We Could Still Defeat Our Ex-Landlord

Trystan, visibly disheveled, holding an overflowing binder of documents and notes.

Imagine with me for a moment that you’re watching men in full-body PPE run up and down your basement stairs, telling you to steer clear of your own office for your safety. Because you’ve all just found extensive black mold and rot in the floorboards of your rental’s basement, and they have to gut one closet entirely as an emergency health hazard.

​Rather than horrified, you’re relieved. You’ve been getting sicker since moving into the unit over a year previously. You had to watch your partner get sicker and watch their pain increase every day, until they spent days at a time in a haze or in bed. But now you finally have concrete proof of the cause you’d suspected the entire time: Mold exposure.

After months of asking, you had to threaten to flee the unit to get the landlord to call these mold specialists. But now, even after all this, imagine that your landlord refuses to fix the collapsed drain causing the mold. He opts to “leave the basement as it is.” And refuses to have any other areas of the house inspected. His agent scolds you for letting the mold experts do “extra work.”

Imagine the pure, dehumanizing frustration of having to beg for safe housing, and your landlord refusing- failing not only his legal obligations, but failing to see you as a human being. Imagine having instead to compile hundreds of pages of evidence, attend and document every building expert evaluation, and complete mountains of paperwork while mold makes you sicker every day in order to file this with the local housing authority. And immediately after you give the landlord your notice, he responds by filing to have you evicted.

Imagine waiting five hours in a virtual waiting room for your video hearing, with years worth of evidence you’ve gathered, only for the host (the housing tribunal itself) to fail to let you in and wrongfully marking you as a no-show. Even after sending in screenshots proving this. You did everything by the book. You even filed a complaint against the tribunal itself, as well as a human rights complaint. The landlord’s retaliatory eviction went through at that last minute anyway, due to the housing authority’s system errors.

(See proof of the virtual hearing failure in this episode of our docu-series, The Last Threshold)

 You completely lose faith in the civil courts that are supposed to protect you. So you spend months looking for a lawyer who speaks your language to help you get justice, while dealing with the fallout of the eviction- a domino effect that rapidly leads to homelessness. You hurt your back in a race against a bailiff, moving all your most precious possessions to a storage unit in 3 days. You had to abandon all of your furniture. Even your sourdough starter.

​You read the local civil code and know that the landlord was acting in violation of it since before your lease even began. None of this should have happened, and yet it was allowed to. The injustice of it is a constant weight on your shoulders, like an unresolved cliffhanger, but the stakes are your faith in a country that is even capable of fairness.

But you share your story, and people in your community- even total strangers- take it upon themselves to make sure you survive. And you do. Then finally, Six months later, one of those lawyers responds to your email.

This week, Lou and I got that email.
A queer-friendly housing lawyer in Quebec has slots open right now for a consultation. (We’ve been waiting for them to open up for months.) They’re willing to go over everything the landlord put us through while living under his roof, including the retaliatory eviction and the ridiculous toll his conduct has taken on our lives.
The Moldlord may yet be defeated.

But first, another bit of good news:
This comes in the wake of successfully getting the sinus spike tooth extracted! This was entirely funded by you through Patreon and GoFundMe. Recovery has been far more intense than I anticipated, closer to a full on surgery than a tooth extraction due to the sinus involvement, but I’m seeing promising signs that this could be the turning point in my health we had all been rooting for. My skull is spike-free. Thank you.

We also have an immigration update- Yameena Ansari’s on the case for my citizenship. (You may remember from GoFundMe updates that my self employed visa was rejected, and we pivoted to a citizenship application, now possible due to a new law.) We also have some family joining in as a HUGE help to me, so instead of $9000 CAD, we only have to come up with about $1500.00 CAD for our share to start the process.

And a hiccup or two, because of course there are:
One: Yet another one of THAT dentist’s fillings has fallen out. (That makes 6 within two years.) So I have to get that fixed pretty urgently.
Two: Lou’s status has been illegally rejected by Canadian immigration. They claimed we filed while he was out of status, which is provably untrue and plain on the application itself. Luckily we have Yameena’s team, thanks to you and your donations, and they appealed it right away. They’re not going to let it fly. Without her, and without you, this could have been catastrophic.

Lou could have been deported. You stopped that from happening. Thank you again.

Now, back to the housing lawyer. Since we finally have an opportunity to get justice for this,
Here is a non-comprehensive refresher list of our landlord’s crimes*:
(which I have backed up by over 344 pages of evidence;)

• Delivered the unit in unsanitary, cluttered condition at move-in (Oct 2023), contrary to Art. 1910/1911 C.c.Q., with the previous tenant's belongings, mattresses, and garbage left throughout, piled to the ceiling
• An expert inspection (Jan 2025) confirmed elevated humidity, lack of ventilation, and active black mold with rotting wood in the basement cold room. Serious enough that the technician deemed conditions hazardous and performed emergency remediation
• Independent building inspector's report (April 2024) documented a fire hazard (non-compliant dryer vent), ventilation failure, structural damage to the rear porch, water infiltration, and mold risk. Confirmed received by the landlord, but never shared with us
• Chronic backyard water retention and French drain failure, photo-documented July 2024
• Backyard power line explosion (May 2024) and ongoing electrical faults left completely unaddressed
• Misrepresented the property's mold history before we signed (Sept 2023), denying any known issue that a neighbor later confirmed was known from the previous tenant
• Invented a fictional ruling by a “rental board" ruling (Oct 4, 2024) to pressure us into paying a $400 pest control bill, knowing pest control wasn't our responsibility. No such board exists that would make a ruling without our knowledge, and no documentation of any such ruling was ever provided despite repeated requests.
• Demanded a rent increase by text (Sept 2024) with about a month's notice, violating the 6 months required for a year-long lease under Art. 1942 C.c.Q. His agent admitted knowing the rule, then pressed for the increase anyway
• Filed for eviction (May 21, 2025) within days of receiving our formal notice that we were applying to submit our rent to the local tribunal over unsafe conditions. Retaliatory evictions are not allowed.
• Repeatedly threatened unlawful unit access (on less than 24 hours' notice by a third party) in the same window as our formal notice, without ever providing a remediation plan
• Sent an unidentified person on multiple occasions to bang on our door and leave a duplicate, already-served paperwork (Sept 3, 2025), despite our standing agreement and track record of accepting service by email
• Multiple instances of misattributing his own bank's wire fees to us as rent shortfalls. (He is responsible for his own bank fees.)
• Failed to comply with rent reductions owed to us under Quebec's Civil Code, despite repeated requests
• illegally required six months' rent upfront ($14,500+ CAD) as a prerequisite to considering our application
• His retaliatory eviction was granted against us only because we were  locked out of our own virtual hearing and wrongly marked as no-shows, despite our documented attempts to attend.

(*For legal reasons I should clarify that most of these are violations of the Quebec charter of rights or civil code, not literal criminal offenses.)

A consultation will tell us what we can actually pursue, and what damages are possible to recover. 

Here’s where your donations are going right now:

$450 — the housing lawyer consultation
$1,200 — a root canal on a tooth that's now actively in pain
$400 — replacing fillings that fell out
$1,500 — Starting my citizenship application (50% of the fee up front)

The housing case means a lot to me, because the alternative is not only that the Moldlord gets away with what he did to us- but that he is free to do to the same to his new tenants. I believe that house as he left it is a death trap. Nobody deserves to go through this.

But if we can’t get the citizenship application funded, we’re out of options in Canada and we will have to leave the country. We can’t afford to leave, but staying in Canada undocumented after publishing our entire story online would be like a pipeline to deportation to the USA. As a trans guy, it’s downhill from there. Not to mention the possibility of being separated from Lou, which I can't even think about. 

With this trifecta of legal cases funded, we could regain enough damages to actually start on our Storybook Inn plans-
​even just by becoming stable enough to focus on those plans instead of survival.

We’ve come so far, thanks to you.

Most people on this ride with us pitch in about $45.
Most members on Patreon pledge $5 a month. 
If you can put anything towards that citizenship application, that’s the piece of the puzzle with the highest stakes right now.

If we can snag a consultation with the housing lawyer and stop that landlord from doing this to anyone else, even better.

Thank you for getting on this roller coaster with us, protecting us, and sticking it out. You’re legends.

-Trystan

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