Shortly after a company called Plan A bought her West End apartment building in April, Paula Payot noticed cameras being installed in the hallway, with one positioned in a way that captured the door to her suite.
Soon, Payot would get an eviction notice from Plan A. Her landlord alleged her partner had been living with her full-time, which Plan A said breached a clause in the tenancy agreement that prohibited visitors from staying in a tenant’s unit for longer than two weeks.
To prove its case, the landlord used surveillance footage from the camera and evidence gathered by a private investigator the company hired.
When Payot received the evidence, shared with her and her legal advocate when she fought the eviction, she was shocked.
“It was a bit disorienting see that they've hired this private investigator to follow my partner, who in my opinion has nothing to do with my current lease,” Payot said. “[They] stalked him on social media, and then had all this video evidence and photographs of him just visiting me, as anybody in a normal, healthy relationship would visit their partner.
“It was like, ‘Wow, they went to such extremes.’”
Payot appealed the eviction to the Residential Tenancy Branch, which deals with complaints from both landlords and tenants regarding breaches of B.C.’s Residential Tenancy Act.
The RTB arbitrator overturned the eviction, saying the lease provision that visitors can’t stay more than two weeks violates B.C.’s rental housing law. As well, the arbitrator said the tenancy agreement didn’t include any limit on the number of occupants in the unit.
Anoop Majithia, a director of Plan A, told The Tyee that he believes Payot did breach her tenancy agreement and he intends to continue to try to evict her. He said it’s important that his company can decide who can live in their buildings.
But Payot says she has now moved out of the building because the fraught relationship with her landlord became too stressful.
Majithia told The Tyee that the tenants’ assumption that he is trying to evict existing residents in order to raise the rents is false.
B.C. limits rent increases for tenants, with a cap of 3.5 per cent this year. But if a renter moves out there is no limit on the new rent the landlord can charge.
According to the Vancouver Tenants Union, Payot and seven other tenants at 1925 Nelson St. have received eviction notices in the five months since they learned Plan A would be taking over the 21-unit building.
Majithia isn’t just attempting to evict several tenants of 1925 Nelson St. He’s also suing a number of them for defamation after they organized against what they feared would be aggressive tactics to evict them.
The case has implications for both privacy and tenants’ attempts to organize, said Robert Patterson, a lawyer who works with the Tenant Resource and Advisory Centre in Vancouver.
A poster and a hidden camera
According to court documents that are part of the defamation lawsuit, tenants found out their building had been sold to Plan A in mid-December 2023. They began speaking to each other about the new owner and searched on the internet to find more information about the company.
They were dismayed when the searches turned up a trove of news stories and reviews.
In 2014, Metro News reported that tenants in a West End building bought by Plan A faced a 315-per-cent increase in laundry fees and 16 tenants in the 23-unit building had received eviction notices.
One resident was issued the eviction notice for “living with an illegal tenant — her husband,” according to the Metro News story.
Majithia later told the Vancouver Sun he would not put the planned laundry increase in place, which raised the cost of doing a load from $3.25 to $13.50.
In 2020, a CTV story described how tenants of a building owned by Plan A had criticized Majithia’s decision to put a memorial to Kobe Bryant in front of their building. The tenants asked Majithia to focus on repairs they said were needed to their units instead.
From 2021 to 2023, there were several news stories about Plan A’s use of “travel accommodations” in leases.
The company claimed the clause meant that B.C.’s Residential Tenancy Act did not apply to those units. The Residential Tenancy Branch did not agree, and fined the company $10,000.
The RTB said it had found 152 tenancy agreements that did not comply with the law.
The Nelson Street tenants created a group chat and shared their concerns based on the information about Plan A they’d found online. They also created a poster that featured Majithia’s face with red devil horns, a tail and fangs and read “Beware of West End Slumlords.”
Majithia and Plan A are now suing a number of the tenants of 1925 Nelson St. for defamation.
In a statement of claim, Majithia says the poster depicting him as the devil and other posters are defamatory, as are the slogans that appeared in the posters. A photo of one of those posters ended up on Reddit, prompting more discussion about renters’ experiences with Plan A.
“The posters are malicious and harmful to the plaintiffs and have caused and will continue to cause damage to the plaintiffs,” according to the statement of claim.
The lawsuit also says that Plan A attempted to stop tenants from communicating with each other and sharing their concerns about the company in their private group chat, “informing the tenants that the correspondence may cause damage to Plan A and its business.” Tenants later joined the Vancouver Tenants Union to get help with their concerns.
The lawsuit claims that by speaking to news media about the problems in their building, the renters drew “further attention to the tenants’ defamation.”
In a response filed in court, the tenants say they all experienced issues with Plan A’s management of the building shortly after the company bought it. When some tenants sent Plan A emails about problems in their apartments, they got no response.
Then, according to the tenants, the eviction threats started.
After Majithia got into a heated discussion with tenants Jonathan Petrov and Garrett Elliott — which Elliott says started when Petrov tried to speak with Majithia about tenants’ complaints — Elliott says Majithia told him he would be evicted because his spouse lived with him in his unit, according to court documents.
According to court documents, Marie Weeks said she was also threatened with eviction. She had moved into the building with her husband four years ago, and Plan A started to claim that neither she nor her partner were proper tenants. According to Weeks, the eviction threats started after she asked about getting a new security fob.
In court documents, Patricia Vickers said she found a rental listing for her own unit, including her unit’s number, while she was still occupying it, but the listing showed photos of a different apartment in the building.
The tenants also claim they’ve been “bombarded” with numerous text messages and phone calls after business hours.
“In these communications, Plan A launches accusations and threats of legal action and/or eviction,” the court document states.
In their response, the tenants deny the posters they put up hurt Plan A and Majithia’s professional reputations. “If the plaintiffs’ reputation has suffered… it was because of the plaintiffs’ own actions and conduct over the past 10 years, which resulted in myriad negative media articles and RTB findings on Plan A and Mr. Majithia,” the counterclaim states.
The claims have not yet been tested in court.
In an interview with The Tyee, Majithia denied his company is trying to evict longtime tenants in order to raise rents. He said the tenants “we have issues with” are residents who have lived in the building for various lengths of time and pay different amounts of rent.
“There's no correlation between how long they've been there or how much rent they're paying and what our issues are with them,” he said.
Privacy rights in rental housing
According to the counterclaim to Plan A’s defamation lawsuit, several tenants said they had concerns about the cameras being installed in their building and expressed their unease to Plan A in emails. They claim their landlord never responded to those concerns.
Payot told The Tyee that tenants at 1925 Nelson St. also found an additional hidden camera in the laundry room. Majithia told The Tyee that tenants were always informed a camera had been placed in the laundry room.
According to British Columbia’s Office of Information and Privacy Commissioner security cameras can lead to the over-collection of personal information and landlords should have “a clear purpose” for installing a security system and “have exhausted other less intrusive options and be able to demonstrate that it is for a reasonable purpose.”
Renter advocate Patterson said he’d like to see RTB arbitrators think about whether the evidence being put in front of them may have been gathered in a way that violates B.C.’s privacy law. In some cases, using surveillance as evidence to evict a tenant may also violate the tenants’ right to quiet enjoyment of their rented home, which is upheld in B.C.’s Residential Tenancy Act.
“If you're a landlord and you're just trying to dig for any kind of dirt on a tenant to find a reason to evict them… there might be actually an incentive to bend those rules or ignore your tenant’s right to privacy,” Patterson said, “if it gets you evidence that you think will support the eviction.”
* Story updated on Oct. 8 at 4:01 p.m. to correct the number of tenants who have received eviction notices.
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