'It’s a management issue,' one tenant said of the recent issues at 260 Wellesely St. East, seen on Feb. 6, 2019.'There are many old apartments in Toronto, but [many of them] are not running into the same problems.'Fred Lum
Some residents of a high-rise in St. James Town have proposed a class-action lawsuit against the owners and management of their building at 260 Wellesley St. East, and are seeking damages over an incident last month that left hundreds of residents without power, water and heat for three days.
The proposed lawsuit would be the third planned class action within six months to be filed against the owners and managers of Wellesley Parliament Square on behalf of tenants.
“The argument is that the owners are automatically liable in this type of incident because they didn’t take care of the property [as] they should have,” said Vadim Kats, a lawyer representing the tenants’ case at Landy Marr Kats LLP. He said that after a pipe burst and flooded the electrical room on Jan. 22, the following days without essential services were particularly difficult for vulnerable residents.
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“It’s a 33-storey building, and there are kids, elderly people and disabled people who could not [leave their apartments] in the dark … in the middle of winter,” he explained.
Mr. Kats said the plaintiffs who commenced the case represent about 1,000 apartment residents. An official notice on the law firm’s website encourages residents and visitors affected by the incident to keep a log of the expenses incurred as a result of the service disruption, and to e-mail their complaints to the law firm.
The property owners, which include 260 Wellesley LHB Investments Ltd., Bleeman Holdings Ltd. and Parwell Investments Ltd., and the property manager, Doug Sartell, could not be reached for comment.
Danny Roth, the spokesperson for Wellesley Parliament Square, said he could not comment other than to say he was not “even entirely sure that [the managers] have received notice” of the proposed action. “When we do, we’ll defend it appropriately,” he added.
Amit Subedi, a resident of 260 Wellesley for just more than two years, said he, his wife and young child spent three days with friends in an adjacent building while they waited for repairs.
“It’s a management issue,” he said. “There are many old apartments in Toronto, but [many of them] are not running into the same problems.”
Mr. Subedi explained that his family has routinely encountered maintenance problems while living on the top floor of the building. He said that because there are so few elevators for so many residents, it can take up to 20 minutes for an elevator to reach the top during the morning rush hour.
“The elevator breaks so often with so many people [using] it, and management does a bad job of fixing it,” he said, adding that he has sometimes had to walk up and down 33 flights of stairs. There have also been prolonged periods without hot water, and times when the water has been shut off without notice, he said.
About a week after the pipe burst last month, Mr. Subedi said he found water was gushing out onto the windshield of a tenant’s vehicle from another pipe in the building’s parking garage.
He said he has had himself added to the new class-action application by responding to a questionnaire from the law firm.
Mr. Kats said the next steps will be to meet with a class-action judge, after the defence finds a lawyer, to apply to have the case certified, at which point a court date would be set. The process could take six months to a year, he said.
Mr. Kats said he is confident the case will be certified, and argued that “the landlord doesn’t really have a defence. … Tenants have no control over looking after the property and knowing if the vital services are working properly.”
He added that he hopes lawyers for the management will agree to a plan for compensating the tenants.