Daniel & Michelle Menjívar
80 Cherrywood Avenue
Toronto, Ontario M6C 2X3
hey@danielandmichelle.ca

September 2, 2024

Konstantinos Katsaris (aka Kosta, aka Gus)
84 Cherrywood Avenue
Toronto, Ontario M6C 2X3
t.omortgagesolution@gmail.com

Re: Shutting off the A/C in the heat of summer resulting in the need to call an ambulance & addressing your utility bills

Dear Kosta,

We started writing you our letter as a personal email, but after your last angry text message, we are genuinely afraid of what you might try next; we realized that we needed to make this an open letter to assure our protection and safety. We have been extremely understanding and patient with you throughout our 2½ year tenancy. However, frankly, your recent actions that came out of nowhere, coupled with your rude impatience over text messages, have made us finally reach our breaking point. Enough is enough.

As you know, every landlord we’ve had in our 19½ years together has provided us with a glowing reference and many have even gone as far as writing us a letter of recommendation. This is to say, our experiences with previous landlords have been very positive, until now. You are the first landlord who has so callously disregarded our health and well-being to the point of putting one of our lives in danger! That is unforgivable.

You came home from vacation, opened a high utility bill after a sweltering summer then proceeded to shut off the A/C without first asking questions or even considering how it might affect your tenants.

Everyone we know on our street and in this neighbourhood is well aware that Daniel is chronically ill, unable to work and presently only able to leave the house about 3 to 5 times a month, so you can’t say you didn’t know it would affect him. During the summer that the furnace broke down, we would get together for doggie play dates on our deck with your partner B███ and have lengthy conversations, including about Daniel’s health. And you are the only one of our neighbours who has it on paper, an important detail that we included upfront on our rental application. Nevertheless, Daniel has never asked you for special treatment, to make special accommodations for him or for you to make his problems your own; his only expectation has been to be treated humanely like anyone else. It’s not that you didn’t know, it’s that you didn’t care.

Incidents like this are why there has been a big push in Ontario recently to hold landlords criminally responsible for their actions.

Where did this come from? Why would you arbitrarily take such an extreme action out of left field? We don’t have a history of arguing with you or not getting along. What anger are you misdirecting and taking out on your tenants who have made it a point of always being respectful, polite and easy to get along with?

Would you do that to your mother? If your daughter was away at college and her landlord did that to her, would you think it was acceptable? We know you would be enraged! You didn’t adjust the thermostat by a degree or two, you completely shut off the A/C and all climate control.

Health Effects & Ambulance

When we informed you of how the abrupt shut-off was affecting Daniel’s health and sent you screenshots showing over 32 elevated heart rate notifications and a high blood pressure reading that showed a state of hypertensive crisis as a result of you shutting off the A/C, did you turn the A/C back on once you were made keenly aware of the specifics? No. Your only response? “Ok.”

Worried by sky-high blood pressure readings that he didn’t even know were possible, Daniel spoke on the phone with a nurse at Health Connect Ontario (formerly TeleHealth) who suggested we should leave immediately for the emergency room. As we were getting ready to call a Lyft, things took a sudden turn for the worse so we had to call an ambulance. When you saw the ambulance parked outside the house, did that make you reconsider your impulsive action and turn the A/C back on? No.

After checking vitals and running several diagnostic tests, the paramedics stood in our 27ºC living room and exclaimed, “Wow, it’s hot in here!” while wiping sweat off their foreheads. They explained that Daniel’s body was beyond stressed and because of his weakened system as a result of his chronic health issues, his body was having a difficult time adjusting to such a drastic and sudden increase in temperature. “Plus, it’s extremely humid, which makes it worse.”

Daniel sat there in a sweat-drenched shirt dripping sweat from his face, he had dangerously high blood pressure putting him at imminent risk of suffering a cardiac event, an elevated heart rate at rest and was starting to get a fever. Such a sudden and drastic temperature change would be uncomfortable for anyone, even a healthy person, but for a sick person with chronic health conditions, it’s life-threatening. Again, you didn’t adjust the temperature by a degree or two, you completely shut off the A/C and all climate control. You absolutely cannot claim that you didn’t know that it would affect your tenants. You did this willfully and purposefully.

Out-of-Control Bills

You complained that your bills are going through the roof, but we aren’t surprised. The decisions you make and actions you take — or don’t — have consequences; in the 2½ years that we’ve lived here, we’ve seen you repeatedly make many decisions that have left us asking ourselves, “Doesn’t he care about the utility bills?”

But before we get into detailing how the “out of control” utility bills are entirely of your own making, we should first take the time to list the many things that we’ve done on our part to conserve water and electricity.

What we’ve done to conserve water & energy

• We paid for and installed a $500+ hands-free kitchen faucet that reduces water waste by automatically shutting off after two minutes.

• At our expense, we replaced the ancient shower head with a ridiculously high flow rate with a modern one that reduces it to a more reasonable, water-conscious flow rate.

• We only take showers and never take baths. When our dog needs a bath, we instead bring him into the shower with us to reduce our water usage.

• We’ve spent over $500 in replacing all the light bulbs (which were previously all energy-sucking incandescents) with best-in-class energy-efficient dimmable LEDs.

• We’ve spent over $2500 on smart home accessories to reduce energy usage:

  • With your permission, we changed every light switch to a smart one so we can shut off lights from anywhere. Unlike before, every light switch is a smart dimmer too, so our lights rarely run at 100%.

  • We plug everything into smart plugs — even our air fresheners — so we can shut things off from anywhere.

  • We’ve set up automation to shut off all lights & outlets whenever we leave the house, most notably, the bathroom heater.

  • We’ve set up automation to turn off the deck lights after a delay so they’re never left on accidentally.

  • We’ve set up HomeKit accessories that enable us to shut off our living room TV from anywhere. “Hey Siri, turn off the living room TV.”

  • We use motion sensors and occupancy detectors throughout our HomeKit automations to shut things off after we leave a room for too long.

  • We installed a sensor on the deck doors and set up an automation to automatically turn off the A/C and alert us on our iPhones and Apple Watches if the deck doors remain open for longer than a minute.

• We enrolled the thermostat in the Save on Energy Peak Perks program which automatically adjusts the thermostat during periods of peak electricity demand and you save on electricity costs as a side benefit. In exchange, they give you a $75 gift card when you enrol, which rather than keeping as compensation for our sacrifice in comfort as intended, we gave it to you to put towards the electricity bill.

• Daniel monitors and analyzes the furnace usage when the monthly reports are emailed.

  • For example, the app clearly shows that the reason the A/C was running all night on the night you asked about had nothing to do with temperature, but was because the humidity was at 88% and the A/C was struggling to get it under control.

  • The average temperature inside the house in July 2024 was 23ºC. Even though it was a much hotter July than last year (and more humid with all the rain), the A/C only ran an additional 38 hours compared to 2023, but, the smart thermostat settings yielded 50% greater savings this year!

• We use the drying rack in the laundry room as much as possible and even hang laundry to dry on the clothesline outside in the summer months.

• Since there’s no exhaust fan in the kitchen and our apartment quickly heats up whenever we cook anything, we cook outside on our propane BBQ as much as possible during the warmer months; we even purchased an outdoor wok burner this year to cook more things outside.

That is not an exhaustive list, just some highlights. There is no planet B. We have done much more than our fair share; anyone would agree that we have done more to reduce our water usage and have invested more time and money than most tenants do to conserve electricity. Simply put, it is exemplary and we are very proud of it.

Yearly Rent Increases

Upon signing our lease — which had the cost of utilities factored into the rent amount — we insisted that you take yearly rent increases by the maximum amount set by the Ontario Government to cover any rising costs due to inflation. We explained to you that we believed it was in our best interest for your business to stay profitable so that you wouldn’t feel motivated to sell the house anytime soon. We even rounded up the increase above the maximum allowed by several dollars a month during our second year as a goodwill gesture. Who else does that? You told Daniel that apart from us, none of your other tenants pay yearly increases because they inevitably ask for it in writing.

With that established, we’ll address your concerns about the utility bills, starting with the water.

Water Usage

We know from experience that leaking toilets are the leading cause of large increases in water bills. At our previous house on Humewood Drive where we lived for almost eight years, the landlord was surprised that replacing just one leaky toilet in the apartment above ours resulted in a $250/month savings on his water bill! So when you started near the bottom and asked us about our laundry usage — knowing full well that there are much larger issues at the top that you have chosen to neglect — we wondered if perhaps things have changed.

We looked at the City of Toronto website to search for information regarding high water bills. Sure enough, leaking toilets top the list, then leaking pipes. As we scanned down the list, nowhere on the list did it say that laundry is a leading cause of water bill spikes. So we checked the websites of other cities and still didn’t see laundry as a leading cause of water bill spikes; we searched the internet, “Is laundry a cause of water bill spikes?” but we could only find information touting that modern high-efficiency washing machines use less than half the amount of water that traditional washing machines use. From applianceanswers.ca:

“In the past, standard washing machines required 45 gallons of water per load, but modern designs get the job done far more efficiently… […] …generally high-efficiency washers (HE), have an average water usage of 14 gallons.”

Laundry Costs

Then we searched the internet some more and found the same information corroborated on various websites: the average cost of washing and drying a single load of laundry at home including water, electricity and detergent is around $1.37. That explains how laundromats can charge $2 – $3 per load for larger machines while covering their overhead and still turn a profit. Moreover, we looked at our Amazon subscriptions to see how many Tide Pods we order and how often; we calculated that we do less than two loads of laundry per week, which amounts to less than $3 a week in laundry costs including detergent.

The facts clearly show that laundry is not a probable cause for large increases in utility bills, and using that as a starting point is absurd when you know there are much bigger fish to fry.

Toilets

T███ upstairs has been telling us for months that she has told you that her toilet leaks and therefore needs a new toilet, but you have chosen to ignore it. While you were away in Greece, we started to suspect that our toilet was also leaking, but we haven’t mentioned it to you yet because we wanted to be sure that it is indeed leaking and not just shoddy workmanship by the installer.

Pipes

Regarding pipes leaking, the city’s website lists one of the symptoms of leaking pipes as excessive humidity in the home. As you know, the smart thermostat emails numerous alerts every day warning that the humidity in the house is “unusually high.” The city’s website also mentions that a damp basement and the smell of mould could be another indicator of leaking pipes. D███ has been telling us for months how the humidity in her basement apartment bothers her — especially with the carpet — and that it’s gotten so bad that she’s been contemplating buying a dehumidifier. On our side of the basement, we too have worsening mouldy smells and were seriously considering purchasing a dehumidifier earlier this year.

Early this summer, you told Daniel you couldn’t turn on the tap for the hose in the back because the pipes in D███’s apartment were leaking.

Hot Water Tank

On July 27, 2022 when Enercare came to inspect the furnace, they told you that the hot water tank was 20 years old and needed to be replaced as soon as possible. Narine P., the technician, ran tests from our bathroom sink and determined that even with the hot water tank set at maximum, the hot water is far below the minimum recommended temperature.

When the furnace was replaced that year and the installation guys observed that it took us several hours to move our furniture out of the way to make room for them, they again suggested, “Now that we’re here, you should replace the hot water tank at the same time so it causes less inconvenience to your tenants.” You refused to replace the hot water tank.

The internet says that the average lifespan of a hot water tank is around 8 to 12 years, so it should be no surprise that a 21-year-old tank is way past its prime and contributing to your high water bills. We also told you that it had started to leak gas, but instead of calling someone to check it out to be safe, you assured us that all hot water tanks smell like they’re leaking gas, even the one at your mother’s house.

Whenever we need hot water, it can take up to four minutes of running the tap to get the first drop of hot water. If we use hot water only three times a day, that’s still over 68 litres of water wasted each day, much more than doing a load of laundry every day! Multiply that by three apartments and the water wastage only compounds further.

T███ upstairs has told us that she too has spoken to you about having hot water issues (among a plethora of other plumbing issues) and that she has never been able to take a proper shower since moving here because there is never enough hot water at any time of day.

Start at the Top

You are complaining that your water bill is too high. Instead of starting with things that will have the least impact, like auditing how many loads of laundry your tenants do, and when, it makes much more sense to start at the top and address the largest contributors to water waste, all of which are entirely and solely in your control. The information on the city’s website backs up this approach: start with the toilets, and pipes, and address the absurdly high waste of water that occurs daily from having a hot water tank that you know is long overdue for replacement.

Electricity Usage

It’s bizarre that you’re attempting to blame us for wasteful utility usage by auditing the number of loads of laundry we do per week when you can see our laundry hanging to dry outside from your backyard, and when you are fully aware — for over two years — that our dryer is not working properly.

Clothes Dryer

We have lost track of how many times we have told you over the past 2½ years that our dryer is not working properly. The first three times you said it was probably just the dryer vent outside that was clogged and that you’d go clear it. The next couple of times, Daniel would tell you, “The dryer is not working properly, I’ll go check the vent” which eventually turned into him saying, “The dryer is not working properly and I already checked the vent.” We’ll repeat the first half of that sentence yet again: the dryer is not working properly.

You repaired the washing machine twice (since they didn’t do it properly the first time) but it was so old that it was not possible to get parts for it anymore. Only when you were left with no other choice did you replace it. (And you wonder why the utilities are so high running obsolete energy-inefficient appliances?) We asked if you would replace the 30-year-old dryer at the same time as the washer, but you insisted the dryer was fine and that you didn’t want to replace it.

Now the dryer is at the point that one load of laundry can take 3 to 4 hours to dry; we have to restart the dryer several times a day to dry one load. At our previous rentals, we would try to do laundry during off-peak periods as much as possible, but that’s not possible when the dryer here takes 3 to 4 hours to dry one load. No wonder we’ve been drying more and more of our laundry outside as time goes by, it dries faster outside than in the dryer! You’ve been made aware continually for over two years that our dryer does not work properly; instead of doing something about it, you have a tantrum by shutting off all climate control on your tenants because your electricity bills are “getting out of control.”

Upstairs Dryer

What’s more, when we first moved in, S███, the upstairs tenant at the time, mentioned to Daniel that she was having problems with the dryer upstairs too, but was still waiting for you to fix it. Now we hear from the new tenant T███ that she too is having issues with the same dryer and has told you about it numerous times. Instead of fixing it to reduce your electricity bill, you want to audit how many loads of laundry she does per week and when.

Electrical Panel

On June 12, 2023, we sent you photos to show you that whenever it rains a lot, water leaks in the basement around and inside the electrical panel. This is extremely dangerous! You’ve been aware of this for over a year, but have chosen not to do anything about it. Are you waiting until the entire electrical panel gets fried? Or just until someone gets electrocuted? Of course, you know that it’s not going to fix itself. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that there could now be a short circuit contributing to high electricity bills. After all, you have repeatedly acknowledged that there are many electrical issues in every unit in the house, like T███ having to bang on her wall to get her hallway light to turn on, for example.

Microwave/Toaster Oven

On April 8, 2022, we bought a small toaster oven for our kitchen but had to return it since it kept tripping the fuse. We had to pick only one: should we turn on the TV or warm up lunch? Unfortunately, Daniel doesn’t have the health to go up and down the stairs several times a day, especially just to reset the circuit breaker. You said countless times that you would have an electrician come to put in a larger fuse, but that hasn’t happened.

In our 2½ years living here, how much electricity would have been saved if we could reheat our lunch in a microwave for 2 minutes instead of having to turn on the stove or preheat the oven for 20+ minutes every time? You don’t want to do anything about the outlet for a microwave, but you wonder why your electricity costs are so high.

Bathroom Heater

When we first moved in, you said you would hire an electrician to use the live exposed wires in the bathroom to install an energy-efficient baseboard heater and replace the non-working one in the laundry room at the same time. You said, “Go buy a cheap space heater for the bathroom in the meantime and I’ll reimburse you,” which you did.

We purchased a smart plug for the bathroom heater (at our expense) so it can automatically shut off whenever we leave the house. That smart plug also has energy usage statistics, so we can see that in the time we’ve been here, the bathroom heater has used almost $800 in electricity to keep the bathroom at 22ºC. If each winter season lasts 5 months, that’s $80 per month just to heat the bathroom! Wouldn’t installing an energy-efficient baseboard heater — as you committed to doing and have been reminded of — go a long way in reducing your electricity bill?

Fans & Space Heaters

As soon as you shut off the A/C, T███ upstairs started running three fans, in addition to however many fans D███ might have started running in the basement; we started running two fans after two separate neighbours lent us theirs — without us even asking — after seeing the ambulance at the house and learning it was because you arbitrarily shut off the A/C. We are now forced to buy additional fans of our own. That sounds like a lot of electricity usage to us — is it worth shutting off the A/C to run all those fans? The same thing happens in the winter: you want the thermostat set cooler, which results in all your tenants running multiple energy-guzzling space heaters non-stop, day and night.

A/C and Furnace Usage

We saved the most significant item for last. The main reason that we are not at all surprised that your electricity bill has increased — apart from the fact that this summer has been much hotter than the mild summer we had last year, and the fact that every year on this planet now beats the record for hottest year only set the year before — is because we were there when all the new furnace options were presented to you in August 2022 (through your partner B███) and when it was explicitly explained to you that this very thing would happen; you signed off on it fully aware of the impact of your decision.

The old furnace at the house was a larger two-stage one with 88,000 BTUs. Sitting at our dining table with his laptop, the sales rep suggested that for a home of this size, you should get at least a 60,000 BTU furnace (the most common size, which also happened to be a two-stage model). But after checking with you, B███ insisted you would never go for it. She said you planned on putting in a ductless A/C unit for the upper unit anyway (which hasn’t happened), so a smaller one should be fine. You went with a single-stage 44,000 BTU furnace, which is half what the old one was.

Wanting to fully understand what that meant and the consequences of the choice, Daniel asked — with B███ listening attentively — if the BTU rating only mattered for the heat and not the A/C. The sales rep said no, the furnace and A/C work together and, “The larger the furnace, the larger the fan.” The upside was that the 44,000 BTU furnace they were trying to sell you had a very high-efficiency rating and would waste less gas, but the downside of buying an undersized furnace was that it would need to run longer and more often to heat and cool a house of this size with a smaller blower fan.

After Ray, the gas installer was finished and turned the furnace on, he asked Daniel to go upstairs to check if the vent was blowing air. Daniel immediately noticed it was blowing significantly less air than the old furnace, so he asked Ray to come and check. Ray assured Daniel it was operating as expected: “smaller furnace, smaller fan.”

We remember the salesperson clearly explaining and repeating that you could either spend more money upfront by getting a bigger/better furnace more appropriate for this size of house, and thereby spend less money on electricity over time, or spend less money upfront, but have increased electricity costs as a result of running it longer and more often. You chose to spend less upfront and pay higher utility bills later, but now you complain that your electricity bill is higher.

Whereas the temperature in the summer was previously set to a constant 22ºC on the old thermostat, you can see in the thermostat app that the average indoor temperature in the summer with the new furnace has consistently hovered around 23ºC. It doesn’t make sense to buy a smart thermostat — with sophisticated algorithms that take into account not only the temperature and humidity inside and outside the house but also time of use electricity prices, the weather forecast for the day, whether people are home or away, previous run times and the amount of time it takes to heat/or cool the house, etc. — only to try to outsmart it with constant overrides, so we let it do its thing. The stats in the iPad app don’t lie: we don’t touch the thermostat unless T███ asks us to, but that usually only happens when eco+ mode is enabled, (as a result of the aforementioned Save on Energy Peak Perks program program), which means that all we’re doing is cancelling the temporary increase and bringing the thermostat back down to 23ºC. The thermostat stats clearly show that the thermostat is never set to a super low temperature so that the house can be cooled like an igloo. It’s just that with a smaller furnace, the A/C (and furnace blower) needs to run longer and more often than before, as was explained to you when you bought a unit that was half the size and capacity compared to the old one. Did you contact Harris Christopoulos, your original sales rep at Enercare to provide him with the thermostat data and ask him about your higher utility bills before you shut off the A/C?

It shouldn’t be a surprise to you that the furnace — and A/C — now has to run longer and more often to achieve the same temperature as before because that was the choice that you made and what you signed up for! We were there and heard the whole thing.

Humidifier

It took until October 28, 2022 to get the humidifier hooked up to the furnace but when Enercare finally returned to finish the job, they said they couldn’t get it to run because it had reached the end of its service life; you needed a new humidifier. You were pretty upset when Daniel told you what they said about how much it might cost and replied, “I don’t care how much you want a humidifier, I’m not spending that kind of money.” (We should have seen this as a red flag that you don’t care about the health and comfort of your tenants at all.) Daniel assured you it wasn’t that he wanted a humidifier, he was merely passing on the information and letting you know. “It’s your house, what you do is ultimately up to you.”

As you know, moisture in the air retains heat. This is especially obvious in the summer when humidity makes it feel hotter outside. So it should also be obvious that having a humidifier for the winter months allows the air to retain more heat so that the furnace doesn’t need to run as often. Also, more moisture in the air means that you can set the thermostat to a lower temperature but still maintain the same level of comfort. Is this not common homeowner knowledge? This was another of your decisions where we wondered, “Doesn’t he care about the utility bills?”

Closing

We’ve taken the time to list some of the many exemplary things we’ve done and continue to do to conserve water and reduce our electricity usage as much as possible. At the same time, we’ve detailed how the decisions you’ve made yourself and actions you’ve taken — or haven’t taken — are unquestionably a much larger contributor to your elevated utility bills than anything your tenants can ever control.

In this letter, we have provided you with clickable photographs to view high-quality versions, dates, facts, links to sources, excerpts from our notes and even some basic data analysis. Daniel doesn’t have the health for this, and Michelle doesn’t have the time; compiling all the information for this letter is definitely not how we wanted to spend our entire Labour Day weekend.

You can also see that we have been extremely patient with you while living under these conditions. As you know, these are not the only issues in our unit that you have committed to repairing that remain outstanding; we’ve only detailed the issues that affect your utility bills since that’s what you asked about.

Most importantly, however, after such a callous disregard for the health and well-being of your tenants by arbitrarily shutting off the A/C for a whopping 44 hours in the heat of summer — which brought Daniel dangerously close to suffering a cardiac event that he’ll be suffering the effects of for several weeks, in addition to now needing to schedule numerous medical appointments until his health returns to where it was — we have no desire to speak to you anymore. Perhaps if you would have adjusted the thermostat by a degree at a time, or given us time to purchase a fan, we wouldn’t be where we are now. Especially being fully aware of Daniel’s health conditions, such a willful and purposeful action is despicable and indefensible.

Since we have understandably lost all faith in you, we can no longer give you the benefit of the doubt; with your recent actions, you have proven yourself untrustworthy, erratic and dangerously unpredictable. Before you, we’ve never had a landlord who has compelled us to keep copious notes about our interactions. For the remainder of our tenancy, all our communication with you will be by email only.

We will let you know when we’ve found a new place to live, but we expect it will take several months since we first need Daniel to recover before we can start looking.

Update

Just as we were almost finished writing you this letter, you responded to Michelle via text message where instead of apologizing and trying to find a way forward, you wrote this:

Did your mom feel disrespected on March 23, 2022, when she came asking us for help getting into her house because the lock wouldn’t turn? She told us she had been telling you for months to fix it, but you hadn’t. Daniel took pliers and WD40 and helped her get the door open; she seemed to be very appreciative.

Or perhaps she felt disrespected on July 16, 2024, when the Hydro went out in a large portion of the city while you were in Montreal with your partner B███ and Michelle went over to check on your mom to assure her that if she needed anything, to not hesitate for a second to let us know?

If it wasn’t then, maybe she felt disrespected while you were away in Greece in August 2024 and we ran into her the first week while she was watering your lawn and after a pleasant conversation we assured her, “Please don’t worry about the garbage bins, we’re going to take them out.” Her huge beautiful smile as she wished us a pleasant day and said goodbye didn’t look like she felt disrespected at all.

Or does she feel disrespected when we give you a Christmas gift every year and make sure to give her one, too?

It’s not at all credible that T███ upstairs would say that we have repeatedly been disrespectful to her when we have invited her into our home many times and spent New Year’s together at our place; she also hosted us at her place last Christmas. When you shut off the A/C, she came downstairs that very evening sincerely concerned if you were mentally OK; she spent the evening in our living room with us, stayed until midnight and witnessed the repeated audible alerts that Daniel was getting on his Apple Watch warning about his elevated heart rate at rest. “This is ridiculous.”

T███ trusts us so much, that she occasionally asks Michelle to go upstairs when she’s not home to help with her dog whenever she runs late on a film set. When we asked her by text message about what you alleged, she was quite mad and insisted, “I would never say anything bad about you. You have helped me so much! Don’t move out, somebody horrible is going to move downstairs and then it’s going to be a nightmare. I love you guys.”

When Michelle asked D███ downstairs, she replied similarly dumbfounded, “Please don’t create drama where there isn’t any. I have no issues to talk to you about so I don’t know where your [sic] going with this text.” She wrote that she, like us, prefers to go through life “quietly and peacefully” and doesn’t want to be dragged into any of this. We have pleasant conversations with her in the back all the time, she’s very affectionate with our dog and we have enjoyed getting to know her grandchildren who have given us eggs from their backyard chickens.

What other tenants in the building are left? Is it that we’ve been disrespectful and inconsiderate to the rats that live rent-free under the deck?

Apart from the tenants in this house, we also have pleasant conversations with our neighbours in the houses on both sides and across the street almost daily. We can’t walk our dog around the block without getting stopped several times by neighbours wanting to catch up. When our neighbours don’t see Daniel for several days, they always ask Michelle how he’s doing. It’s simply not credible to say we only think about ourselves without considering our surroundings. All the evidence suggests otherwise.

As you know, it is unlawful to try to evict us through text message as retribution for speaking to our neighbours who were concerned for Daniel’s health after seeing an ambulance in front of the house. It is especially abhorrent that you would make up false accusations that can so easily be proven to be complete lies. Opinions are valued on valid grounds. If you are now embarrassed by your actions, that is not our fault.

We have given you a heads-up that we intend to move out and made it clear that we want to do so as soon as possible. Especially now that you have revealed your true character, we have no desire to stay here any longer than necessary. But again, Daniel needs to recover before we can even start looking for a new place, so we expect it will take several months for us to move out. We are stuck here, whether we like it or not. Daniel has already had to cancel a previously scheduled medical appointment this week because he’s not well enough to leave the house after this. Even if you offered to pay for movers to put our things in storage, plus six months of accommodation at a downtown hotel to have us out sooner — which we know you would never do — we need Daniel’s health to recover from this first.

We hope you can better control your impulses until then so that Daniel’s health doesn’t continue to worsen by unnecessary stress, thereby prolonging our move even more. Regardless, we will endeavour to remain true to who we are by continuing to be easy-going, respectful and polite to all our neighbours, including you. Our integrity does not waver depending on the actions of others. We will give you our formal notice to terminate the tenancy in writing using the official forms provided by the Landlord & Tenant board once we have found a new place to live.

Respectfully,
Daniel & Michelle Menjívar
 
 
cc: B███ X███, Kosta’s partner
cc: T███ P███, upstairs tenant
cc: D███ A███, basement tenant
cc: Josh Matlow, City Councillor
cc: Dr. Jill Andrew, MPP
cc: Ontario Landlord & Tenant Board