Let's Make Landlords Miserable and Afraid
Oi, you got a loicense for that flat?
Recently, a slumlord slash speculator in Montreal got up to such nefarious shenanigans that he managed to get himself on the news. The CBC and Ricochet both reported on his schemes, which mainly involving buying apartment buildings full of low-income tenants, taking out mortgages with extremely high interest rates, and then getting rid of the tenants as quickly as possible in order to flip the buildings, leaving some homeless. Par for the course for the parasite class, of course, who produce nothing of value and instead use their access to capital and pathological lack of regard for other human beings to squeeze rents and profits out of the rest of us. Clearly the guy is a pitiless freak: no surprise there. But what struck me about these articles was the following insane incident.
According to a pair of decisions rendered by the rental Tribunal (Tribunal administratif du logement — the TAL), last summer this landlord visited several of his tenants unannounced. These tenants benefited from a program for low-income people through the OMHM, the body administering municipal housing programs in Montreal, under which the portion of their rent that they paid was capped at 25% of their income, the rest being subsidized by the city. The landlord handed these tenants paperwork informing them that their rent was being increased significantly and that appliances, heat, and hot water would no longer be included in the lease. The paperwork was on fake letterhead from the OMHM, giving the tenants the impression that this rent increase was coming not from the landlord, but from the government body that was subsidizing their rent. Frightened and shocked, they signed.
Later, realizing what had happened to them, the tenants filed complaints at the Tribunal. The landlord didn’t even bother showing up for the audience. Upon reviewing the evidence, the judge found ‘unequivocally’ that the landlord had ‘deliberately’ committed fraud, that he was clearly attempting to take advantage of a vulnerable person, and that his actions were ‘inexcusable and reprehensible’1. The Tribunal ruled against him, and declared that the documents the tenants had signed were null and void.
And… that’s it. I cannot find any record of this landlord suffering any legal consequences whatsoever after getting caught knowingly defrauding vulnerable elderly people. The only thing that seems to have happened to him was that a judge said that he was not actually allowed to benefit from the fraud that he had committed. It’s like if you got caught going to the bank and taking out a loan in someone else’s name and your punishment was that you had to say sorry and give it back.
Reading this made something inside me snap. It brought back all the times over the years that my landlords have behaved in outlandishly antisocial ways, constantly breaking the law, neglecting their responsibilities and practicing various kinds of fraud, deception and extortion, always without any consequences at all. Backdated rent increase letters, documents referencing rental rules that don’t exist, imaginary ‘major work’ being cited as justification for raising the rent, emails threatening legal action over totally standard lease reassignments, attempts to extract ‘first-and-last’ rent payments and deposits which are not legal in Quebec, months of radio silence whenever basic repairs need to be done, unannounced visits and entry without permission, refusal to pay for exterminations, broken smoke detectors, floods and leaks going unaddressed, disgusting hallways, busted heaters, and on and on and on. Everyone in this city will start rocking back and forth and muttering to themselves if you bring up the topic of bad landlords. We are all held hostage by this totally pointless and often actively predatory stratum of profiteers. Why — apart from the class structure which makes this miserable system of housing allocation possible in the first place — are things so, so bad?
To get a driver’s license in this province, you are obliged to take 40 hours of instruction at a government-mandated driving school over the course of minimum one year. You must pass three tests, and then drive with a probationary license for two years. You will spend at least a dozen maddening hours at the government office in charge of driver’s licenses, the SAAQ, trying to explain weird problems you’re having with their online portal to people who stare at you blankly and ask you if you’ve tried calling. If at any point in this whole minimum three-year long process you get four demerit points, you’re out (touching a cell phone while driving, by the way, is five demerit points). If you want to become a real estate agent, you need a college degree in brokerage and a permit issued by the industry body. If you want to be a notary, a translator, or an accountant, you need specialized training and to be part of a mandatory professional order. If you break the rules of the Order of Optometrists of Quebec, you are not allowed to be an optometrist anymore. Yet to be a landlord — a social position so central to the economy and so fraught with conflict that there is a special Tribunal and whole chapters of the Civil Code dedicated to its administration — there are no requirements.
There is no government-mandated class you have to take. You don’t have to get on Zoom on a Saturday morning and learn about Module 2: You Are Not Actually Allowed to Ignore Black Mould. There’s no test at a government office where they make you sit in a little booth and show you little scenarios on a screen and ask you to identify which regulations the little characters are violating and make you retake the test in a month if you don’t pass. There’s no permit that says you are allowed to own other people’s houses and extract rent from them. And since there’s no permit, there’s nothing to take away.
There is also basically no scenario in which the police walk into your office and put you in handcuffs for repeatedly breaking the law as a landlord. If you hit somebody with your car, or even speed fast enough, you might very well go to prison. If you’re a doctor, you can be held criminally liable if you do something negligent enough at work. By contrast, a landlord can be ruled against over and over again and essentially nothing happens, because everything a landlord does is under the jurisdiction not of the police and the regular courts but of this dinky little Tribunal, the TAL, which has no ability to convict anyone of a crime. Even when landlords are taken to real court, which is rare, they always get away with fines. Two different buildings owned by Montreal landlord Emile Benamor burned down recently, killing nine people in total; inspectors found that he had not been keeping fire exits clear, and the city took him to court. He was fined $650 and plans to appeal. Long story short, there is essentially no way to actually compel these people to follow the laws governing their “““profession”””.
The reason there is no gruelling licensing process for landlords is the same reason there is a special parallel court system for landlords that can’t really punish them. Incidentally, it’s also the same reason there’s a special parallel court system for when your boss steals money from you: class rule by the people who own all the property and businesses. The development of liberal capitalism was the result of that class seizing power for themselves a few hundred years ago, and our institutions all reflect that to one degree or another. The result is this system wherein if you steal money out of the cash register you are arrested and possibly imprisoned but if you steal money by fucking with your employee’s paycheck you are summoned to an office building and asked by a bureaucrat to please not do that anymore; a system where a landlord can call the police to have you evicted but you cannot call the police to have your landlord deal with the black mould from Module 2. Technically everyone is equal before the law (one’s ability to pay a gazillion dollars an hour in legal fees notwithstanding), but conveniently if you own rental properties, you’re violating a different, special kind of law, one with no cops, courts or consequences.
I’m sure this has been lots of fun for the ruling class up til now but it’s getting pretty ridiculous, so I propose that we solve this absurd problem by the simple expedient of treating landlords the way we treat drivers. (Trust me, this is a really generous compromise.) Here’s the vision: landlords are required to take a class on the regulations governing rental housing and then pass a test on the material. If they pass, they can apply for a landlord license. If a landlord is found by the Tribunal to have knowingly violated any rental regulation, that landlord then receives demerits on their license. If that landlord exceeds a certain number of demerits, their license is suspended. This means that their right to collect rental payments from tenants is rescinded for the duration of a penalty period, during which their tenants pay rent to the government instead of the landlord. After the penalty period they must retake the test and reapply for their landlord license. For certain violations — such as deliberately committing gross fraud!!! — suspension is automatic and immediate and also comes with criminal charges. If your license is suspended three times, you lose the right to be a landlord permanently. A lawyer from the city estimates the value of your rental property and informs you that the government will be buying it, minus (large) fees and fines. For certain offences your building is simply seized without compensation in order to prevent you from committing more crimes. All buildings taken over by the city are turned into cooperatives or converted into affordable housing. A mobile inspectorate is set up so that tenants can call and report violations the way that you would call and report a crime. Eventually, if you want (I do), you simply stop issuing new permits to for-profit entities and transition away from landlordism entirely.
Such a system would certainly be met with an ungodly amount of bitching and moaning by parasites convinced they have an inalienable right to have poor people give them all their money in perpetuity. Among other things they would also threaten darkly that such a system would force them, force them! to raise their rental prices. To which I would respond: first of all, luckily the amount by which it is legal to raise the rent is not up to you. And secondly, are you saying that your current prices are possible because you are… breaking the law? The inspectors, sir, are on their way.
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Translation mine.