05-10-2024, 09:13 AM
(05-10-2024, 05:00 AM)danbrotherston Wrote: 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.
The “tenant became a student” situation is entirely different from “tenant didn’t clear sidewalk”. It is by law the responsibility of the property owner to make sure the sidewalk is cleared. One way of discharging this responsibility could be to hire the tenant to do it, but it doesn’t extinguish the responsibility — it just makes the landlord an employer also, and means they need to monitor the quality of the employee’s work.
By contrast, the landlord has no way of even monitoring whether the tenant has become a student, and no way of forcing them to either cease being a student or cease being a tenant if they do become aware the tenant has become a student. So it is entirely unreasonable to in any way penalize the landlord in this situation.
It of course true that all of these concepts are social constructs, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t real. Our modern justice systems have all sorts of concepts deeply ingrained into them, such as the right to have the charges clearly stated and prohibitions on collective punishment. I’m not an expert in the philosophical foundations of justice, but I feel quite confident stating that punishing someone for the actions of another over whom they have no control is definitely fundamentally unjust.