Can you be evicted from your rental home in the winter?

In Ontario, tenants cannot be evicted for frivolous reasons and the Residential Tenancies Act affords a number of protections that might help to prevent that from happening.

But there’s a widespread belief related to an apparent rule about evictions in the winter time that has no basis in any existing law.

“[There is a] really harmful belief where people think that they’re somehow protected from being removed from their home between December and March. Not at all true,” says Karly Wilson, staff lawyer with Don Valley Community Legal Services.

Wilson says enforcement of evictions is not connected to the time of year in any way.

“The sheriff’s office is still working. They are enforcing writs of eviction throughout the winter months. There’s nothing preventing them from doing it,” she says.

“Generally speaking, the sheriff’s office will not enforce evictions on holidays the week of Christmas. They tend not to enforce because that would be something out of a Dickens novel. But otherwise you are not protected from eviction.”

Wilson says as far as she knows, a ban on winter evictions has never been implemented.

“I think it makes practical sense. I think in the back of anyone’s brain, they’re like, no one would be that cruel. Right? Especially when you’re dealing with Ontario winters. But in the five years that I’ve been practicing housing law, it has never been true,” she says.

It is possible that some are confusing it with the Ontario Energy Board’s Winter Disconnection Ban — which says that utility companies cannot turn off heat during the winter time, regardless of whether the bill is paid.

The ban is in place yearly from November 15 to April 30, based on which landlords are also not allowed to withhold heat.

If a tenant finds themselves without heat in the winter, Wilson advises calling both the Rental Housing Enforcement Unit (RHEU), which is a provincial oversight body and local bylaw.

“The Rental Housing Enforcement Unit will contact your landlord and then, the way they say it is ‘remind them’ of the law and say you’re not supposed to do this. If that doesn’t spur the landlord to action, they have the ability to open a file, do an investigation, and ultimately issue orders and fines. Typically they don’t get that far into the process. It often is resolved just by a phone call,” she says.

If bylaw enforcement is called, the city’s property standards office will contact the landlord.

“They’ll do an inspection as well and they’ll do follow ups and they’ll also issue an order,” says Wilson.

“The bylaw tends to work a lot quicker and a lot more, I would say, efficiently and immediately than the Rental Housing Enforcement Unit does. So if you are in a dire situation, you just want the heat back on, you don’t care about a file being opened about your landlord, bylaw’s probably the right way to go.”

What happens during an eviction?

Only the Landlord and Tenant Board can order an eviction following a hearing, whether the landlord is selling, moving in themselves or a family member or renovating, or for other reasons like non-payment of rent by the tenant.

Once an eviction order is issued, the process that follows is the same, regardless of the reason for eviction.

“[The order] is going to say a date by which the landlord can file for enforcement. At that time, the landlord brings the order to the sheriff’s office and the sheriff will then process it and issue what’s called the ‘notice to vacate.’ The notice to vacate will give a tenant a heads up about when the eviction’s going to happen,” says Wilson.

“Notices to vacate are not governed by the Residential Tendencies Act. There’s no mandated timeline that they have to give you. So they can give you anywhere from 10 days notice to two months notice and when the sheriff can actually come to enforce is entirely dependent on the sheriff’s schedule and how busy they are. It can be anywhere from two weeks to eight weeks to maybe longer depending on how backed up they are.”

The sheriff will only inform the landlord of the exact date when enforcement will take place so that the landlord can have a locksmith available to change the locks.

Once the enforcement has taken place and the locks have been changed, the now former tenant is given 72 hours to retrieve their belongings, after which the landlord can legally dispose of them.

Wilson says it is important to take a notice to vacate very seriously.

“That’s the time where if you haven’t already contacted legal representation, please do so and see if you can get some kind of legal advice or assistance about your options. There may still be an opportunity for you to stay,” she says.

“Or take that date seriously and come up with a plan so that you are not evicted into homelessness in [winter months].”