Three-bedroom madness

[danbrotherston]

The condo corporation will make rules (whether declaration, bylaws or condo rules), hopefully legal ones, and then the responsibility of the owners is to comply with these. In some cases they are very clear, in other cases not so clear, like your examples above. You can always fight them in court but most people would not want to get involved in a legal battle.

My point is, let’s ignore whatever feelings I might have about the rule. I rent out my place, and put in the rental advertisement, “condo rule: no students”. I rent to somebody who isn’t a student (let’s just suppose they’re not a student, and ignore the question of what I might do to establish that fact). A few months later they register with the University to take a course, making them a student. The condo finds out about it. Now what?

Clearly, either they have violated the condo rule, or I have. If they have, then what should the condo corporation do? Is there a procedure for a condominium corporation to evict a tenant of a unit owner, or to fine an occupant? If I have, then can I go to the LTB and have the tenant evicted? I’m pretty sure I couldn’t if it was my own rule rather than a condominium rule. What about fines? If I have to pay a fine because my tenant registered as a student, that is flagrantly contrary to justice.

Anyway, “no students” should be considered a human rights violation, and I hope the other poster is correct that the OHRC would consider it so.

Condo corporations cannot evict tenants (or owners). They can only fine owners (or lien their unit). Also, owners are liable for costs including fines and damages incurred to common property. They can try to recover this from their tenants, but this will probably come down to lease terms and their luck at the Tribunal. This is no different than any landlord (plenty of landlords in KW have been fined by the city for failure to clear sidewalks). And I strongly suspect a request for eviction would fail here.

As for whether this is "contrary to justice" (flagrantly or not) is ENTIRELY a social construct, as is virtually all definitions of justice (hell, even "don't kill people" is not as universal as I would like...and even I don't think it should be fully universal (e.g., assisted suicide and self defence of a deadly threat are both exceptions) but for example, in many parts of the US, people (and governments) believe it is okay to kill someone to defend your property, or even just because they 'scare' you).

So you can argue that a tenant should be liable, but you can also argue that the property owner should be liable, and I don't think either are a particularly strong argument, liability, tenancy, and property are all fairly high-level social constructs themselves, so I think if you feel there's an obvious fundamental answer, it's probably time to question some preconceptions.

But either way, in a practical sense, whether a landlord could recover fines would depend a lot on the specifics of the rental agreement, and also the specifics of the situation, and the particular luck/legal sophistication of the parties involved.

As for the specifics of the "No students" rules...we of course know what this is...it is exactly an end run around human rights. They say "no students" because the goal is to forbid young, single, often transient people. in favour of more established, more permanent, traditional families. But those things are much more protected than "enrolled at a institute of higher education" is.