A senior woman living in Verdun, Que. is making an emotional appeal to authorities to increase protections for tenants.
This after the city gave her 72 hours to vacate her home of many years.
Li Rong Qiu, 69, is inconsolable.
She fears she will be evicted from the only home she’s known in Canada, after she moved from China more than a decade ago.
The city issued an evacuation notice on Monday, giving her until Wednesday to leave her home on Rielle Street in Verdun, because the building is deemed unsafe, without heating.
Her apartment building was recently sold and has been under renovations for the past few months, .
“For these nine months, my mother has experienced totally torture,” her daughter Jing Zeng said.
Zen says the new owners demolished the mechanical room and cut the heating.
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She claims tenants were never warned.
“They need to issue us major works notice, give us compensation and tell us when we can come back to the building and they refused to do that,” Zeng said.
Housing advocate Lyn O’Donnell, who is a community worker at the Citizen Action Committee of Verdun (CACV), is trying to help.
She says all tenants left out of panic but Rong Qiu stayed to defend her rights.
O’Donnell deplores that the city didn’t intervene when they were made aware of the problems.
“It’s absolutely a manufactured urgency because back in February we confirmed the building was safe for people to live in and now they literally remove the central heating system and all of a sudden the tenants have to leave?” O’Donnell said.
Rong Qiu was offered temporary accommodation by the city but it’s in another neighborhood she’s not familiar with.
She doesn’t speak English or French and fears losing her entire community.
While she fights the matter in court, she is pleading with authorities to step up protection for tenants.
“The whole system, there’s something wrong inside,” Zeng said.
For its part, Verdun city councillor Kaïla Munro says they conducted 31 inspections in the building and did everything they could legally do to ensure the safety of tenants.
The landlord’s lawyer wrote to Global News saying in part that, although he doesn’t own the property, he has always acted legally and in good faith towards Qiu and done everything in his power to avoid the present situation, including offering temporary accommodation several weeks ago.
“Unfortunately, Ms. Qiu and her lawyers have either declined or ignored our repeated offers to help,” wrote Me Rachelle Urtnowski-Morin in an email. “The City did not advise the landlord of its intention to evacuate Ms. Qiu until hours after the notice had been sent to her.”
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