Your first stop for self-help is a review of our FAQs. Take a look at the ever increasing collection of questions asked by Ontario’s small-scale landlords as well as the actual answers provided by Landlord’s Self-Help Centre.
Harassment can be committed by a landlord, their agents, or even other tenants and includes repeated unwanted comments, insults, verbal abuse, as well as intimidation, threats, or aggressive behaviour. It can include discriminatory remarks based on race, nationality, language, gender, disability, or family status or any persistent conduct that makes a tenant feel unsafe, targeted or distressed. Harassment does not need to be physical and does not have to involve criminal conduct to be taken seriously.
As a landlord, once you become aware of the harassment, you are required to take reasonable steps to protect that tenant’s reasonable enjoyment of the property, regardless of language barriers. This includes documenting the complaint, ensuring communication with interpretation if needed and addressing the behaviour directly, including issuing warnings and or serving an N5 Notice for harassment and interference with reasonable enjoyment. If the conduct continues, you will need to file an L2 application with the Landlord and Tenant Board.
As a landlord, you have the responsibility to ensure that all tenants have reasonable enjoyment of their premises, free from harassment by the landlord or other tenants. Once this situation is brought to your attention, you cannot ignore it, you must look into the matter, gather details and take reasonable steps to address the conduct. If the behaviour continues after being addressed, you should escalate the matter by taking steps to terminate the tenancy of the offending tenant based on ongoing harassment and interference with another tenant’s reasonable enjoyment using an N5 notice.
Unfortunately, this will not be possible. You do not have to use the tenants’ written submissions (letters) or call the tenants as witnesses, but if you do, the tenant has the right to know who they are, and to cross-examine them if necessary. The Board is bound by certain rules that do not allow evidence to be given in secret. Because of this, the other tenants may be reluctant to get involved.
A landlord who lives in the same rental property as the tenant that has 3 or fewer residential units may serve the tenant with a Form N7 – Notice to End your Tenancy For Causing Serious Problems in the Rental Unit or Residential Complex if the tenant harasses them. This is a 10 day termination notice that allows a the landlord to apply to the Landlord and Tenant Board to terminate the tenancy immediately after giving the N7 to the tenant.
Provided the superintendent lives on the same property as the tenant, then the Form N5 would be the notice to use in this case.