Tenant Awarded $20,000 from Ontario Human Rights Tribunal for Landlord Sexual Harrassment

[Advocate]

Last July, Janice Gricken was savouring her hard-fought victory at the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario: her abusive Parkdale landlord had been ordered to pay her $20,000 for three years of despicable sexual harassment.

There was little time to celebrate. “She can go screw herself,” landlord Jack Andriano told the Sun at the time. “She provokes me and I call her a hooker …, what’s the big f—— deal?

“It’s freedom of speech,” the landlord continued. “You don’t like it? Too f—— bad.”

Andriano vowed Gricken wouldn’t see a penny. “I’m a fighter,” he warned. “I’m ready to fight.”

So far, he’s been good to his word. Instead of paying her, he issued her with yet another eviction notice, claiming she hadn’t paid her August 2017 rent.

While the case took its sweet time waiting to be resolved, Gricken paid her monthly rent as required into trust with the Landlord and Tenant Board (LTB). Last week, the board ruled in Gricken’s favour – Andriano had lost another of his many bids to toss her out. The board accepted her version of events: that her landlord threw her rent check in the garbage to try and evict her “without merit.”

But once again, there was no sweet victory.

Despite months and months of mediocre efforts by the HRTO enforcement office, Gricken has yet to see any of the money she was awarded by the human rights tribunal. She’s played detective herself and provided all the banking information she can find only to have her landlord’s accounts closed before the enforcement officer gets around to trying to garnishee anything. “They keep bungling it,” she charges.

Yet here was a pot of almost $10,000 in back rent that she’d paid into trust. So she asked the LTB to return the money to her as part of the settlement she’s owed by Andriano.

No can do, she was told. “Because the HRTO is a separate entity,” the adjudicator wrote, “the Board has no role in enforcing the HRTO’s decisions.”

Instead, the LTB gave her rent money to the scofflaw landlord who owes her twice that amount.

“It makes no sense,” say the exasperated Gricken. “They just handed this man $10,000 of my money and he owes me over $20,000 and I’m still paying rent to this guy. They’re both government tribunals and are governed by the same provincial laws and yet they said one tribunal order has nothing to do with the other?”

It’s ridiculous.

How the man must be laughing. As the human rights decision stated last year, Andriano has been determined to make Gricken’s life a “toxic” hell.

He’s called her everything from a “f—— b—-” to “you dirty c— whore.” When asked to fix a leak, she says he told her “Go f— yourself b—-! I’m not fixing anything until you move out!” She claimed he repeatedly vandalized her bike and filed groundless eviction notices against her.

“Landlords are in a position of power over tenants,” wrote vice-chair Josée Bouchard last year in her decision, and Andriano “abused his position as a landlord by making (Gricken’s) personal life a misery. He regularly made offensive gender-based comments and sexually demeaning gestures that denigrated her as a woman, and women in general.”

Bouchard also found Andriano “made it a mission to make (her) stay miserable, which makes it more plausible than not that he was responsible for the bike vandalism as part of his scheme against (her).”

Yet her $20,000 award – plus interest – remains a fantasy while the bullying continues. “He’s handed his money on a silver platter,” Gricken complains.

“The system is so broken. It’s laughable and it’s cryable. It’s just unbelievable.”

http://torontosun.com/news/local-news/m ... d-wont-pay

[Laura]

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