Speech to St. Catharines City Council on Not Dropping Hallway Heating From the Vital Services By-Law

I am Saleh Waziruddin and I am a tenant in St. Catharines. I've been renting my entire adult life. I live in a building owned by the same owners of the building mentioned earlier by my ward councillor Ratzlaff, which is a REIT: Real Estate Investment Trust.

You shouldn't need to wear a coat to go out into the hallways, which is what will happen if we let landlords off the hook to keep the heat adequate for common areas.

A tenant obviously complained about the hallway being too cold, and our response is to the change the by-law rather than enforce it on the landlord.

It's not actually that difficult to insulate, and therefore enforce, hallways from stairwells and entrances. The report itself says there was only 1-2 degree of heat to make up. Weather-stripping, plugging any gaps, and having adequate insulation goes a long way.

Yes we tenants live in the apartments, but we need to go through the hallways not just to go out and come back in, but also things that don't require leaving the building, like taking the garbage down to the bins, and other everyday life. We should be able to go about this outside the apartment itself without the discomfort of not having adequate vital services, heat.

The report says St. Catharines is the only Niagara municipality with a vital services by-law. St. Catharines should be the one leading and pulling up the rest of the region, not racing to join the lowest common denominator. It should be that tenants in other cities say, "look at St. Catharines, if it's good enough for St. Catharines why isn't it good enough for us?"  We're not doing ourselves justice by reasoning that because no one else has this protection we should abandon it too.

As the Manager of By-Law Enforcement and Licensing himself said on the Tom McConnell radio show earlier, St. Catharines being by-far the biggest municipality in Niagara means we have the biggest apartment buildings and more tenants, that the other municipalities are not comparable. 

Under the 2006 Ontario Tenancies Act, Reg. 517/06: Maintenance standards, Maintenance of room temperature 15(1) says about 20 degrees heat for “all habitable space and in any area intended for normal use by tenants, including recreation rooms and laundry rooms but excluding locker rooms and garages.” I'm no lawyer so even if this doesn't apply to hallways it's still a good concept to go by when looking at hallways, not just for any heat but for adequate heat. Hallways are part of normal use for us. We don't just live in the apartment itself. Any place we tenants go through should have adequate heat and the landlords should be made to keep it so.

Please stick with the current rights tenants have, get the landlords to keep the heat on to adequate levels so we don't need to dress up just to step out the door to see a neighbor down the hall!