant in the building was likely to be a lot more trustworthy than someone from a random external organization. and not just for reasons of conflict of interest or potential malice, but if both of us actually live in the same building and we're both being evicted, then we both have lots of motivation to work together and solve our mutual problem. Another detail that I recall from this meeting was a sign-in sheet that was passed around. At the time, I didn't know what the sign-in sheet was for at this meeting. The sign-in sheet never made its way around to me, so I figured I'll just write it down next week. After the meeting was over, I recall talking to one of the women who was hosting the meeting. I provided her with a corporate profile report of one of the businesses that are associated with this new landlord. I asked this woman if she was a tenant in the building, and she responded, "Not yet." So, I assumed that she was just unlucky enough to have gotten caught moving into the building in the middle of this takeover by the new landlord. The next event was on March 27th, 2024, when I received a note addressed to me personally claiming that I have a car occupying a parking spot without permission. Now, I don't own a car and I don't have a parking spot here. When I got this letter, I decided to go down to the parking garage and take a look around, and the parking spot numbers didn't seem to line up at all with the apartment numbers. So, I had no way to verify if maybe someone else was parked in what would have been my parking spot. The note indicated that the monthly fee for parking was going up to $250 a month, up from the $50 that it would have been in my original lease. I asked a member of the building's new management about this supposed parking spot of mine that was being occupied and he said that they were simply handing out the same notice to everyone. A few days later on April 4th, 2024 was the second tenant union meeting. Now, I remember this tenant union meeting fairly clearly. The meeting started with a very long pitch to sign up to become a member of Acorn or to give a small donation. At the time, I remember thinking that their advertisement was very poorly placed. Ideally, I think they would have a much better conversion rate if this advertisement was at the end of the meeting and not at the start since most people were just barely getting familiar with what Acorn was in the first place. Having said this, I was more than willing to listen to their pitch if they were willing to help us. And even if we did have to pay 50 bucks a month or something, that was more than worth it because the amount of money that we were saving in our apartments each month was on the order of $1,000. For the rest of this meeting, we talked a lot about code of conduct and how we should all work together. We talked a lot about some hypothetical things that we could do to improve our situation. And some of the organizers there were very interested in doing another protest. We also discussed the possibility of having a general social event where we could go get some tea and coffee or something and do some planning together. As far as I understand, that event never happened. At the end of the meeting, some hypothetical dates were discussed, but no formal meeting minutes were distributed. And I think that this was the first meeting where we discussed the possibility of pushing for a local municipal bylaw to focus on preventing renovations. At a number of these meetings, an idea that was emphasized is that the landlord may try to turn the tenants against each other and that people might try to disrupt the meetings by saying things that were racist or discriminatory. In practice, I never really saw racism or discrimination to be an issue at the meetings, although we did spend a lot of time at the meetings talking about how this might be an issue. Now, a few days after this tenant meeting, I got a note through my mail slot. In the note, it says that some of the tenants felt that their trust had been betrayed with the protracted advertisement for Acorn membership, and other tenants had complaints saying that the meeting was not as organized as it could have been. The note suggested that we should go meet in the lobby to discuss these issues. Generally speaking, I agreed with the criticisms of the letter, but overall, I actually just found it kind of amusing that people were already starting to have disagreements. I didn't bother attending this meeting in the lobby and I just decided to stay out of it. The next meeting that we had was on April 12th at the social development center and the advertised focus of this meeting was to review the counter filing process against the landlord. Now this was the start of the period where things started to become very chaotic and confusing. Around the same time in the first half of April 2024, many long-term residents reported being locked out of the parking garage. This is despite being long-term residents of the building with a long-term agreement for underground parking in their lease agreement. Now, for the previous meeting that I mentioned on April 12th, I'm not 100% sure if I remember correctly, but I believe that that was the meeting where they talked about counter filing in relation to the parking issue. And this was a source of significant confusion from a legal perspective. There were two separate and isolated issues going on. The first was the unlawful evictions and the second was the parking issue. and many tenants, including myself, found it very difficult to differentiate between the discussion in these two issues at meetings. The next item on the timeline is on April 27th where construction dust in the parking garage triggered a fire alarm that required that we all evacuate the building. When the fire department arrived, I recall hearing the firefighter say that he went to look for the worker who was actually doing the construction, but couldn't find him. The firefighter wanted to tell the construction worker that he needed to use better ventilation or the fire alarm would probably just go off again, which is exactly what happened 2 days later when we all had to evacuate again for the exact same reason. The very next day after the second fire alarm, the second wave of N13 eviction notices went out. This was the day where I got my eviction notice. A couple days later, a representative of the building's management knocked on my door and asked me if I wanted to speak to the property manager about the notice that I received. I told him not right now, and that was the extent of the interaction. Other tenants told me that they were provided with the option to simply stay in their apartment if they agreed to pay more money. It's important to note that when a landlord gives you an N13 notice, that doesn't necessarily mean you have to leave. The N13 form can simply be downloaded by anyone from the tenant board's public website and then filled out with whatever you want. In order to actually evict the tenant rather than just suggesting that they leave, you have to actually go to the tenant board and request that they be evicted. In our case, the landlord didn't actually file until a few months later. Another thing worth mentioning is that the N13 eviction process is supposed to allow you the opportunity to return to the apartment when the renovation is finished. But this landlord has a reputation for not honoring that requirement. In general, if the landlord simply moves in a new tenant at a higher rate, there is no recourse for the tenant who was evicted since the tenant board obviously wouldn't evict the new tenant because they didn't do anything wrong. I actually heard from someone at a different building under the same landlord who tried to exercise their right of first refusal to return to the apartment after the renovation was finished. This person first got their N13 notice a couple years ago and still hasn't been able to return. Later that same day was the third meeting of our tenant union. At this meeting, a representative of the Waterlue Regional Community Legal Services was there and the information that she provided was a very helpful introduction to the overall process of legal filings at the landlord and tenant board. It was around this time when we started to get an overall picture of how these organizations plan to help us with the legal issues of renovations. During this tenant meeting, I recalled that the overall plan was to somehow combined our cases and filed them as a group. And it was explained that with so many people together in the same case, all presenting evidence, that the hearing would last for a very long time, and that this would slow down the overall eviction process and hopefully buy us enough time to get a bylaw passed. In the early days, I recall hearing that the plan was to file a group T2 against the landlord before the landlord filed an L2 against us. At this meeting, one of the representatives of the social development center said that part of the legal arguments that they plan to make against the rent evictions was to argue that the landlord was violating our human rights. On the other hand, the N13 eviction notices themselves focus on supposed safety hazards and mechanical issues. And if there was a legitimate physical issue with the building that affected the health and safety of the tenants, I can't see why the tenant board would buy an argument about human rights because those are two different arguments. And the N13 itself focuses on the merits of the supposed necessary renovations. But still, I was willing to hear them out and I figured things would get cleared up at future meetings. This was also the first meeting where I started to gain an understanding of all the different people and organizations helping us. At the center of everything was an organization called Acorn. I had never heard of Acorn before this experience, but since the renovation started, I started hearing about them everywhere, even from people in the YouTube comments and live stream chats. From what I understand, ACORN was responsible for setting up the initial tenant union. and the tenant union leaders were a couple of the people who were the first people in the building to get N13 notices and the tenant union itself consisted of people who physically live in the building. I also believe that some of the tenants in the building were members of ACORN before the renovations even started. In addition to this, there was also an organization called the Social Development Center. Just before the renovation started, a representative from the Social Development Center stopped by our building and handed out flyers to all of the apartments to let them know about ACORN. This individual from the Social Development Center worked in a department called the Eviction Prevention Center, and in addition, this individual was also a member of ACORN. A couple of other tenants told me that this individual was also a government employee in her role. I was not able to quickly verify this fact and I don't really have the time or desire to research it any further, but I did see that the social development center does get a bunch of grants for something. The tenant union itself was not a formal organization. It was basically just the term that we used to refer to the group of people who would get together and talk about the renovations. The meetings of our tenant union were held in the civic hub in Kitchener inside of an old church just across the street from a harm reduction center. In addition to all of this, there was also one more community organization involved called Waterlue Regional Community Legal Services. And as I understood it, the Social Development Center frequently interacted with Waterlue Regional Community Legal Services to assist low-income people. And in general, these legal services were only offered to people who meet certain lowincome eligibility criteria. However, at this meeting, I recall them saying that they would be loose with this criteria because there were so many people in the same room who had the exact same problem. Earlier, at one of the prior tenant meetings, one of the organizers said that they had a meeting with a lawyer scheduled the next day. I assumed that after this meeting, we would likely be introduced to this lawyer. I also assumed that we would eventually be expected to compensate this lawyer something. Some of the tenants in the building were really struggling financially. And for many of these tenants, it was clear that they didn't have the professional skills to work effectively with a lawyer. But early on, we still had a much larger number of tenants who were better off financially and intellectually. Given what was at stake financially, I had initially thought that we would at some point pull together financial resources to hire an additional lawyer. I think that it's incredibly generous for a free legal service to help us out in this case, but if we are not paying them for their time, we can only expect to get so much in return. For these people who were protected by rent control, the return on investment from keeping their apartment was on the order of about $1,000 a month per person. And even though many of these people are poor, if everyone had initially put up $1,000 to fund a group legal case, we probably would have been able to finance $40 or $50,000 worth of legal fees. The alternative is to simply pay market rates elsewhere, which would be an extra thousand every single month for the rest of your life. And even if some of the tenants couldn't afford the extra $1,000, I'm sure that some of the better off tenants would be more than happy to subsidize their neighbors. Around this period, I also started doing a little bit of my own legal research to figure out how much a lawyer would actually cost for this situation. One legal firm that I contacted had an hourly consultation rate of $250 per hour for their parallegal. And for this, they said that they would also do a little bit of research in advance, provided that you give them some initial documentation and information to look into. And they also quoted me at $350 per hour for a more experienced lawyer and not just a parallegal. For an individual T2 filing, they quoted me at $2,000 for a single case. And in my notes here, I wrote that I think they said that would give you 10 hours of consultation. And after that, they would charge you the hourly rate. And I also asked about the possibility of what if we were all to file together as a group. And they quoted me $5,000 for a group case. And they said that would include things like setting up a mailing list and getting everyone on the same page. If my financial position had been what it was 6 or 7 years ago, I probably just would have put up the $5,000 myself and tried to fund a group legal case for the entire building. Now, I had hoped to engage with the organizers of these meetings, and I assumed initially that they might have been doing some of the same research on their end. But as time went by, it became increasingly clearer that there was no concerted effort to actually pay money for a legal case, and instead, we were just going to rely on the free legal help. I suggested the idea of actually paying for additional legal help. But one tenant in particular really didn't seem to think that that was a very good idea. They complained that lawyers will charge you $500 per hour and that they're not actually worth it for us. $500 per hour is fairly believable for a specialized lawyer. But in our case, we didn't need a world-class expert. And clearly from my numbers, we could get a parallegal for much less than that. The same day as this tenant meeting on May the 2nd was also the first day that I joined the Slack channel. The Slack channel was a discussion channel that had been set up by a tenant in the building. The intention behind the channel was to give us a forum where we could discuss the ongoing renovation situation and do some planning. Around this period, I started to significantly ramp up my involvement and try and help out with the organization activities. After joining the Slack channel, I read through the entire conversation history to try and get an idea of who was involved in the organizing activities. Initially, everyone seemed to be very concerned about their privacy. Most people didn't have profile pictures or use pseudonyms to identify themselves. I decided that I would try and break the ice and use my real name and also use a profile picture. A few days later, on May 5th, 2024, I set up a website to hopefully help with distributing information to tenants. Up until this point, we hadn't really been getting any form of meeting minutes from the tenant meetings, and things like important dates or the date of the next tenant meeting were not readily available everywhere. I also felt that we were lacking a clear description of what exactly people should do next. I also thought it would be a good idea to have a list of the people involved in helping us. That would also include some instructions for how to contact these people. Another concern that was raised at tenant meetings was that a number of people in the building don't speak English very well. And ideally, we could have some documentation for them that was written in their own language. This is another reason that I thought that a website would be useful in this situation. Up until this point, the organizers had been distributing information by putting paper flyers through people's mail slots. For elderly residents who don't have internet, this would still be necessary. But I thought that at least some of this information could be distributed through a web page, which could also include automatic translations from the organizer source material. I attempted to coordinate multiple times with the organizers on this topic, but nothing ever came of it. I even added a feature to the site that would have allowed the organizers to post updates directly to the website anonymously. Eventually, the site ended up just being me posting things from my own perspective. One tenant expressed concern that some of the messages that were posted to the website could be confused with messages that were coming from some of the community organizations that we were working with. They suggested adding a disclaimer to clarify this and I agreed. Over time, I didn't seem to get much interest from the organizers about posting information on this website. Clearly, some information about our situation would have to be kept confidential, but a lot of information like the dates of our tenant meetings were something that we already considered to be public information. The physical flyers that were distributed in the building were distributed indiscriminately, and oftent times members of the building's new management would also receive these flyers, and they were the ones trying to evict us. A couple tenants told me that they checked the website every single day and that it was one of the few information sources that they had to get updates from. The next day on May 6th, 2024 with the workshop on T2 filings, which was also held at the civic hub. This workshop on T2 filings provided us with more information about filing at the landlord and tenant board. I believe that it may have been on this date that I got this consent form from the social development center. The forum seems to give quite a few rights to the social development center to speak on your behalf. The consent form says, "I give the social development center waterl region permission to one, speak to my landlord, my landlord's representative, other community organizations, the city of Kitner andor the landlord and tenant board on my behalf. Two, share information about me with my landlord, my landlord's representative, other community organizations, the city of Kitner, and or the landlord and tenant board. And three, receive information about me from my landlord, my landlord's representative, other community organizations, the city of Kitner, andor the landlord and tenant board for the purposes of eviction prevention and community support. For the most elderly and vulnerable tenants in the building, this kind of consent form was actually fairly reasonable since many of them had a very hard time understanding what was going on with their legal situation. If you asked them, they would even have trouble explaining to you that they got an N13 form, which by this point was a fact that had been repeated endlessly. However, in my case, I still had a lot of uncertainties about what would or would not be negotiated on my behalf. The Social Development Center is not a law firm and the person who asked me to sign the form was not a lawyer. So I decided to wait a little while until I had a bit more information about their process before signing the form. 2 days later on May 8th, 2024 was the march to city hall protest. This was to be a protest where we would all march down to Kitchener City Hall and apparently present a letter demanding that the city councilors approve a municipal bylaw that would protect us from rent evictions. As I mentioned before, I'm not really into protesting. But since I had also received my eviction letter only a few days ago, I figured why not try it out, see what all the fun is about. I volunteered that I could do some printing if they needed to. And one of the organizers asked that I print out some flyers for them. I also printed out the supposed demand letters that we would be presenting to city council. In addition, I also put the demand letters in fancy envelopes and put the names of each city councelor in a fancy Germanic font. I also printed out at least one protest sign for them. Frequently, when I see someone protesting something, I consider it a double tragedy. The first tragedy is that they're suffering from something that's so bad they feel the need to protest about it. And the second tragedy is that I can't read anything that's written on their sign. So I can't even think about how we would fix the issue. But for my printed sign, I made sure that this wouldn't be an issue. Early in the morning, on the day that the protest was to happen, information was circulating in the building, claiming that some people's cars in the parking garage had been broken into. There was already a lot of anxiety in the building, and this served to only increase it even further. When I came downstairs to the lobby on the morning of the protest, the landlord had hired security people who were sitting in all of the chairs in the lobby. For the actual protest, we did in fact marched down to city hall. Once we were there, the organizers of the protest said a few words. Apparently, for the day of the protest that we chose, the city councilors weren't actually working that day. So instead, we left the pile of demand letters with the secretary. Then it started raining very heavily on us, and the protest dispersed naturally. The cars that were broken into in the parking garage was naturally a topic of discussion in the Slack channel. One of the things that I asked about was for more information about what actually happened. Even by this point, some tenants were having trouble getting accurate information about what was actually going on. And this uncertainty led to considerable anxiety. One of the people in the Slack channel said that she could put me in touch with the person who had their car broken into. She also said that this information had been forwarded to a reporter who had done some articles on our building previously. She never put me in touch with this person, so naturally I asked for more information. At this point, she said that it's not my business to know. Now, to be fair, if the person whose car was broken into doesn't want to talk about this to other tenants, that's their decision to make. From their perspective, they have no idea who was actually responsible, and the police might want to keep certain details secret. But still, I was interested in knowing whatever effects I could. As far as I'm concerned, if there is criminal destruction of property occurring in the building that I live in, then it becomes my business to find out what's going on rather than sticking my head in the sand. This response did rub me the wrong way. But I decided to just leave it there. Even though some of this person's other responses didn't really seem consistent because of the parking issue that we faced previously, some of the tenants who used to use the parking garage were parking their cars on the street. and she suggested that maybe the cars had been broken into because they were now parked on the street. But clearly, since she actually talked to the tenant who had the car broken into, she would know that the break-in was in their parking garage. About five different tenants had their cars broken into. And I eventually ended up talking to one of these tenants who confirmed that the break-in absolutely did happen in the parking garage, which was supposed to be a secure area, that some of the tenants were even locked out of now themselves. I decided to just ignore all of this and not raise the issue further. At this time, I was still under the impression that the individual in these messages was another tenant in the building. However, I later came to understand that this individual was the same representative of the social development center that we interacted with at meetings and that they did not physically live in the building. Around this time, I started to get the feeling that we were finally building some momentum and actually getting organized. By this point, I was finally able to recognize all of the different people involved in the organizing efforts. I figured that the next tenant meeting would be very productive now that we were all starting to get to know each other. But unfortunately, we didn't have another tenant meeting until almost 2 months later. In the meantime, the next event on the timeline was on June 17th, 2024. On this date, a building permit showed up by the elevators in the building posted on all the different floors. The building permit title was permit to replace existing plumbing stacks on floor 3 to 15 in an apartment building. Up until this point, one of the things that had been discussed about our supposed N13 eviction notices was that any N13 eviction applications were only valid if the landlord had a building permit. Previous to this, they didn't have a building permit, but now apparently they did. This event also raised the anxiety level in the building, which I figured would lead to another tenant meeting, but not until a few weeks later. Around this time, I had been starting to reach out more to the leaders of the tenant union in our building. I had been hoping on organizing some sort of smaller meeting with the few people in the building who were much more motivated to work on our situation. However, since the day of the march to city hall protest, they hadn't been quite as responsive. Around this time, they were under an enormous amount of stress. The landlord also issued an additional second eviction notice against them for supposedly interfering with the reasonable enjoyment of another tenant, for supposedly having a freezer that was a little bit noisy. They say that there are always two sides to every story. And for the record, I would like to say that the leaders of our tenant union were very soft-spoken people. The claim that they were interfering with the reasonable enjoyment of other tenants, in my view, is a very extraordinary claim. one that demands extraordinary evidence on the part of the landlord. I would describe them as very soft-spoken and shy people. Around this period, they had left town for a few days, and when they returned, they found that the power to only their apartment had been shut off. As a result, all of their refrigerated food had been warmed up and spoiled. When this happened, I told them to check the breaker to see if it had been tripped, and he said that was the first thing that he checked when he got home. I believe it was the next day when sometime early in the next morning their power was mysteriously reenabled. And these tenants are not the only ones who I've heard of under the same landlord who have reported a similar experience. Another factor that put considerable stress on the leaders of the tenant union was related to maintenance requests. Something that was a topic of discussion at many of the tenant meetings was the new landlord's lack of willingness to do maintenance and upkeep on the building. A few tenants were not very happy about the new landlord. In their view, they thought that they could help out by bringing up as many minor maintenance requests about the building as possible. But since the new landlord was not very responsive to maintenance requests, many of these were directed instead to the leaders of the tenant union. But since they were just regular tenants in the building, their ability to do anything was very limited. And on top of this, they both had full-time jobs. By this point, we were starting to develop a bit of an information vacuum in the building. We hadn't had any tenant meetings in a while, and there was no information about when the next one was to be scheduled. The previous meetings had answered some of the tenants questions about how the legal case was supposed to work. But as of this point, I still didn't consider the initial outreach to even have been finished. The initial waves of anonymous letters had put a lot of fear into the older tenants, and many of them were often scared to even open the door. In addition, the new landlord also experienced a very high staff turnover. So, whenever tenants saw a new person knocking at their door, they didn't know if this person was there on behalf of the landlord to bother them. It was obvious to me that in order to get more people involved with what was going on that they would need a familiar face to interact with as opposed to anonymous flyers. I know from experience that in order to convey complicated information to people, they need to have it repeated to them. They also need lots of opportunity to ask questions and clarify things. I decided to do a little bit of outreach in the building on my own to convey the small amount of information that I had. I quickly found that people had a lot of legal questions and didn't know basic facts that we had already discussed at meetings. But unfortunately, I only had bits and pieces of information to give them. Up until now, there was apparently a mailing list that had been created. At the very first tenant meeting, the so-called sign-in sheet, I believe, was actually a sign up to that mailing list. At later tenant meetings, I recall hearing that this sign-in sheet was also a sign up to a mailing list. So, I put my name and email down for the mailing list. Having said this, I don't actually know which mailing list this sign-in sheet was for. The organization Acorn had at least one mailing list of their own. In addition, I believe that the representative of the social development center had their own mailing list for our building. And in addition to that, I believe that the Waterlue Regional Community Legal Services also had their own mailing list. I was eventually able to get on to Acorn's mailing list, but I never got on to the other two. It had also occurred to me that one of the potential explanations for why I wasn't getting details about what was going on was because I hadn't submitted the consent form yet. People in the legal profession have to be very careful to honor the confidentiality of their clients cases. However, I talked to some other tenants who had already submitted their consent form, and they didn't really have much more information than I did. Some of them were on the mailing lists that I wasn't signed up to yet. Some tenants shared these email list updates with me, although the information was fairly anemic. To try and get more connected with what was going on and get people better information, I reached out to the leaders of the tenant union. I asked them a few questions about the efforts that were taking place to get tenants in the building in touch with information about the legal services that were helping us and they referred me to the contact information of the legal service that we were working with since their office was literally just down the street. On June 18th, 2024, I decided to go visit them in person. At the tenant meetings where we had been introduced to this legal service, there was a lot of rhetoric about how we were all going to work together. There was lots of emphasis about how we should document and record everything and how all of this would be admitted as evidence for our group case. Some tenants had the perspective that there was a team of lawyers diligently working away on their behalf somewhere. When I visited their legal office in person, the individual that I talked to there said that they were very familiar with our building. I asked them if they had a specific person I should contact in relation to the group filing in our building. The person that I talked to didn't have a specific person for me to contact. Instead, she suggested that I should just direct everything through an application on their public-f facing website. Later that day, I did submit an application through their website. I volunteered some information and research that I had done. I mentioned that I had some previous experience going through civil court and I had more information if they wanted it. I never did receive a response or follow-up to this application. During my visit to this legal clinic, it was apparent to me that they had very few resources. Most of the people that they served were very lowincome and vulnerable people. When I visited the clinic, I saw what looked like a homeless woman crying in the waiting area. Clearly, this service was only appropriate for the most vulnerable members of society. This is another reason why I had still hoped that we could put together a paid legal case. Some tenants in the building clearly would have been able to afford a lawyer. But unfortunately, due to the disorganization of our tenant meetings, the tenants who are the most equipped to fight the renovictions were the first ones to leave, leaving the most vulnerable tenants to fend for themselves. The next event on the timeline is on June 20th, 2024, when a notice appeared on the garbage shoot saying that it was out of order. The very same day, we also got a notice for another general inspection that would also require entry into our apartment. The notice that explained the condition of the garbage shootute did not actually obstruct tenants from still using it. Apparently, the garbage shoot had been physically damaged and garbage that was being passed down the chute was bouncing back onto the second floor garbage room, which created unpleasant conditions for tenants on that floor. And some tenants in the building didn't initially see the notice and continued to put garbage down the chute. I spoke with a member of the building's new management who said that the garbage shootute would now be out of service indefinitely. He said that someone had tried to pass a table leg down the garbage shootute which had become stuck and that this had caused garbage to pile up in the chute tearing down the inner liner. I talked to other tenants who reported being told slightly different narratives such as that the cause of the blockage was due to construction material being passed down the chute. About a week later, the garbage room was bolted shut. The next event on the timeline is on June 28th, 2024 when the third round of N13 eviction notices was sent out. And the same day, the following sign was observed on the front lawn of the building. Now, the content of this sign is a mind-numbingly boring detail. But unfortunately, it's a very important part of the story. In short, the sign was placed there because the landlord requested minor variances to the building lot. Whenever you try to build something in the city, there are all sorts of municipal laws that specify how you're supposed to do it. Things like the maximum height that a building is allowed to be, or in this case, the exact number of parking spaces you're supposed to have. Whenever the landlord requests a variance, they're requesting that the rules vary a little bit just for their specific case. If the maximum allowed height of a building is 40 m and you want to build a building that's 41 m, that's really not a huge difference. So if you go to city council and ask them nicely for a variance, they might just let you do it. And that's exactly what was happening here. Although confusingly, this variance was actually requesting three separate changes and not just one. Some tenants found this request for a variance to be extremely confusing. At least one tenant told me that they thought that the landlord was trying to build additional apartments in the parking garage. This request for minor variances is something that we'll return to. The next item on the timeline is on July 5th, 2024 when the corporate profile report for 1524256 Ontario Limited was updated to include a record for articles of revival. Something that I didn't mention previously is that the company that we were asked to make our direct deposit rent payments to was dissolved in 2008. This numbered company was originally incorporated on May 17th, 2002. On August 9th, 2008, it received an indication of being in default of the Corporation's Tax Act, possibly for failing to file annual returns. On December 13th, 2008, the corporate profile report includes a record for a cancellation request. Under the corporation's tax act section 241 subsection 4, a corporation gives protection to its directors from personal liability. But if the corporation is dissolved, this protection is undermined, which is of course why the director revived the corporation on July 5th, 2024. The next day, on July 6th, 2024, a fire started in the apartment that was occupied by one of the building's new management. The day after the fire happened, I actually wrote some detailed notes while my memory was still fresh. It was not long after I finished my live stream on Saturday. I noticed that my light started flickering a bit just before midnight. At the time, I thought that this kind of looked like an issue with the power, but sometimes my light bulb has a loose connection, so I turned the kitchen lights on to see if it would flicker, too. A few minutes later, the fire alarm went off. So, I figured there probably was indeed a fire, probably caused by the electrical disturbance that I saw. Since it probably was a real fire, I opted to take the stairs and not get clogged up in the elevator. I went into the eastern stairwell, and in there, I heard loud banging noises on the floor just above me. Since the place where the noises came from was only a few steps away, I opened the door to the hallway above me, and I immediately saw smoke in the hallway. A number of tenants on this floor were out in the hallway looking at the door of the apartment that was on fire. The loud banging noise that I heard was almost certainly someone banging on his door. I asked if anyone was in the apartment and nobody knew for sure. Smoke was pouring out of the apartment door. I mentioned to everyone that if someone was in there, we'd need to get them out very fast or they likely wouldn't survive. I could hear noises inside of the apartment and it sounded like the noise was probably from the fire, but I reasoned that it may have also been the sound of a person moving around in there. I banged on the door for a while myself, just like the other tenants had done. I tried opening the door, but it was locked. I questioned whether we should possibly try to kick in the door and make sure no one was inside. However, I know that this can also make the fire worse, and I wasn't quite sure what to do in the situation. I asked if anyone had called 911, and no one had yet. So, I opted to just call 911 and ask them what I should do. Upon calling 911, I was put on hold briefly. When someone answered, I described the situation. I said that there was smoke coming from the top of the door, and I let them know what floor we were on. I asked if the fire department had arrived if they were already there. I'd prefer that they take care of the situation and kicked the door in themselves. Around this time, someone else went ahead and kicked in the door. At that point, some tenants said that the fire department had in fact arrived. Around this time, the firefighters had arrived on scene. So, I concluded the call with dispatch. Later on, after the fire was out, I talked to one of the firefighters outside. I asked him what would be the right judgment call in this situation and he said it's a very difficult question to answer and it could go either way. Eventually I ended up talking to the tenant in the building who actually pulled the fire alarm. He said that he actually did hear beeping initially from the apartment. However, the fire in the apartment didn't actually trigger the building fire alarm, so he had to do it manually. When I arrived about a minute later, there was already some smoke in the hallway. After the firefighters put out the fire, the eastern stairwell was full of ash and water. This mess that was present in the stairwell went all the way down to the basement and the puddles of water and ash were not cleaned up and were simply left to dry up naturally. 2 days after the fire on July 8th, we had the next tenant meeting. This meeting was not run by the leaders of our tenant union as the previous one was. It was run by the individual from the social development center who was also present at most of the previous meetings. By this point, I had been attempting to do a bit of outreach on my own and build a list of people's contact information so that I could provide them with updates about what was going on. At this meeting, I handed out some flyers to other tenants in the building to try and get connected with them. By this point, a lot of these tenants were starting to become familiar faces, and I talked to them often in the hallways and in the elevator. As I was handing out the flyers, the individual from the social development center suggested that I was handing out conspiracy theories. I expressed my frustrations about the lack of information that we were getting and the fact that many tenants were still not on the mailing lists. At this point, we had been supposedly organizing for almost 6 months and we still didn't have everyone's contact information. As a result, a lot of tenants had already given up and just left the building. I figured that if we didn't get our act together soon, the whole tenant union would probably just fall apart and we'd all get evicted. Up until this point, this individual from the Social Development Center had tried to shut down a lot of what I thought were very reasonable conversations. Now, to be fair, in about 20% of cases, tenants would occasionally say things that I thought were inappropriate, things like unnecessary accusatory statements about things that other tenants may or may not have done, or whether or not they had taken special deals with the landlord. But in the other 80% of cases, she would try and cut people off when I thought they were asking reasonable questions. The provided justification was usually about preventing the spread of so-called gossip and misinformation or conspiracy theories. In previous interactions, I had simply submitted her request to stop talking about the issue and move on. After I vented my frustrations about the lack of communication, she said that I would have to change my attitude with her. During this interaction, I decided to redirect whatever energy she showed to me right back at her. I corrected her and informed her that in fact, she would have to change her attitude with me. Unsurprisingly, she didn't like to hear that, but I continued to double down and raised the volume of my voice substantially and used a lot of colorful language to emphasize the points I was making. I emphasized that I would continue to cooperate with her in helping the tenants in the building, but she would have to change her attitude with me. I figured that this probably would burn some bridges, but if we weren't making progress on our legal case, then the bridges weren't worth anything anyway. I also figured that this might provoke some productive side conversations that I was not a part of. For the rest of this meeting, the tenants discuss research that they had done on the parking variance that was posted last week. The next event on the timeline is on July 11th, 2024 when a tenant emailed me to report that they received a notice telling them to remove the air conditioner or face eviction or that they could have the electricity bill changed into their name to pay more. And this event connects to the general inspection that we had on June the 21st when presumably they were just looking for air conditioners. And a couple days after I heard from this tenant, another tenant emailed me with the exact same issue. Although for the second tenant, she had a portable indoor air conditioner. With large external air conditioners, there is a potential legitimate safety concern. But in this case, since the tenant had a portable indoor air conditioner, I really thought they were grasping at straws here. Around this time, the social development center passed a note around the building saying that the landlord would likely use this as an additional justification for an unlawful eviction order. I reached out to them and asked them about the portable air conditioner issue. I got an out of office notification and to my knowledge, we never received additional guidance on air conditioners. The next event is on July 16th when the request for minor variances was refused. Now, at the time, the tenants celebrated this as a huge win because they put a lot of work into fighting it. But this is not the last you've heard of this variance. The next event was on July 25th, 2024. On this date, I got the response to the Freedom of Information request that I filed to find out what the cause of the fire was. It says, "Investigated the fire and located an electrical appliance in the kitchen in the area of significant burning. V pattern was observed indicating that the appliance was in or was the point of origin. The appliance was plugged in and appeared to be an air fryer. Damage too severe to confirm. The stove was located directly beside the appliance and was located on a small counter space and may have been left on causing the combustion of the appliance. Occupant indicated that he did have an air fryer in that location and it was plugged in but not on at the time of departure. Nothing suspicious was found that would indicate arson. The occupant was in redacted, which I think was Hamilton, at the time of the fire. Now, from the incident report, it's clear that the cause of the fire was related to a domestic kitchen appliance. But when I asked the building management about the cause of the fire, and by building management, I mean literally the person whose apartment was on fire, the response that I got was that the fire was an electrical issue. At the time, I asked him to clarify. I asked if the fire started in the electrical panel or if it started in the wiring in the walls, but he reiterated that it was an electrical issue. Now, it might sound like I'm trying to nitpick things here, but the distinction here is pretty important. Imagine that you're living in a building thinking that you're safe and sound, and then some new people come and take over the building, and the first thing that they tell you is that all of the wiring in the building is bad, which is one of the things that we were told orally. And the first thing that they do is hire a bunch of contractors, some of whom don't speak English very well, to do a bunch of changes to the building, including changes to all the electrical panels. Then a couple months later, the building catches fire and they say it was an electrical issue. And furthermore, when you read about how this event in your building was covered in the local media, they repeat this phrase that it was an electrical issue. Now, technically, if there was some sort of electrical defect in the air fryer itself that caused it to catch fire, then you could call that an electrical issue. But I think most people in the building would have appreciated knowing the distinction. If the building really does have serious wiring problems, then that means that potentially everyone is at risk. And if you just received an eviction notice, that's probably going to influence your decision. If it was clear to people in the building that the cause of the fire was an air fryer, then that means that they could sleep easy at night knowing that their air fryer was unplugged. But presumably the news doesn't have access to these incident reports. The other noteworthy detail that's missing from the news report is the fact that the fire happened in the apartment of the person who was managing the building and furthermore that that person wasn't even present in the building at the time. Accidents do happen to everyone, but if the other tenants can all exercise fire safety, I think that the building management can too. The next event is on July 26th when the fourth round of N13 eviction notices was sent out. 5 days later, on August 1st, I was doing some work in my apartment when I heard some commotion in the hallway. At first, I ignored it, but after a while, I realized that it kind of sounded like a waterfall. I went over to the stairwell to check it out and I saw that there was water flowing down the stairwell from the top of the building right down to the basement. I think they eventually said that they were doing some kind of water pressure test. The next event on the timeline is on August 23rd when I exchanged a few emails with someone from Acorn. A few of the Acorn members had been doing a bit of research on this particular landlord's behavior in other buildings. Clearly, if we could establish an overall repeated pattern of behavior, then that might help our legal case. I provided some general information such as a list of other buildings that this landlord owns as well as a list of news articles that cover various controversies in these buildings. I volunteered that I did have more information, but by this point it was clear that many people in Acorn were very unique. I mentioned that I'd be willing to share more information with them if I could share it with their lawyer. The information that I had contained a lot of addresses and personal details. It also contained a lot of information from completely unrelated parties. For this reason, I wanted to make sure that the information was used properly. I never did receive a follow-up on this email thread. The next event is on August 29th when I received another notice of entry for a general inspection and a pest control treatment. And by sheer interesting coincidence, the date of the anticipated pest control treatment was August 30th, the day before the date indicated on my original N13 eviction notice. Now, when I got this notice, I was a bit concerned because we didn't have a pest problem here. Thankfully, I've never had bed bugs in my life, and there's no other kind of pest control problem here either. I was curious to know what kind of chemical they might be spraying, and if there might be any kind of safety hazards associated with the pesticides they were spraying. So, I called the building manager to ask him about it, and he said that it was just another general inspection. The next event was on September 3rd when the garbage shoot was restored to working order for most of the floors. A couple days later, I got a note from one of my neighbors who was concerned about chemtrails and other geopolitical uncertainties. I responded with a note saying that contrails, not to be confused with chemtrails, are the result of water vapor produced from the combustion of jet fuel in the following chemical reaction. A couple days later, I got another note from a different elderly neighbor who I had seen at meetings. In the letter, he stated that he was experiencing considerable anxiety. He mentioned that he had heard that the legal case hadn't been won yet and he was interested to know if there were any tenant meetings coming up. At this point, the last tenant meeting was 2 months ago, so we were once again developing an information vacuum. I was eventually able to make contact with this tenant and I talked to him for a while over the phone. I gave him some updates about what I knew. Around this time, I got a flyer for a general ACORN meeting. This meeting was different from our tenant meetings because it included people from other buildings. I decided to attend this meeting which was over a zoom call just to see if there was any new interesting information. Theformational content of the meeting was similar to previous meetings that we had had where we discussed general introductory information about N13 evictions. There were a few new pieces of information such as anecdotal reports about what was going on in other people's buildings. The next date in the timeline was on September 18th. At this point, I was starting to get frustrated about the lack of communication and the lack of organization about our supposed legal case. Other tenants in the building would sometimes ask me for information about what was going on with the legal case. It wasn't clear to me what I should have been telling the tenants to do about their legal situation. Some of the tenants had already submitted information to the free legal council, and it wasn't clear to what extent their legal case had already been initiated. The initial vision at the early tenant meetings was that we were all going to work together and build a group legal case because we were stronger if we stick together. And a few tenants were strangely obsessive about this stick together mantra. On the other hand, some of the tenants reported that the people we were working with were not very responsive because they were so busy and overburdened, which is of course very believable because this is not the only building that they were supporting. In fact, this was not even the only building in this city that was experiencing renovations from the same landlord. I questioned whether I should be advising that maybe some of these tenants seek their own independent paid legal counsel, and a few of these tenants told me that they were already looking into this. In the morning of September 18th, I sent a very long and critical email to both the Social Development Center and Waterlue Regional Community Legal Services about the lack of clear communication about what we should do next. I said at this point that I wouldn't be joining in on their group legal filing due to lack of communication. I also said that if I didn't get clear guidance from them on what I should be advising other tenants that I would start advising them to seek independent legal counsel. Later in the evening on the same day, I saw an interesting message that someone posted in the Slack channel. I don't recall exactly when this message was posted and it was likely unrelated to the email that I sent which was only about an hour prior. The message contained a piece of email correspondence with one of the legal representation. In the message, it says that there is no legal representation for the N13s as a group. And furthermore, the email went on to clarify that people would have to apply and be approved individually. For me, this was completely new information. By this point, I had already made contact with someone who worked at the legal clinic. So, I reached out to them to confirm the accuracy of this information. In the email that I sent, I mentioned that I'd seen this information in one of the chat sessions, and I pleaded with them for some public version of this that I could distribute to other tenants. In the response that I received, they said that they were very glad to hear that this information had reached all of the tenants, but I clarified that this information had absolutely not reached all of the tenants. The private Slack channel that we had only had about four or five people who were active on it. Again, I requested to have some version of this information that they would be okay with me distributing publicly. Just before sending that email, I had met another tenant in the lobby, and she asked me questions about the group filing. I even offered to print off flyers myself and hand distribute them in the building. My offer was declined, and instead they suggested that we go to the meetings. But the problem was sometimes people didn't get notices for the meetings or sometimes they got them at the last minute. I wasn't the only one who surprised by this new information, and I confirmed with other tenants that I hadn't just missed something. I didn't receive any additional follow-ups on this email thread. Around this same period, although I don't have a record for the actual date, I recall that some of the other tenants were invited to the legal clinic to have a meeting about their T2 filing. A couple of the other tenants suggested that I should go to this meeting. I didn't receive an invitation to this meeting and since it was at the legal clinic, I felt it was probably not appropriate for me to go since it was probably about their legal case. In my discussions with tenants prior to this meeting, I recall that the tenants were anticipating that the topic of the meeting to be about T2 filings in relation to the renovations. However, after the meeting, the tenants reported that the topic of the meeting was related to T2 filings for the parking issue. And this was a fact that very much surprised them. I remember one tenant commenting, "Why are we fighting so hard on the parking issue if we're just going to get evicted?" After this meeting, there was a lot of confusion among the tenants who still had lots of questions about the legal process of fighting the evictions. Later in the evening of that day, on September 18th, was another tenant meeting. I did hear about this meeting from other tenants, but I decided to skip this one since I didn't get invited anyway. I had made a lot of my points clear at the previous meeting and through email I figured that the meeting would be more productive if I wasn't present. A few days later on September 21st, 2004, I learned that the leaders of our tenant union were leaving the building. Up until this point, they seemed to have been gradually running out of gas and were becoming less engaged over time. There was also a huge number of other dramas and conflicts that took place in the building that I haven't talked about yet. As I mentioned before, one of the early mantras that was repeated when we set up our tenant union was to stick together. And one tenant in particular interpreted this to mean that tenants shouldn't try to leave the tenant union and make deals with the landlord on their own. This tenant saw it as their responsibility to police other people's behavior and criticized people for making deals with the landlord. One tenant that I know who was undergoing chemotherapy at the time was a target of this criticism. The tenant who was undergoing chemotherapy was apparently yelled at by the other tenant for supposedly taking a deal with the landlord. During this period, the tenant who was undergoing chemotherapy was extremely weak and was barely even able to speak. I spoke to her briefly during this period and her voice was basically a whisper. Another controversy surrounded supposed special treatment that certain tenants received when the building was taken over. Another controversy that I heard about was when one tenant apparently expressed concern that the landlord might try to sue people for defamation. Apparently, another tenant who was a member of Acorn spread information around claiming that this tenant was threatening that the landlord was planning to sue people for defamation. They were trying to insinuate that this tenant was making specific claims about defamation suits in order to create a chilling effect. One day, when I was walking down the stairwell, I talked to an elderly man who lived in the building. He told me some information that he had apparently obtained somewhere about the individual who I had seen at one of the earlier tenant meetings, specifically about the individual who I asked if they live in the building, and they responded, "Not yet." The elderly man told me that this person had been paid $20,000 to leave the building. By this point, I figured that this person probably had left the building since I hadn't seen them around since. Now, I tell you these things not to convince you that any of them are true, except for what I explained from firsthand experience. In fact, I heard a lot of other things that I didn't talk about that turned out to be 100% false. But the point in mentioning all of this is to describe to you the atmosphere in the building at the time. When the leaders of the tenant union told me that they were leaving the building, that didn't surprise me. As I understand, they were the target of a lot of this drama, and they were the first people in the building to stick their neck out, so they got the brunt of it. I never really probed them for more details, but I just assumed that they had a mental breakdown. The next event is on September 24th when I got back the freedom of information request that I filed to try and get more information about the break-ins that happened in the parking garage. By this point, I had started work on putting together my own legal case just in case the tenant union fell apart. I had already filed a few other Freedom of Information requests for things like incident reports and building plans. I figured that I might as well go ahead and file one more to try and figure out what happened in the parking garage. At this point, I still wasn't 100% sure that the incident even happened or whether it was just a really effective rumor. My assumption was that if I could find out any information at all, it would probably come back inconclusive, probably due to missing surveillance or something. I figured that even this information might be useful to try and argue that the landlord failed to create a safe building for us. I was not able to find out the conclusion of any investigations or whether an investigation even happened. The best that I got was this piece of paper that confirms that an incident matching the description I provided actually did happen. As far as I know, there is no other public record of this incident ever having occurred. The next event on the timeline is on October 2nd, 2024 when Acorn organized another protest at our building. Since my building was just one of many buildings that was experiencing renovations under the same landlord, ACORN decided to raise awareness of the issue by organizing a protest at all of the buildings simultaneously. Originally, I had received an email notification from Acorn as a follow-up to the online Acorn meeting that I had attended previously. The email notification stated that the protest at our building would be at 1 p.m. on the 2nd. I mentioned before that I'm not really into protesting, but I wanted to help out the other tenants in whatever way I could. I didn't have many updates to post about anyway, so I posted about this protest event on my website. About an hour before this protest was supposed to happen, I got an email from a fellow tenant who checked my website. They were wondering why I hadn't updated the location of the event in my post. I then learned that a change had occurred to the intended location of the protest and that this change had only been made in the afternoon yesterday. The other tenant forwarded me an email that they received with a notification about this change. The update email notification apparently came from a different Acorn mailing list that I was not signed up to. But strangely, I didn't receive any emails about updates to the location. I even checked my spam folder. I updated the intended location on my website, but at this point, tenants were very confused. I talked to another tenant that day who had driven down all the way from Northern Ontario just to be present at this protest. He hadn't received an N13 eviction yet, and he wasn't very involved in the meetings, but he was hoping to talk to someone at this protest to get information about what was going on with the renovations. The anticipated location of this protest had been changed to another building in the city that was also experiencing renovations under the same landlord. Since I don't have a car and I didn't want to travel all the way across town by the bus, I opted to just stay here. Around the time that the protest was supposed to happen, I went down to the lobby to see if anyone showed up to this building. At this building, there was no one around. Apparently, only two people from this building showed up to the other protest. A few days later, on the 7th of October, I received an email with an interview request from Northstar Media. Now, I considered ignoring this email at first because it came from a generic Proton Mail address. Northstar Media does have its own domain name, so I thought it was curious that they were using Proton Mail. I had never heard of this news website before, and if you had asked me to guess without any context, I probably would have guessed that it was based in North Korea. Overall, this news website did have a really weird vibe to it. I decided to respond to this email anyway just to see where things would go. They asked me some generic questions and I gave them some generic answers. Here's the article that they wrote about my interaction. In general, I don't really have any complaints about the article, although there are a few details that I find amusing. The first is that they referred to me as a tenant organizer. Now, I never referred to myself that way. I just wanted to create a website to get some information out to people. This news service has a very small YouTube channel with some rather unique videos. The next item on the timeline is on October 9th, 2024 when I sent an email to the individual from the social development center about potentially posting the date of the next tenant meeting on my website. Previous to this email interaction and previous to the tenants interaction at the meeting in July, I had solicited feedback from this individual on multiple occasions. This individual was likely supporting on the order of hundreds of tenants across multiple buildings. Up until this point, it was never clear to me if this person's lack of responsiveness was simply due to being busy or a lack of interest in responding. This response was the first time that this individual ever responded to one of my emails. In her email response, she says that according to my website, I'm not affiliated with any tenant union. Now, I don't mean to be pedantic, but the disclaimer talks about information posted on the website, not about me personally. I was present at the tenant meeting where we all raised our hand and said I agreed to be in this tenant union. If they truly considered that I was not a part of the tenant union. Why didn't they tell me that 6 months ago? Now to be fair, I can understand why some of the tenants might have reservations about a website like this. But I let everyone know about the website, including the organizers, as soon as I had the website set up. I asked them for feedback about information to post there, and no one seemed to have a problem with it. She further suggested that I should reach out to Acorn and set up my own tenant union. By this point, we were already 9 months into this process, so trying to set up a second tenant union would of course be ridiculous. Previously, it was never clear to me if she was just busy or wasn't interested in working with me. But this email clarified that uncertainty. Later in the evening of that same day was another tenant meeting to connect tenants of this building with tenants from another building under the same landlord who were experiencing the same situation. This meeting was run by the same person who had just told me to not send her any more emails. I heard about this meeting from other tenants, but I didn't personally receive an invitation, although at this point that didn't surprise me. As a matter of self-preservation, I decided to attend the meeting anyway to see if there's any useful information. But what did surprise me is that I was not the only tenant from our building who was not invited at the time. I remember thinking that the optics of this was incredibly poor. Everyone in the building had a lot of anxiety at this point and finding out that the rest of the tenants had a meeting without you might be upsetting to some people. At this meeting, one of the tenants complained about the extremely poor planning of the October 2nd protest. This man also had a full-time job and he complained about the time of day of the protest. Since the protest was at 2 p.m., he was not able to attend because he had to work. The reason that was explained for the timing of the protest was that we have to protest during work hours because if the protest is done outside of work hours, then apparently the media won't show up. The organizer of the meeting was also able to get one of the city councilors to attend this meeting to hear some of our complaints. Some of the people at city hall had previously complained that they were having trouble tracking down our landlord and finding out who he was and that this was one of the reasons why they hadn't done much about our situation. At this meeting, I obtained some contact information from the city counselor who was present and I sent her an email the very next day with some information and research that I had done about the landlord. I mentioned to the city counselor that I had more information if they wanted it. I received an initial reply 11 days later stating that the information that I provided would be forwarded on. I didn't receive any additional follow-ups on this email thread. The next event was on October 15th, 2024 when I received the official L2 eviction application against me from the tenant board through Canada Post and the mail package that I received had a few different pieces of paper in it. One of them contained a piece of paper stating that my official L2 merits eviction hearing would be held on February 19th, 2025. And there was also a piece of paper with a link to an online portal. And from that day forward, I kept track of my case through the online portal. The next event on the timeline is on October 17th when I attended the next tenant meeting. Now, this tenant meeting was the last tenant meeting that I attended. So, I took a few notes. So, this was the first tenant meeting for our building where the previous leaders of the tenant union were officially no longer in the building. And I kind of figured and hoped that maybe we would choose some new leaders for our tenant union because if we had someone who actually lives in our buildings who was chairing the tenant union meetings, then that person would be very motivated to avoid getting evicted. But this meeting was once again run by the individual from the social development center. And when she started the meeting, she made a few statements that made it sound like we had already solved our eviction problem. But in my opinion, we hadn't really even finished the outreach yet. And from my notes here, I wrote down that she had decided to rename these meetings to the uh Michael Klein tenency advocacy, something or other like that. And I guess the vision going forward was it was not really going to be a tenant union anymore. It was going to be more about lobbying and trying to get a bylaw passed. And at this meeting, she said she was going to set up a few different uh working groups to get us to do some research on bylaws. And and this meeting was hosted by the individual from the social development center as well as three other former ACORN people. At this meeting, I think I counted 14 people. And at this meeting, one of the tenants asked about how other tenants won at their building because apparently there had been a recent victory at the tenant board for one of the other buildings under the same landlord. And the individual from the social development center said that she did not know because the person who was her contact in ACORN was not talking to her anymore. And the meeting started off with some discussion about how the uh people hosting the meeting were all former Acorn people. And uh I didn't get all the details but apparently there was some falling out that all these people had with Acorn. Um they said something about uh the accountability is not there. I think they were apparently asking for some information from Acorn and they didn't like the answers they were getting. So, oh, and I also think it's amusing to note that the person who she said that she was not talking to anymore in Acorn is the same person in Acorn that she recommended that I reach out to to talk about setting up a tenant union. And at this meeting, one of the tenants pointed out that time is ticking away and our hearings are coming up. And the person leading the meeting said there are no updates on the legal front and they're still waiting for more case numbers to come in. And I also noted that one tenant there was surprised to learn that not all of the LTB hearings were going to be at once, which is of course what we had been told earlier on in this process. And we talked a bit about setting up different working groups for lobbying, media, and research, etc. And I raised my hand and signed up for the research working group cuz I had already been doing that. As you might expect, I never heard back about this working group that I supposedly signed up to. And the person running the meeting brought up the idea of handing out some flyers to uh maybe local businesses to raise awareness of our situation. And then another tenant suggested, "That's kind of ridiculous. Why don't we send out flyers to people who live in other apartment buildings because obviously they can actually sympathize with this issue and it affects them." And since they really wanted to work on putting together a bylaw, I suggested that maybe we could put together, you know, a few hundred extra dollars and hire an actual legal professional, someone who actually has experience and know how city council works and how they pass laws and stuff. And the response I got was that all of the legal professionals around here likely have a conflict of interest or are on the payroll of the city, so they probably wouldn't be able to work with us. And a couple of tenants said that that would be a waste of time and cost too much money. I also brought up the idea again of pooling some money together to hire additional legal counsel to work on our case. And the response that I got to this was that we would have to first check with the uh parallegal that we were already working with from the free legal clinic. Oh, and I also didn't get a flyer to this meeting and at the meeting I asked had the flyers gone out for other people and apparently the answer was no. And after that I made a few more suggestions about u making sure that we actually get the notifications out about meetings. And I also have in my notes that this meeting ended a few minutes early. So at this point, I figured that I wasn't going to get much out of the tenant meetings and that I should just focus on building my own legal case. Throughout this process, I had reached out to a few other people in the building who I thought might have the intellectual capabilities to work on a case like this. In one case, the person didn't respond, and I found out shortly afterward that they had left the building. In one case, the person expressed a lot of interest in what I was doing, but this person had also heard a lot about much of the drama in the building, and they said they just want to stay out of it. So, I'm going to have to speed things up a bit because it looks like I'm running out of time and hard drive space. So, the next event in the timeline is on October 28th, 2024, when at 7:26 a.m. a fire alarm went off and sounded for about 10 minutes, and we all had to evacuate for that. And then the fire alarm went off again about an hour later at 8:43 a.m. I think I remember hearing one of the firefighters say at the time that it might have been an issue with the faulty sensor. And later on the same day, I received a notice of entry in relation to uh inspection of fire alarms that would takes place on October 29th. And 2 days after that was the date that was indicated on the third round of N13 eviction notices. And the next event in the timeline was on November 21st when there was another tenant meeting. and I did not attend this meeting but from what I heard from other tenants it was consistent with previous meetings. Now for the month of November I continued to do a bit of research and preparation on my own. I also continued to interact with the contact that I had made at Waterl Regional Community Legal Services. So at this point it was clear to me that these services didn't really have a lot of resources. So I decided to share some of the information and research that I had done with them and not bother pressing them further on the communication issues. I mentioned to them that even though I wasn't seeking representation from them, I'd still be glad to share some of the information I had with them. I shared some of the freedom of information requests that I had done and other things like corporate profile reports. At this point, I really didn't have any insight into what kinds of legal arguments that they were planning to make. I would describe these email communications as positive and amicable, although it was clear that they didn't have a lot of time to interact with me. A few of the times the responses that I got were out of office notifications. The next event in the timeline is on November 28th, 2024 when I got a call from Acorn. And the person on the call asked if she could count on me going to the December 3rd Acorn meeting at the Civic Hub. I asked her what the meeting was going to be about, and she said something uh very general and non-specific. And I responded that I probably wouldn't go to that meeting. And I asked if I had met her before because I had met a few of the other Acorn people. And she said probably not because she was from Ottawa. And once again on December 19th, I got another call from Acorn. And I wrote down that the call came from a private number. And if I recall correctly, I think it actually said Ottawa on the caller ID. And they wanted me to know about uh an event that was coming up for Acorn. And they really really wanted me to write down the date of this meeting. And I wrote down in my notes that it almost sounded like they were talking on speaker phone or something because there was a very bad echo and I could barely even hear them. So, in preparing for the legal arguments to actually fight the uh the merits of the N13 eviction, the arguments that I would make would obviously have to focus on what was actually in the building permit. And the building permit that was issued was only valid for 6 months. And since the building permit appeared around June 17th, that would put the expiry date just into the start of January. So, I thought that there was probably a risk that they might immediately renew the building permit just in January, which was immediately before my eviction hearing. And then if I tried to make some legal arguments, I might be working on an outdated copy of that building permit. So since my eviction hearing was on February 19th, I thought I might have enough time during January and the start of February to um get repaired a legal case. And that way if they change the building permit, then I would be able to respond to that in time. And I was hoping to actually find a professional engineer who could maybe make some comments about the building plans. So on January 6th, that was when I first started reaching out to other engineers. And I had trouble reaching people because a bunch of people were still out on vacation. At least one of the messages that I got back said they wouldn't be back until the 14th. And the next event on the timeline is on January 8th, 2025. At 10:00 a.m. I was notified that my eviction hearing for February 19th was cancelled and it was rescheduled to January 27th, which was 23 calendar days sooner. But that kind of understates how much less time I had to prepare because now there was only 2 weeks and two business days left for me to prepare. So, it was around this period that I put out that YouTube video uh requesting commentary from Smart Mechanical Engineers and one of the engineers who I'd messaged previously on January 6th actually uh eventually got back to me and we went back and forth a bit and the idea was that we might be able to get something written out on paper but and they were a bit concerned about u a potential professional liability because if they're testifying as an expert witness, if the opposing council wanted to, they could maybe draw them into it more. and they said that they thought it would be most productive if they could uh issue a statement in coordination with a legal professional. And at the time I had considered introducing this engineer to the uh free legal service, but I was kind of hesitant to do that because if the legal representation didn't really even have time to communicate with me, they probably wouldn't have the extra bandwidth to uh coordinate uh a prepared statement with an engineer because all of this would have been based on the building plans that I got through the freedom of information request and I didn't have any insight into the documents or preparation that the legal clinic had done on their own. So about a week later on January 15th, 2025, I noticed in my uh tenant board portal that a legal representation was assigned to me. Now this was a surprise to me because I had not given consent for this person to represent me. And of course I recognized the name of this individual who was assigned to me as my legal representation. It was the same person who I was interacting with over email. But this surprised me because I had never given consent for this person to represent me. I hadn't signed anything and I had explicitly stated over email that I wouldn't be joining in on the group filing. I had originally planned to hire my own representation, although in the end that ended up not happening because there was just too much going on. Since I've been through civil court before and chasing someone for bad debts, I figured that this was something I could probably handle on my own. And furthermore, since I had never actually coordinated with this free legal representation about how exactly the hearing process would unfold, I was a bit uneasy in having someone else represent me when we hadn't even had a discussion about uh what arguments are going to be made. And it's also worth mentioning that the tenant board doesn't have any kind of automatic legal representation that's assigned to you. It's not like in a criminal case or something where you have a lawyer that's appointed to you by the court. Representing yourself at the tenant board is not really that abnormal. Now, the fact that this legal representation was automatically assigned to me put me in a very difficult position. On one hand, in the LTB portal, it was clear that this person had been assigned to me as my legal representation. But on the other hand, many of the other tenants in the building were on a mailing list from this legal clinic where they got updates with more information about what was going on with the legal case. And I was not on this mailing list. But of course, that was not unexpected because I had explicitly told them that I didn't want to be a part of the group filing. And if they weren't representing me, there would be no good reason for them to send me emails about other people's legal case. So clearly there was an inconsistency somewhere. There was also apparently an information session sometime around this period where they talked about the legal case. And unsurprisingly, I didn't get an invitation to this, although I was told by another tenant that it wasn't very productive anyway. By this point, I had made a lot of connections with other tenants in the building, and a couple of them forwarded the most recent update from this mailing list to me. In the mailing list update, there was a PDF document that outlined some legal arguments that the legal professional planned to make for our building. There was a technicality with the building permit that would have allowed for a legal argument to potentially have the N13 evictions dismissed for my floor specifically. And in this document from the mailing list, I could see that the legal professional had made exactly this argument. and the text that had been written for the legal argument explicitly specified all of the apartments on my floor except for mine. But of course, since this person wasn't representing me, there was no reason for it to. The other punchline of this much sooner eviction hearing is that it wasn't going to be an N13 merits hearing. It was going to be an adjudicative case conference and this meant that it was going to be a group case after all. Now, because of the change in the hearing date, that meant that I had a lot less time to get my evidence prepared. I decided on January 16th to send a request to the tenant board to have the hearing date uh postponed and I cited all my reasons like having less time to get evidence prepared and stuff. I figured that they would probably reject this request, but I figured this would give me something to point to if maybe I lost because my evidence wasn't prepared or something because later on they might say, "Well, if your evidence wasn't prepared, why didn't you apply before the deadline to postpone the hearing?" And in this case, I can say I did do that. And unsurprisingly, my request was rejected and so the hearing would be on the 27th. Now, I have here on my timeline that it was on January 22nd, so 5 days before the hearing that I found out that the preliminary issue that was written by legal representation, who was on my file, that that preliminary issue argument did not include my apartment number. Oh, I guess I should probably explain what a preliminary issue is because I didn't know what that was before this whole thing either. So my understanding of a preliminary issue is it's just like a small logical statement that uh a court will rule on before the much bigger case. So the important thing there is once they make a ruling on the preliminary issue, it's basically considered set in stone and you don't really get a chance to argue on the preliminary issue later on in subsequent hearings because it's already been decided on. And since I didn't know what preliminary issues we would actually decide upon at the first hearing. In fact, I don't think anyone did, including the adjudicator, it was really important for me to get all my evidence together so that I would be prepared to talk about anything we need to do. So, for example, one of the preliminary issues that I was concerned about was if we make a judgment on whether vacant possession is necessary or not for the stated renovations that are in the N13s. because if that was the first thing that we started talking about and we didn't have evidence prepared, that might really paint us into a corner. And the other thing that made this complicated and confusing was the fact that this was not an L2 merits hearing. This was an adjudicative case conference or a case management hearing. And if you look up adjudicative case conferences on the tenor's website, one of the first things it says is that you should come to the hearing prepared to make a settlement. And the other part of that that I found surprising is that settlements and discussions about settlements at the tenant board are considered confidential. Now, the other stated priority of this case management hearing was to ask the question of whether or not all of the cases should be combined together. So, of course, I was not the only one in the building being evicted. There were uh I think 61 tenants in the building who got these N13 notices. And the other complicating factor is that originally everyone had different hearing dates. So, I think there were four different hearing dates. Mine was February 19th. I think some people had it in late February and I think there was also a couple dates in January. So, originally there was something like eight or so tenants that were grouped together that were going to have their eviction hearings uh held separately. And the point of the adjudicative case conference was to answer the question uh should all of these cases be combined together because they have enough facts that are in common. So, by this point, I had absolutely no idea what to expect. I wasn't sure if we were maybe going to be all kind of pressured into making some kind of settlement or as I mentioned before up until this point I had absolutely no insight at all into the legal preparations that the free legal legal service was doing. And it was only on January 22nd that I got the first insight into uh how they were planning to approach this. And just before I had submitted the request to the tenant board to postpone the hearing, I had also sent an email to them to let them know that uh the representation that was added to my case uh I haven't given consent for that person to represent me. So, I'll just represent myself. And a few days after I sent that email, I noticed that the representation had been removed from my file. Um, at that point, I think it was only a couple days before the hearing. And I also noticed that there was a new piece of evidence added into my case. And the piece of evidence was a binary form of the email that I actually sent to the tenant board. Now, when you add a piece of evidence to the online portal, it'll say who added that piece of evidence. And since I sent the email to the tenant board, I was kind of surprised because the piece of evidence, it said it was added by the legal council who was representing me. Maybe the tenant board forwards that email to the legal rep and then the legal rep adds it to the case as a evidence to say like I officially signed off or something. Or maybe it's just some kind of drop down that the tenant board selects and they've selected the wrong one or something. Anyway, just one of many confusing details in this case. Okay, let's go through my notes from the day of the adjudicative case conference. So, the hearing was conducted over a Zoom call, and one of the first things that I should emphasize is that this was incredibly disorienting. I know that the whole idea behind this call was to group a bunch of the cases together, but I had no idea if maybe because I was representing myself, if I'd be off on my own or if I'd be in like a different hearing room or something. Um, and because this was on Zoom, there was no such thing as, you know, a hearing room. We had these uh uh breakout rooms on Zoom. And so when we first joined the call, there was I guess like the lobby or whatever. And after we were there for a while and got signed in, we were added to a breakout room, but the most confusing thing was in that breakout room, there was already an existing case. Now Zoom hearings, they're all online, so there's no there's no physical space constraint. I don't understand why we were initially added to uh another case. I guess maybe they wanted to show us how the process worked or something, but it was very disorienting. And in fact, one of the tenants, uh, you can click to raise your hand. And he he interrupted this other hearing to say like, "Hey, I I don't I don't think I'm supposed to be here. I'm in this such and such building because we're listening to these two people go back and forth, a tenant and a landlord argue about something." And it was in a completely different building, unrelated to us. And then the adjudicator stepped in and said, "Oh yeah, you're actually in the right room." And another thing that I was not sure of at this point was whether there were other tenants who maybe had their own individual representation. So there was the free legal clinic that was representing most of the people in the building. But I had talked to other people who had suggested that they were going to hire their own lawyer or parallegal or whatever. So I actually expected there to be uh the freed legal clinic representing I don't know 20ome people and then maybe one or two people who had their own lawyer and then there'd be me representing myself or maybe a couple other tenants representing themselves. Uh but it actually ended up being it was so it was just me representing myself and it was the free legal clinic representing the rest of the tenants in the building. And so it was us two groups against the uh landlord. Okay, let's speedrun through my notes on the day of the hearing. So I logged on to the Zoom call at around 8:40 a.m. and they were signing in people. Uh, the tenant board spent 15 minutes saying out all of the case numbers allowed at 9:00 am. At around 9:30ish, the landlord and the um free legal service representation went into a breakout room together to meet. That was a separate breakout room that I was not a part of. So, we spent a bit of time in that meeting room watching the other case unfold. And then when it was done, the adjudicator turned their attention to us. Oh, and the other interesting thing from that date was that when I signed up, I identified myself as separented. So the tenant board has this thing called um uh tenant duty counsel. So it's I guess they have a legal professional who can give you some you know basic advice and stuff. And because I was so disoriented about um trying to understand uh the structure of the different rooms we were going into um just like a lot of the intangible stuff of doing this over a zoom call how this was all orchestrated um for example when would it be my turn to speak and uh you know what does the process of this day look like. So, the person who signed me in asked if I wanted to speak with uh tenant duty counsel, and I said yes. And guess who was the person who was on tenant duty counsel? It was the same legal professional from the free legal clinic who I'd asked them to remove a few days ago for my case. So, this was actually the first opportunity that I'd ever had to speak with this person one-on-one for any length of time. And she was helpful and answered some of my questions, although I think there were some uh differences in our communication style. I explained to her that I wasn't trying to go against her or anything, but there were a lot of questions that I had about the case. they really weren't answered. So going self-represented was I think the best approach. This way she could protect the other tenants. If there was a piece of evidence or a legal argument that I thought was very important that hadn't otherwise been introduced, then I could do that on my own. And for this hearing, we didn't actually focus really on the preliminary issues. So that simplified things a lot. And we only focused on the question of whether the cases should be combined. And the landlord's position was apparently that the cases should be as separate as possible. One of the criteria that the tenant board had for uh the necessity of combining cases was that if it's separate, then there could be inconsistent findings. And one of the landlord's arguments about why the cases should be kept separate was that um inconsistent findings happen all the time, so what? And the position of the parallegal from the free legal clinic was that all of the cases should be combined and the evidence should be considered together. And since I was self-represented, I got her turn to weigh on on these questions as well. And I agreed with her position that the cases should be combined because there's a lot of evidence in common. And I recall that during the hearing they said that they probably would combine the cases and the case management hearing ended just after noon. And at the time they said that the actual L2 merits eviction hearing would probably be sometime in April. So the next event was on February 5th, 2025 when I got a notice that a member of the building's management team had changed. And this was not entirely unexpected because a previous member of the management team uh specifically the guy whose apartment caught on fire, he seems to have just ghosted since uh sometime around November or something. In fact, I remember around the time that I stopped seeing him around the building, there was an elevator license that expired. And this license that was posted in the elevator stayed expired for uh I think it was 1 year before it was replaced. And the next item on the timeline is February 19th, 2025. And of course, this was originally scheduled to be my L2 merits eviction hearing, but of course that was canceled. Okay, the next date is February 28th, 2025, and it's time for round two of the parking variance. And of course, the tenants did a whole bunch more research on this parking variance to prepare for the uh city council meeting. And around this period, I got a notice through my mail slot for tenant group therapy. Now, I think that some of the tenants probably would benefit from group therapy, but what I think would benefit them even more is having more of their legal questions answered. And the best part of this notice is that it says many people attended the first session, but I never got a notice for that session. And on the reverse side of the flyer, it says that there's another tenant meeting on March 5th. I did not attend that meeting, and as far as I know, that was the last tenant meeting that we ever had. And it was on May 12th, 2025 that I received a notification from the tenant board that my L2 merits eviction hearing would be on May 26th, 2025. And so that would be the big hearing that we'd all been waiting for where we actually discuss the merits of the N13 eviction. Okay, March 18th, 2025. This was the grand finale of the parking variance. Okay, so I'm about to bombard you with a ton of information and you probably won't follow any of it, but that's okay because it doesn't matter. So there are three separate issues going on with the parking variance. So first it'll make sense to talk about this additional four dwelling units to an existing multiple dwelling having 108 units for a total of 112 dwelling units. So in this building apparently we have some shared amenity space that uh I've been living here 7 years and I didn't even know about that. And the new landlord wants to renovate that amenity space and put new apartments in there. And because they're adding new apartments, they have to re-evaluate their compliance with the parking standards. And for a building of this size, they need a certain number of, I guess, paid parking places and 28 visitor parking spaces. Now, for some reason, at some point in time, this variance became conceptually connected to the T2 filing where some of the tenants were locked out of the parking garage or had to pay a lot more money. And that connection has never been made super clear to me. So, from what I understand, early on, it was explained that they needed to win the parking variance in order to also win on the T2 and also the T2 filing that was with the tenant board. But this variant, so this was at the city. So down in the actual visitor parking area, we only have like seven or eight visitor parking spaces. And a very reasonable complaint that some of the elderly tenants had is that if family comes to visit them, then there's no visitor parking. So I think some of the tenants were pushing back on that because we overall just don't have enough parking here. But having said that, there's a physical limit to how much parking we can actually build here. And in relation to the shared amenity space, I think if no one's actually using it, then they should convert that into apartments to help out with the housing crisis. Having said that, if some of the tenants actually use this amenity space, then I fully support them in advocating against turning it into apartments. Now, the other thing that makes it more complicated is that the variance says we should have 28 parking places, but clearly right now we only have 7 or eight parking places. And in addition to that, they also took into consideration the fact that they're actually amending the bylaw. So, the requirement is going to go from 28 parking spaces down to 12. But, of course, we're still going to be in violation of that. And there's a super long city council meeting where this was hashed out in detail. And when this was initially brought up at city council, they said, uh, in my opinion, this should not even be on the agenda because of course they already ruled on this variance. But then it was argued somehow that this is actually a new application, even though the variance text looks pretty similar. And then there was some back and forth about whether the community was aware of this variance meeting because there was a sign posted, but then there was, I guess, a snowstorm, so people couldn't see the sign. And there's also some confusion because the local community might think that they already voted on this variance, but now it's back with what looks like basically the same text. So then they suggested maybe let's defer this. And then they did a vote to defer it and they decided not to defer it. Oh yeah, and they're also supposed to take some pictures of the variant sign and record that or something, but then they lost those pictures. And then they went back and forth a bunch. They turned off the microphones for a while. And some of the tenants voiced their concerns about not having enough parking. And the meeting concluded with a vote on whether the variant should pass and it passed 3 versus two. So after all that research and back and forth, the variance passed anyway. And there's a lot of weird aspects to this variance itself. I think if you wanted, you could probably try and build a narrative that like, oh, there's some corruption going on or something like that because originally they voted on the variance. Uh, it didn't pass and then it came back with basically the same text and then there's something about the sign photo being missing. Then they turn off the microphones for a while and chat. And I also looked into the guy who was running this meeting and at the time of this meeting he was working for Peak Realy. And when I saw that the company he was working for was called Peak Realy, I thought that's interesting because the private equity firm that actually financed the purchase of this building was called Peakill Capital. And since both of these companies have similar names and somewhat similar logos, I thought maybe there's a connection there. So I looked into it a bit and Peel Capital was incorporated on November 27th, 2019. And Peak Realy Limited was incorporated on August 18th, 1988. So there's probably no connection there. Now, you could also say this guy's working for a real estate company, so this must be some kind of conflict of interest or corruption or something. But then again, it probably does make sense to have someone who actually works in industry and understands how real estate works who actually looks at these variances because if you're one of the people applying for these variances, you probably wouldn't want some clueless bureaucrat who doesn't understand how anything in business works. Now, with all of that said, even if the whole thing is corrupt, the whole thing also doesn't make a lot of sense because this building has been here for ages. And if the building isn't in compliance with the parking variance today, then it also wasn't in compliance 10 years ago or whenever this variance bylaw was introduced. And even if they come back and say, "No, you can't have this variance. You have to build 28 visitor parking places and also the corresponding number of non-visor parking. We physically don't have enough space to build the parking." Now, you probably could jam a few more parking spaces on the side of the building, but not enough to meet the 28 visitor parking space requirement. I think the only way to achieve that would be to also use some of the underground parking that's also in the secure area. Oh, and the other punch line is supposedly we have, you know, seven or eight visitor parking places. From my perspective, we have never had visitor parking. We actually have an area down there that says there's a big sign says visitor parking. And I had someone come to visit who parked in that supposed visitor parking place and they got a note on their window saying that if they parked there again, they would get towed. And so, even if the whole thing is corrupt, it also doesn't make any sense. And apparently it also doesn't even matter because in some earlier communications I saw that people said that they have to win the parking variance because that's related to the T2 parking filing. However, since then I saw in other communications that apparently the other tenants won their T2 filing for the parking issue. And of course they lost on the parking variance. So I was not a part of the parking issue. So maybe there is some details or inside scoop that I didn't get. But I've analyzed this issue enough and I really don't care anymore. But I have to include this because many tenants spent a lot of time thinking about and analyzing this issue instead of working on preventing getting evicted. Here's a few quick snippets from the original city council meeting. >> And in my opinion, this um should not even be on the agenda. >> Um this is a new application and not a reconsideration of a past decision. >> Uh and if I can make make a comment, I've been on this committee, this is my 19th year. It is the first time I've ever seen anything like this. And as I said, I've been around for a while. >> Yeah. So, I appreciate your comments. We're going to move this uh and as part of the back of our agenda here, deal with those two other applications. We'll come back on our agenda here. We had one outstanding item uh a uh 2025-026. In the last time that we went through this, it was mentioned that the planning department needed to go back to the drawing board because there's a problem in Kitchener with park with parking. On my word, the most I've ever had to wait for an open spot on the street, so God help me, is an hour and a half driving around a fourb block radius around where I live. Now, of course, I was disabled at the time, and I have to be four blocks, which I had to buy a walker to do. Most of the people living in this place are senior, about 25 to 30% disabled, and they depend on their vehicles. >> Uh, at this point, Mr. Chair, I think we need a deferral so we can uh make sure that the neighbors are aware that this is coming back to the committee of adjustment. >> Marilyn, can I ask you for your help here a little bit for a second? >> Excellent. So, we have um a mover and a seconder for a deferral for for one month. Lean on a uh the agent here if they would be open uh to a deferral of one month. But I would prefer to go to the presentation for a decision from the committee. >> I'm wondering and I was looking through the package. Usually there is a picture of the sign. Um >> unfortunately it's missing. I apologize. But we we do that we do take the responsibility of putting the sign in ourselves. >> So all those in favor of the deferral, we have one in favor of uh of the deferral. Uh all those opposed of the uh deferral, four. So uh no deferral. What I want you to imagine, please, is looking out your window out of the front of the building and watching a grandmother who's disabled drag her grocery cart from her car through a snowbank into her apartment because she can't stop in the visitor parking because there's no room. There's no room. It's designated visitor parking. Imagine what that looks like. >> So, we'll uh call for the vote. Uh all those in in favor, three and uh in favor, those opposed. Two. So that is uh is carried passes. Okay. The next item I have on the timeline is when a tenant posted some comments in the Slack chat about other tenants spying. So up until now the Slack channel hadn't really been very productive for doing a lot of planning. I did find it fairly useful for getting information about stuff that was going on. Sometimes people would post pictures of notices that they'd seen around the building or they'd maybe introduce new information about um something that they heard from building management. Originally, I had hoped that the Slack channel would grow a bit more and we'd bring in more people and start doing some planning there. But unfortunately, there were two tenants in particular who really didn't get along with each other. And both of these tenants would complain about things that the other tenant would post there. And to be fair to both of these tenants, I'd probably agree with each one of them in about 50% of cases. So sometimes people would once again ask questions about what was going on. And one tenant would try to insinuate that these were conspiracy theories. And I also found that a lot of the discussion in the Slack channel ended up devolving into meta discussions about what was or was not appropriate to post there. So on one occasion fairly early on when we were all still just kind of getting to know each other, we made some rules that we should only post things there that are actually relevant to our case. And one tenant said that he was feeling fairly down and alone and he posted a music video and said, "Uh, this vi this music video reminds me of this loved one who passed away." And normally I didn't participate in these off-topic discussions, but in this case I made an exception and I posted a reply to his music video with another music video. And the other tenant who was keen on clamping down on conspiracy theories uh frequently cited this as an example of how the Slack chat is totally useless and it's just music videos and conspiracy theories. Now on the other hand, the other tenant probably could have exercised a bit more due diligence and restraint when posting things to the channel. Some of the posts were a bit off topic, but I was more than willing to tolerate a few music videos and off-topic posts if it meant that I could prevent getting evicted. Now, a comment like this about someone in the building allegedly spying uh sounds pretty off-the-wall, but I'm pretty sure I know exactly who that tenant is talking about, and I can say that this individual and their friend uh did in fact use the word spying to describe their activities in their own words. So, hopefully that gives you an idea of what it's like to live in this building. Okay, so the next event in the timeline is on May 26th, 2025. This was the big day for the L2 merits eviction hearing. And leading up to this period, I didn't really get much insight into how other tenants or the uh legal services were preparing for the case. Now, because I was a separate party in this legal case, um all of the other parties, including the other parallegal, uh had to serve evidence on me and I also had to serve evidence on uh the other two parties, the landlord and the legal clinic. So, I did that. I served my evidence and they also served their evidence on me and that was the first time I got a lot of insight into what kind of preparations had been done on the legal case and I will say that I was very pleasantly surprised at what I saw. Now, most of the tenants didn't really have a lot of information to actually fight the merits of the N13 eviction itself, but there were a couple tenants who had actually done quite a bit of work on that. And the other thing that didn't really initially come through in the evidence package was uh we had a few different witnesses who testified uh on our side. And those witnesses were absolutely amazing and they helped our case tremendously. And I should mention that I didn't have anything to do with arranging these witnesses. The credit for that goes to someone else. Most of these witnesses were people who actually had a history of working on the building. So they had specific knowledge of our building. There was a lot of tenants who had submitted information about like medical test reports and things saying that this will impact them significantly if they get evicted. Now on this May 26th hearing, I think it was only one of our witnesses testified. And on this day, it was mostly the landlord's witnesses that were testifying. And initially on the morning of the 26th, uh we actually focused on a preliminary issue before getting to the actual N13 merits. So the preliminary issue that was argued in the morning had to do with distribution of compensation checks. So when you end evicted tenant, you're supposed to give them a small compensation check, something like 3 months rent, which works out to be around $3,000 for the rent control tenants. Now, some of the tenants did not get this compensation check. And if the tenant doesn't get the compensation check by the deadline, then it says in the tenant board rules that the tenant board cannot issue an eviction order against them. And so the point of arguing this preliminary issue was for that subset of tenants that their N13s should be dismissed because they didn't receive compensation checks. Now when it came to arguing about this preliminary issue, there was a whole bunch of back and forth about trying to explain, you know, where did these compensation checks go? Did they get lost? Uh were they held in the office? And the arguments for this preliminary issue applied to something like 14 different tenants that hadn't received these compensation checks and wanted the N13s dismissed. And I think it was two of those tenants provided some testimony to back up the claim that they did not get the compensation checks. Now, one of these tenants in her testimony about not receiving the compensation check um mentioned that for other types of notices that she received um that she basically always received these notices. And so part of the logic of her argument was to say that uh because I received basically all of these notices, it seems implausible that I just didn't receive this specific one with the compensation check. And so therefore that must mean that the compensation check they simply never even attempted to deliver to me. Now in relation to this preliminary issue, I had actually decided to provide some testimony of my own to contribute to the discussion. And I had made this decision to provide my own testimony before the other tenant testified. And my argument was to be that if certain tenants did not receive compensation checks that there was actually another plausible explanation for that was that uh sometimes when I get notices they don't put them all the way in the door. And it's possible that sometimes the notice fell back out into the hallway and maybe got lost. And so technically there is kind of a conflict between those two potential narratives. It can't necessarily be both narratives at once. either they didn't even bother trying to deliver the compensation check or they tried to deliver the compensation check and then it fell out and got lost in the hallway. Now, personally, I attended the hearing from my apartment here, but from what I understand, a bunch of the other tenants were watching the hearing together at the Civicub. And I didn't know this at the time, but apparently one of the other tenants who was watching the hearing in this room uh suggested that I was actually testifying against the other tenant in our building and that I was trying to claim that the other tenant lied. And the other interesting thing is that after I provided that testimony, the opposing council, the parallegal who was representing the landlord, uh, really latched on to my statement and he seemed to be really happy and enthusiastic that I provided this testimony because during this point, um, I think he was kind of scrambling for a reason why these compensation checks might not have been delivered. So, the landlord's parallegal uh, dreamed up this kind of elaborate scenario where he said, "Oh, well, maybe we we tried to deliver it. uh we tried to provide the service of the compensation check by the due date, but then it fell back into the hallway and what may have happened was uh another tenant picked it up and returned it to the office and then that's why uh the compensation checks were in the office and they weren't weren't delivered. So and so therefore there's no reason to dismiss the N13s uh based on the preliminary issue. And the other interesting detail is that the opposing council, the landlord's parillegal repeatedly referred to me as uh my friend. Now, I understand that that's just a legal formality. He's not really referring to me as his friend, but many of the tenants in the building don't necessarily understand that. And given the way that he seemed so happy and gleeful that I provided that testimony, I think that really set a lot of the tenants off. Now, it did surprise me a bit that the opposing council uh seemed so enthusiastic and really latched onto that statement because the whole reason I provided that testimony is that the compensation checks are uh an official document and they have to be served properly. And of course, if you read the rules for service of official documents, you can't just leave it halfway hanging out someone's door and then have it get lost down the hallway. And if you don't serve the document properly, you have to prove that the person actually got the document. So, we heard from some of the landlord's witnesses and um I took a turn to cross-examine them. I pointed out a few inconsistencies in some of their documents. And the day ended just after we had heard from one of the witnesses that testified for our building and we were about to call the next witness uh but we didn't have time. So, we decided to adjourn so we would have yet another N13 merits hearing sometime in the future. Okay. The next event is on May 31st, 2025 when an angry tenant stopped by my apartment to berate me a little bit about the testimony that I provided. So, she was upset about the testimony that I provided about the compensation checks and I explained my reasoning to her about the uh service of official documents and the fact that my testimony does not necessarily contradict the other tenants testimony. It just provides the adjudicator with one more potential justification to dismiss the N13 evictions. But she was not convinced. She also had a bunch of other critical things to say, like that I'm selfish and I only care about myself and I'm not doing anything to help out the other tenants. Oh, and I should also mention that this tenant was the same tenant who was keen to clamp down on conspiracy theories in the Slack channel. And it was during this conversation that she let me know that she had been screenshotting my chats in the Slack channel. Now, for the most part, I never got involved in the arguments about so-called conspiracy theories, but occasionally I would try and contribute sometimes to try and mediate the conversation and maybe lower the temperature a bit. And in one conversation, when they were arguing about uh so-called spies in the building, I made a joke suggesting that all 107 other tenants in the building were spies and that I was the only real tenant in the building. And she let me know that this was one of the messages that she had allegedly screenshotted uh presumably to expose me, I guess. And a couple days later on June 2nd, 2025, we got the official interim order uh from the tenant board saying that those 14 tenants had won their case on the basis of uh the preliminary issue of not receiving compensation checks. So this meant for those tenants, they were now safe and there was no more immediate threat of eviction for them. And in reading the order itself, it goes into a bit more detail about that elaborate narrative that the landlord provided. It says, "The landlord proposes an alternative explanation for redacted testimony." It suggests that perhaps the landlord's management delivered the payment on time, but did not put it all the way into the mail slot. Perhaps the envelope fell out into the hallway where somebody picked it up and returned it to the management. The landlord's theory is far-fetched, but even if true, it would not assist the landlord. If building management had only delivered the payments partway through the mail slots such that some of them fell out and were returned to the office, then it would be impossible for the landlord to prove which payments, if any, had actually been delivered to the tenants. So effectively, they admitted that there was a possibility that the compensation checks hadn't been delivered on time. By providing that elaborate narrative, the landlord's representation testified against himself. This set a good tone for the case because at this point the landlord had already lost on half of the cases in the entire building and we hadn't even reached the merits arguments yet. The next event on the timeline is on June 24th when I got the notification from the landlord and tenant board that the next hearing would be on October 6th. So this would be the second round of the N13 merits hearing. Now for the first time since the start of this process there is a approximately 3 and a half month period on my timeline that's basically blank and the next date in the timeline is the second and 13 merits hearing. Now in the previous hearing a lot of the time was taken up with uh testimony from the landlord's witnesses. So in this day we heard from a lot of the witnesses that were representing this building. And honestly there's a ton of information that I could say about the actual uh hearing itself and the legal arguments and the legal process. In fact, I could probably make another hourong video on that, but for the sake of simplicity, I'll probably skip all of that. I have here in my notes that during the morning, one of the tenants testified and the landlord's representation gave lots of objections, saying that everything was hearsay. I also have in my notes that the definition for what could be admitted as evidence was very narrow. And since most of the witnesses that testify that day were representing our building, uh, I didn't bother to cross-examine them. So, for this hearing date, I didn't actually say very much. I did offer some observations about the landlord's testimony in my closing statements, though. And the next event is eight days later on October 14th, 2025. On this date, we got back the official order from the landlord and tenna board saying that since the landlord has not proved its case, the applications will be dismissed. And 2 days after that, on October 16th, 2025, there was a notice posted in the building lobby saying that I guess there's a bunch of uh fire department inspection reports that are missing. And on November 12th, 2025, I got some papers through my mail slot saying that the landlord intends to file an appeal on the order to dismiss all of the N13 applications. So, the landlord plans to escalate this case above the tenant board, uh, I guess to divisional court, and I don't have any official case numbers yet, so I don't have any more information about the supposed appeal. Okay, so we finally made it through the timeline. So, I had originally planned to do uh a retrospective once I got through the timeline, but in the interest of time, I can't go into as much detail as I would have otherwise. So, I'm just going to try and speedrun through this as fast as possible. Now, the first thing I want to say is that despite all the miscommunications and chaos, I have full confidence that the social development center, Waterlue Regional Community Legal Services, and ACORN will continue to support the tenants of this building. And furthermore, the appeal that was filed by the landlord will be defeated and the tenants will be able to remain in their homes. Now, having said all that, you could ask, what do I think about ACORN? Well, in my view, Acorn is really a mixed bag. It's really a weird organization. So, for the initial wave of communications of those um I think initial notices, I think those were extremely useful. There were probably a lot of people in the building who would have just u you know, immediately uh given in and left the building. And having a paper handout like that, giving them a heads up that u you know, this is just an intimidation tactic. I think that probably uh allowed a lot of people to stay in their homes and I think it was a huge step forward to get everyone together and put them in the same room and get them talking about the subject. However, I think they totally dropped the ball on the second meeting with the uh super long pitch for membership. And it's not that I have an issue with the membership, it's just that that was extremely poorly placed and a lot of the stuff that they have on their website is about um you know sticking together and organizing and stuff like that, but I think they really really dropped the ball on actually getting people connected, getting people on a mailing list. And another thing that they did that I thought was hugely positive was they did some research and compiled a report on this uh serial render landlord uh talked about the tactics and and the fact that you don't have to give into this and stuff. But having said that, while this document was so great, it was really curious to me why they went like 90% of the way there. Uh but they did not compile any conclusive legal arguments that could actually be submitted as evidence uh to help us win the case. Now during our case there were some of these documents that were added to the tenant board portal but these were not actually admitted as evidence. So they were not actually considered uh in relation to making the decision even though we knew that there was a really established pattern that this was happening at basically the same thing at all the buildings. It was like exactly word for word notices and stuff and all that analysis had been done and compiled in a document. But what I really would have liked to have seen is having them get in touch with a lawyer and have a lawyer. You know, this is not going to cost like $100,000 for a few hundred dollars or maybe $1,000. You could probably get a lawyer to actually compile something that would have some chance of making a difference uh to actually help people win in the courtroom because protests don't help you win legal cases. Legal arguments do. And in a way, whether it's deliberate or purely just accidental, um they almost effectively act like a controlled opposition because they come in, they say, "Hey, we're going to save you." But then later, just as we started getting some momentum, they really seemed to drop the ball on stuff. Now, honestly, it's impossible to say what would have happened if um those people hadn't come around and handed out those flyers. But I do suspect that probably uh a few of the older tenants probably would have gathered together and started to get organized. And if they had have gotten together and put together a few thousand to actually hire a lawyer and do a professional legal case, I think that the outcome would have been much less stressful on everyone. Another thing that I thought was kind of odd was they uh they organized a protest apparently at this Michael Klein guy's house. Now I can see that they were trying to create some publicity for this situation, but but going to the landlord's house and protesting that doesn't help us at the legal case. If we go to our hearing and say that we held a protest at this guy's house, uh the tenant board might just say, "Well, you're kind of harassing the guy." And a lot of the activism consisted of stuff like um handing out leaflets in the neighborhood to people who live in houses. And even though some of those people might actually sympathize with us, there's really not that much that they can do about our situation. And the way that this organization is pitched is as though it's a grassroots community organization, but the fact that I got these uh private number calls from Ottawa, uh it doesn't really have a grassroots feel to it. If it was someone in the local community or someone in the building who reached out and said, "Hey, come to this meeting." Uh that'd be more convincing. Now, there was a time when I thought, uh maybe I should get more involved with the Acorn and I can try and help them I can help with some uh the legal research and stuff and document searches. And so I thought about getting involved with Acorn by, you know, first uh interacting with people at the meetings who were in Acorn. Um but everyone who I talked to who was in Acorn had a bad experience and uh was no longer working with them anymore and I never really got to hear the details. So I don't exactly know what happened. I think a lot of other people had the same idea that I did. they uh started working with someone and then maybe they got some bad information or something like with the the protest where they said there's going to be a protest and they they changed at the last minute and as I mentioned I was able to eventually get onto their mailing list and a lot of the emails are kind of um off-puttingly political. Not necessarily that I disagree with the politics but for some reason a lot of the emails seem to have a fixation on Doug Ford and of course the issue that I'm facing is related housing but Acorn also does advocation for a whole bunch of other things. So, I think there was one email that I saw where uh they wanted to protest something like uh insufficient funds fees uh for the bank and they also do a bunch of advocacy for things like uh universal basic income. And now I think universal basic income that would be nice to have but uh personally I don't really think that's a a viable economic thing. And personally, I think a lot of the optics of their advocacy is uh very self-defeating. When you're trying to advocate for stuff like this, you have to be very uh cautious of the way you come across. Now, a perfect example of this is this clip that I saw, which was uh I don't know if that was in the legislature or something, but uh anyway, it's this guy apparently from Acorn who was uh just being obnoxious and then Doug Ford is there telling him to get a job. >> See you later. And when I see stuff like this, this is the kind of thing that makes me not want to be associated with them uh at all. And the other thing that's really offputting is this kind of uh militant language they're always using that they're going to uh mobilize and they're uh people at meetings would talk about like we're going to strike back and and once again I think just very poor optics. Now, given everything I've said, you might ask, why would anyone join Acorn at all? Well, on the day of that protest we did, the whole uh march to city hall protest where we uh were going to demand a bylaw. Uh you know, that that was a fairly depressive uh mood on that day. I had just gotten my eviction notice a few days before and you know, I've been in some pretty high places in my life. Um I met uh Jensen Huang, the CEO and founder of Nvidia. And during that period of my life, I was feeling really on top of the world. And here I am now. It's 10 years later. I'm totally broke. I got no money. I just got an eviction notice a few few days ago. I'm here with all these, you know, disabled elderly people and stuff. And in that moment of extreme weakness, who is the person that actually comes to support you? It wasn't Jensen. It wasn't uh Elon Musk. It wasn't some capitalist in a business suit. It was a red-haired woman who looked like she was from a punk rock band. Uh she came with a co mask in the middle of summer. And uh one of the first things that she did was she scolded me for apparently misgendering someone. Now, to this day, I'm still not exactly sure who I misgendered. Uh, but I do know that the symbolism of that, I think, is very powerful because in a situation like that where there's nobody supporting you, uh, and then Acorn shows up, you know, the choice is clear. There's there's simply no other option. And I think that's a point that's really worth stressing. If you look back at that, uh, that video of the guy yelling in Parliament to Doug Ford and people are telling him get a job. Um, it's easy to look at those people and say, "Oh, these are just a bunch of welfare bums." And there probably are some welfare bums there. But there's also a lot of just old grandmas and um, you know, elderly people who maybe had a stroke. And you could say that some of these people are probably not the sharpest tool in the shed. But a lot of these people are just ordinary poor people with no one to support them. And I don't think it's necessary for your grandma to be a rocket scientist. At the online ACORN meeting that I attended, I recall hearing from an elderly man who was in tears after having received his N13 eviction notice. He was completely beside himself, wondering how he was going to take care of his elderly bedridden wife. He said that the pending eviction notice was the only thing that he thought about all day long, every single day, and he had no idea what he was going to do about it. It was clear during this call that the online acorn meetings were the only lifeline that some of these people had. So, it makes sense why people would cling to the only sense of community that they have. Okay, let me try to speed this up or I'll never get through this. Uh, so the next thing I wanted to mention was uh so we spent a lot of time advocating for a bylaw. Now, personally, I don't really understand why we spend so much time advocating for a bylaw. The city seem to be of the opinion is that this should be solved at the tenant board and it's not their jurisdiction. And in my opinion, that does kind of make sense because if we can win this at the tenant board, then we can set a precedent for the entire jurisdiction of Ontario. But at the same time, the city can also help out in being more rigorous in the permit issuance process. And throughout this process, there were some uh news articles that were written about this proposed bylaw. And honestly, a lot of them seem like they were written just to kind of uh discredit or undermine us. Um, so one of these articles has a piece of text here that says, uh, the implementation of a rent eviction bylaw will take time. City staff will begin the process of hiring a consultant who will aid in the creation of the bylaw at a cost of approximately $150,000. If you want to hire a consultant who's an expert on renovations, hire me. I'll charge you $1. Here's my advice for you. This is all you need to prevent renovations. Oh, and the other thing Acorn did was they had a few strange demands like they were asking for a a landlord registry to keep track of uh landlords, but technically that already exists. It's called the land register. And there's a process you can use to request the land register. And I do believe there's some people at ACORN who knew about how to do that. But oh, and the other criticism that people have when they see these protests that uh ACORN organizes is people will say, "Oh, clearly these people are welfare bums because if they were at work, they would not be here protesting during the day." But as I mentioned earlier in the story, there was one of the people who wanted to come to the protest and he couldn't because he has a full-time job. And he's not the only person that I talked to who was in that exact same situation because I met another woman in this building. I said, "Did you go to the protest?" And she said, "I wanted to, but I couldn't because I have to work." And of course, their explanation for that was because uh apparently if they don't protest during work hours, the media won't show up. And personally, over time, it almost looked like there was a concerted effort to kind of uh make these people seem a bit more pathetic than they really were. If someone wanted to present something in a way that had really poor optics, uh they would let that person do it. But then if someone else had some good ideas that made a bit more sense, uh that person was kind of, uh, you know, pushed to the side. Now whether that was deliberate or organic, I'm not sure. And that leads to another thing that I saw with this organization and a lot of these other activist organizations is an association with a particular flag of a foreign country. And if you look into a lot of the different organizations on the uh tenant and landlord side, you will find uh frequently very strong associations with uh two particular foreign flags. And I think you know which two foreign flags I'm talking about. Now I don't have any particularly strong feelings about these flags and I really hope that these two countries can uh resolve their differences and get along well together. But the bigger picture here is that it is becoming increasingly difficult in Canada to advocate for your own rights without somehow becoming attached to one side or the other of this foreign conflict. The core issue is that when people see you standing beside one or the other of these foreign flags, people will say, "How could you support that flag? I won't take you seriously anymore, but I'm just trying to mind my own business and live in my apartment." Now, one of the other things that I started wondering is uh where does Acorn actually get funding from? So, at a low level, clearly they don't have a lot of resources uh because they were, you know, asking this room full of poor people for like 50 bucks a month or something, but clearly they have a lot of infrastructure. They're like an international organization. They have like uh chapters in Peru and basically every country in the world. So, clearly there's a lot of money coming from somewhere. And so, of course, I Googled for who funds ACORN. And on the first page of Google, I found a reference to this organization called the uh McConnell Foundation, which is which is some really old foundation that does a bunch of charity. And I saw that this organization had given a few hundred,000 to Acorn. And I clicked around on their website a bit, and I found that most of the money for this McConnell Foundation comes from a whole bunch of these uh really big corporations. And then I saw that one of the corporations that gives them a bunch of money is this familiar corporation. and then of course that led me down a rabbit hole of uh seeing what other organizations this McConnell Foundation gives money to. And personally, I don't have time to look into this at all, but uh in my opinion, this would be a really great thing for investigative journalism because if you follow through the information on their website, uh according to them, there are hundreds of millions of dollars that are going to all these hundreds and hundreds of organizations. Now, don't get me wrong. You'll you'll frequently see like a big bank or something give, you know, $10,000 to a cancer charity or whatever, and that seems like a nice organic thing, but if you dig into this a bit, the amount of money that's going into these organizations is absolutely insane. And I honestly have a difficult time figuring out what all these organizations are doing with all this money because they'll they're just like a word salad nonsense about like climate action, equity, justice, housing, acceleration. So, moving on. Who is Michael Klein? So the first thing that I should say about Michael Klein is that there are like five different people who are all named Michael Klein who are involved in commercial real estate. And in fact there's another guy uh even right in the Kitchener Waterlue area who is also involved in real estate who is also called Michael Klein and that is not the same Michael Klein. The Michael Klein who owns my building first started showing up in news articles based on his activities in 2015. So apparently back then we were trying to settle some refugees from Syria and some of these Syrian refugees ended up in a building of his and then he ended up uh suing these Syrian refugees because I guess there was a contract dispute where they signed a contract to lease the apartment but it was full of bed bugs so they didn't want to live there. Now, in terms of the corporate structure of his building, um here is a diagram showing the corporate structure of this building specifically. And this diagram is actually incomplete because above the redacted shell company, uh there's a couple more companies. So during the LTB hearing, we found out that uh it's family properties that's above that redacted shell company. And I think possibly above that or adjacent to that is some of his other shell corporations. And they go by a bunch of different names. One is called Diamond International Management and that was formerly called Diamond Shoe uh Diamond Footwear. And if you want to find out more about him and his history, I would strongly recommend this very good piece of investigative journalism. So, in this article, they dug into a lot of his previous behavior and uh you know, strange business dealings, things like just abandoning leases and not telling anyone and people chasing him around in court for bad business dealings. And during our interactions with the city, one of the justifications they had about uh why they couldn't really do anything about our situation was they couldn't find this landlord. But having said that, I think that within the world of uh multif family residential commercial real estate financing in Ontario, I think this guy is actually pretty wellnown because in 2015, he did this fairly detailed interview with First National Bank. So it seems like someone there knows him very well. But you wouldn't know that because for some reason they deleted that article. Oh, and something else that I forgot to mention is that when I set up that website to get information out to tenants, I expected that I would get maybe messages from tenants, but what I didn't expect was I started getting messages from tenants in other buildings that are owned by this landlord. And those tenants also started sending me lots of interesting information. Now, one of those tenants suggested to me that they thought that Michael Klein might actually be Russian. But based on my research, I didn't find any connections to Russia. In fact, I found uh substantial personal and business connections to the uh North York area, although I do believe that he has a business associate with connections to Muldova. I also heard from someone in another building who said that he also has connections to Florida, although I haven't personally confirmed this. Now, you might be wondering, when someone who works for your landlord makes statements like this, aren't you afraid of speaking up and facing retaliation? Personally, I'm actually a little bit more afraid of potential retaliation from all of the different social justice activist organizations that are associated with this situation. Earlier on in this process, when I was looking for news updates about what was going on in other Michael Klein buildings, I came across an Instagram post that was talking about Michael Klein. The Instagram post was from an organization called Climate Justice Toronto. So, of course, I took a look at their website. The website seems to make a lot of connections between climate change and housing affordability. At the top of their website, they describe their vision for fighting climate change, which includes working to fight white supremacy and defunding the police. For some reason, a lot of these social justice organizations have a fixation on the police. What does the police have to do with climate change? And this is not just an isolated example. When we first won our legal case, the Social Development Center posted an Instagram post to celebrate this fact. One of the commenters on this post was a page called Fightback KW. This is yet another one of these organizations that talks a lot about social justice, but they also have a bunch of things on this page criticizing members of the police force and individuals in the local community. Now, I don't know who any of these people are, and maybe there are some legitimate grievances there, but when I see stuff like this, this makes me think that maybe it's time to leave Kitchener permanently. Now, when it comes to the Social Development Center, I should stress that there absolutely were things that they did that I thought were very positive. And when I say that, I include the person who told me not to email them anymore. At the first few meetings, I was very impressed with her willingness to help people. But over time, a lot of this unconditional support started to lack detail in action. At times, it almost resembled campaign speeches. During one of our tenant meetings at the Civic Hub, I recall being told that we should think about our privilege. Now, I would agree there probably are some people in our government who make six figures and spend all day watching Netflix, and those people probably should think about their privilege. But to be honest, I don't think that the old man who wrote this note needs to think about his privilege. I think he should get a pass. The ultimate irony of the statement at the time was the fact that the more diverse members of our tenant union had stopped coming to tenant meetings, probably because we didn't do a great job of supporting them. Okay, let's talk briefly about PEL Capital, the private equity firm that actually financed the purchase of this building. So, obviously, it's Michael Klein who actually bought the building, but he only put down 25% of the equity. The other 75% was done on finance. And it says here in their investor report that they do socially responsible investing. So, it says here they consider the impact of things like whether the business model requires removal of low rent tenants. And they also included this wonderful diagram to illustrate the impact assessment of their investments. They don't really explain the diagram, but using my mathematical intuition, it looks like they're trying to illustrate that they'll do anything as long as it makes enough money. And to maximize their social impact, they also do a lot of good things with that money and contribute to a large number of local charities. Okay. Next, I wanted to say a couple things about Waterlue Regional Community Legal Services. So, I can't really criticize them because we're not paying them anything and they have a limited amount of resources to support a lot of people. But reading between the lines, I suspect, but cannot confirm that there may have been some uh disagreements or miscommunications between these community organizations and the Free Legal Service, but obviously I'm not a party to those interactions. Okay, so I've criticized a lot of things in this video, but I had a few experiences that uh left me with a surprisingly positive impression. The first is fire department incident reports. I had very low expectations when I first filed those uh freedom of information requests to see what was in the fire department incident report, but I was very pleasantly surprised. So, if you're a firefighter writing incident reports and you think that no one reads them, uh know that uh there's at least one person out there who appreciates them. And the next thing that I have positive things to say about is the freedom of information request process. Now, it is kind of a tedious process, and I think that's actually kind of a good thing, and it's also an imperfect process, which is both bad and good because I did a freedom of information request, and the information that I got was different than the information that another tenant did who did the same FOI request. So, that could work to your benefit if you're an investigative journalist or something. And I also have good things to say about the adjudicator that we had at the tenant board. People tend to complain a lot and say stuff like, you know, the legal process is corrupt and whatever, but my experience at the tenant board actually restored a bit of my faith in the system, but I still think we have a lot of really massive problems in basically everything around the system, as you've seen in this video. And there were a couple local politicians who advocated for us and uh actually talked about us in the legislature. And I think that really helped legitimize our case. This is the mail slot to my apartment. Over the past two years, I would estimate that I've looked at this mail slot about 4,000 times. Whenever I walk by the door in my apartment, I always check to see if there are any new court notices, general inspections, or other communications that require me to take urgent action. Whenever I go to bed at night, I always wonder if we are going to have another fire in the building or if my power will get cut off or if the homeless people who sometimes hang out in the stairwell will cause trouble at night. The government has made it clear that they want to build a nation of renters instead of homeowners. But if this is what the future of renting looks like, then maybe getting evicted isn't so bad after

An investigative journalism video by Village Media on Michael Klein's renovictions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUyTrePhgGQ 0:00:00 Intro 0:00:30 Recap 0:01:37 Timeline Review 0:04:44 1st Wave Of N13 Notices 0:05:42 Initial Protest 0:08:14 $250 Parking Spot 0:10:32 Initial Tenant Disagreements 0:11:20 Tenants Locked Out Of Parking Garage 0:12:00 Construction Dust Fire Alarms 0:12:30 2nd Wave Of N13 Notices 0:15:37 Structure Of Community Organizations 0:17:48 Legal Counsel 0:21:10 Getting More Involved 0:23:46 Workshop On T2 Filings 0:25:30 May 8th March To City Hall Protest 0:27:21 Cars Broken Into In Parking Garage 0:29:30 Information Vacuum 0:30:57 Stress on Tenant Union Leaders 0:35:35 Reaching Out To Free Legal Clinic 0:38:27 3rd Round Of N13 Notices 0:38:29 A2024-052 Parking Variance (Round 1) 0:39:44 Revival of 1524256 Ontario Limited. 0:40:42 Fire In Building Mgmt's Apartment 0:43:38 Heated Tenant Meeting 0:46:19 Remove AC Or Face Eviction 0:47:33 Cause Of Fire - Incident Report 0:50:25 4th Round Of N13 Notices 0:50:30 Waterfall In Stairwell 0:52:33 Stress, Fear & Communication Issues 0:58:12 Tenant Union Leaders Leaving & Drama 1:00:53 FOI Request On Car Break Ins 1:02:01 ACORN Protest At Building 1:04:14 Media Interview Request 1:05:06 Tenant Union Meeting Dates 1:08:46 Received LTB Mail For N13 L2 Eviction 1:09:16 Last Tenant Meeting I Attended 1:13:58 Faulty Sensor Fire Alarm 1:15:24 Calls From ACORN 1:16:17 My Preparations For Eviction Hearing 1:25:58 Jan 27, 2025 ACC Hearing 1:32:10 A2025-026 Parking Variance (Round 2) 1:40:35 Tenants "spying" 1:42:44 May 26th, 2025 1st N13 Merits Hearing 1:48:46 Angry Tenant Came To My Apartment 1:50:02 Jun 2nd Interim Order 1:51:40 Oct 6th, 2025 2nd N13 Merits Hearing 1:52:37 Remaining N13 Applications Dismissed 1:52:51 Landlord Appeals To Higher Court 1:53:24 Retrospective 1:53:58 What Do I Think About ACORN? 2:01:48 Advocation For Bylaw 2:04:04 Foreign Flags 2:05:00 Who Is Funding These Organizations? 2:06:49 Who Is Michael Klein? 2:09:28 Intimidating Organizations 2:10:53 Social Development Center 2:11:47 Peakhill Capital 2:12:57 Some Positive Things 2:14:10 Eviction From This Video