The Landlord and Tenant Board (LTB) has made changes to the Rules of Procedure, forms, and two Interpretation Guidelines: Guideline 6: Tenant Rights and Guideline 12: Eviction for Personal Use, Demolition, Repairs and Conversion.
Rules
The Rules of Procedure have been extensively reformatted and now use plain language. The commentary that appeared under some of the rules has been removed. The format and language of the new rules is consistent with the Social Justice Tribunals Ontario (SJTO) Common Rules of Procedure.
Some substantive changes to the Rules have also been made, including:
- Allowing the use of a declaration instead of an affidavit (Rule 1.5).
- Setting out the authority of LTB Hearing Officers (Rule 1.7).
- Allowing parties to give each other certain documents by email where they both agree (Rule 3).
- Changes to the test LTB applies when considering a request to close a hearing to the public has been revised to reflect recent jurisprudence (Rule 7.6).
- Removing the requirement that Co-operatives serve applications (Rule 12).
- Allowing a party to request that an application resolved by mediation be re-opened if the party lacked capacity to enter into a mediated agreement (Rule 13.11(b)).
- A new rule about electronic evidence (Rule 19.3).
- Changes to the rules about the payment out of money paid into the LTB’s trust account by tenants (Rules 20.3, 20.4, 20.6 and 20.8). If the tenant has not paid enough money into the LTB’s trust account to void the eviction order the money will be returned to the tenant.
Guidelines
Guideline 6: Tenant Rights has been expanded. It now includes discussion of all the grounds in the T2: Application about Tenant Rights. References to applicable case law have been updated and there are extensive references and links to relevant LTB orders.
Guideline 12: Eviction for Personal Use, Demolition, Repairs and Conversion has been changed to reflect amendments made to the Residential Tenancies Act on January 1, 2018. The guideline allows tenants to file a T5: Tenant Application – Landlord Gave a Notice of Termination in Bad Faith if a landlord does not allow a tenant to move back into the rental unit after extensive repairs have been completed. The discussion about who should be named as a respondent in a T5 application has also been revised.
Forms
Two new forms have been created as a result of these changes:
These forms have been updated to indicate that a declaration can be used instead of an affidavit:
- L2: Application to End a Tenancy and Evict a Tenant
- L3: Application to End a Tenancy – Tenant Gave Notice or Agreed to Terminate the Tenancy
- L4-A: Application to End a Tenancy – Tenant Failed to Meet Conditions of a Settlement or Order
- L4-B: Application to End a Tenancy – Tenant Failed to Meet Conditions of a Settlement or Order
- Tenant’s Motion to Void an Eviction Order for Arrears of Rent
- Request to Re-open an Application
- C4-A: Application to End the Occupancy of the Member Unit and Evict the Member because the Member failed to Meet Conditions of a Settlement/Order
- C4-B: Application to End the Occupancy of the Member Unit and Evict the Member because the Member failed to Meet Conditions of a Settlement/Order
- Co-op Member’s Motion to Void an Eviction Order for Non-Payment of Housing Charges
Begin using these revised forms immediately. Make sure you are getting the latest version of the form by clearing your browser cache.