Contract Law - Re: LTB

Mejia v. Cargini, 2007 CanLII 2801 (ON SCDC)

12) Section 157 of the Act gives the Tribunal “exclusive jurisdiction to determine all applications under this Act and with respect to all matters in which jurisdiction is conferred on it by this Act”.

13) Section 162 of the Act gives to the Tribunal “authority to hear and determine all questions of law and fact with respect to all matters within its jurisdiction under this Act”.

14) Having found as a fact that the landlord “harassed, threatened the tenant and interfered with the tenant’s use and enjoyment of the rental unit”, the Tribunal could grant remedies pursuant to the provisions set out in section 35 of the Act. That section provides in part that if the Tribunal determines that a landlord has done what the landlord did in this case, the Tribunal may, amongst a number of specific remedies “make any other order that it considers appropriate”.

15) Similar language was used in section 94(3)(c) of the Landlord and Tenant Act, the predecessor statute to the Tenant Protection Act, which provided that a judge to whom application was made to enforce obligations imposed under the statute, may “make such further or other orders as the judge considers appropriate”.

16) In Shaw v. Pajelle, (1985) O.J. No. 833, Montgomery J. sitting as a single judge of this Court held that section 96(3)(c) (later section 94(3)(c)) of the Landlord and Tenant Act gave the Court in a landlord and tenant proceeding, the power to award damages. In so doing, he held that the decision in Beyer et al v. Absamco Developments Ltd. et al, 1976 CANLII 733 (ON SC), 12 O.R. (2d) 768, which held to the contrary, was wrong.

17) In MacKay v. Sanghera, (2001) CarswellOnt 2349 (Div. Ct.) (e)(C), this court held that the residual clause in the Act, then section 34(1)(5) which permits the Tribunal to “make any other order that it considers appropriate” afforded a basis for an award of damages to tenants for consequential damage arising from a landlord’s breach of its obligations under the Act. See also Nesha v. Bezrukova, (2003) O.J. 3787 at para 4 (Div. Ct.)

18) Those cases and the grammatical and ordinary sense of the language giving the power to “make any other order that it considers appropriate” persuades us that the Tribunal has the power to award damages for breach of the contract of lease. To hold otherwise would be contrary to the intent of the legislature which gave to the Tribunal the jurisdiction under section 162 to which I have previously referred, to determine all matters arising out of the landlord and tenant relationship.

19) Accordingly, we find that the Tribunal was incorrect and erred in law in determining that it had no jurisdiction to award damages for breach of contact.