“I am a Tibetan immigrant. My family came to Canada in the year 2015 and I have two children. I was a student doing my ECE program before this pandemic. Before the pandemic, I was working part time and being under social assistance. I was able to pay my apartment rent. Since this pandemic started I lost my job and was not able to pay rent. So a group of tenants from our community decided to hold the rent. For about nine months I was not able to pay rents and I got the eviction notice letter from the landlord. I attended the hearing on December 2, 2020. The board asked me to make a payment plan for which I was able to make a plan but the landlord didn’t accept that. They were asking about my income and at last I have to tell them that I can try to pay from the child-tax benefit which I receive. So that was a very emotional moment for me. The amount which I receive for child-tax benefit, I have saved some little for their future education expense. They were asking about CERB. The amount I receive for CERB, I have to get groceries. I thought there would be a positive decision from the board but they decided to send through mail. I kept waiting for that mail but didn’t get it so I wrote an email to the board about the hearing decision and they replied it was supposed to be received within a month. A month passed, and I still didn’t receive any mail. I am worried if I get an eviction notice from the board.”

“I’ve recently been evicted … staying in a hotel for now until I find a better accommodation. I had a case with the LTB since March of last year. I had gone thru the court process with my landlord and they wanted to evict me for rent owing—I paid off everything and there was a ‘stay put’ on the sheriff’s order. Fast forward eight months: I guess my landlord must have taken it back to court unbeknownst to me and there was a court date held over the phone early November. I got the court documents AFTER the court date stating I did not attend (which I had no knowledge of until after the fact). I spoke with a duty counsel, they said the only thing I could do was to come to agreement with the landlord. Just before Christmas my landlord and I sat down, she expressed her bills were stressing her and that I should at least give something—I agreed to pay that month’s rent (December) + an additional month on top of that. She took the money—even gave me a gift and card on Christmas. Then January 5m 11:30 a.m. there’s a knock on my door—Sheriffs WITH my landlord. I asked her what this was about. I thought we had an agreement and she had no answer, just shrugged her shoulders. I was evicted out of my home. She even called the cops to make sure I couldn’t come back.”

"Having to deal with the hearing was very stressing for me and my partner. Because we are new in this country and we didn’t know what to expect from it, we really couldn’t sleep thinking about what was going to happen. Thankfully, days before the hearing I could contact a person that represented us in it and she was very helpful during the process. Thanks to her help the hearing was very fast for us, because she managed to get to an agreement with our landlord representative. But I personally think that it was really unnecessary to go to the hearing, we could have had an agreement without the stress and the anxiety that it represented for us."

“You can’t get a straight answer from the LTB. Even when I sent my forms by registered mail and got confirmation from Canada Post that it was delivered, the LTB still said they lost my mail. Instead of retrieving a document they had on file or even asking me to provide it, the adjudicator dismissed my application without even giving me a chance to present my case at a hearing. She said I “did not do my due diligence.” I know I did my due diligence. My application had 24 appendices.”