The Voice of the University of Toronto at Mississauga
MEDIUM THE
MONDAY, JANUARY 14, 2008
VOLUME 34, ISSUE 15
www.mediumonline.ca
A letter to Britney
Creative Corner
NFL final four
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The $5-million eviction Jilted resident serves UTM papers for a lawsuit totalling five million dollars SAIRA MUZAFFAR NEWS EDITOR
What started out as administrative confusion and lead to an eviction notice is now a five-million-dollar lawsuit against the University of Toronto at Mississauga (UTM). Residence tenant Adam Rogers and his family filed on December 17, 2007, citing multiple reasons for their case against the university. Rogers applied for transfer from Waterloo and moved his family into a Schreiberwood unit last August, after signing a lease with the university. But Rogers’s grades weren’t satisfactory for UTM, and he was denied admission in September. He received an eviction notice on October 14. After numerous failed appeals to have the denial of admission and eviction proceedings reversed, Rogers filed a statement of claim against the university on the grounds of breach of contract, deceit or negligence, and for abuse of process.
“I am not looking to have some kind of retirement package. What would a reasonable person do? Just watch and say I am not going to do anything because they are U of T and they must be right? I can‘t even register with another school because you have to show how you intend to pay and I don‘t have any cash to put up for my tuition.” - Adam Rogers
The statement of claim names the Governing Council, UTM, director of housing and residence life Marc Braithwaite, dean of student affairs Mark Overton, and manager of parking and transportation Alex MacIsaac as collectively responsible for leaving the family “in crisis and living in poverty.” According to the Rogers’s lawyers, the family can claim up to seventeenand-a-half million dollars in damages resulting from the eviction order, dis-
qualification of admission, student loans, and the physical, emotional, and mental stress experienced by the family during the ordeal. Rogers opted to lessen the claim in order to expedite a trial or settlement. “I am not looking to have some kind of retirement package. What would a reasonable person do? Just watch and say I am not going to do anything because they are U of T and they must be right? I can‘t even register with another school because you have to show how you intend to pay and I don‘t have any cash to put up for my tuition,” he said. The claim also emphasizes that as a direct result of the eviction order Rogers will lose out on at least one year of postsecondary education, which will further delay his career and prevent him from supporting his family. The Rogers family - which includes Adam, his wife Erica, and their four children who under the age of six - had to resort to an emergency loan of $1,000 from University of Toronto Students’ Union and help from relatives and friends to cover the cost of daily necessities. After Rogers was denied admission to UTM he could not claim any more loans from the Ontario Student Assistance Program, which had been the family’s sole source of income during the school year. Since the eviction proceedings, the university has also refused the family access to a parking spot in the Schreiberwood complex lot, which forced Rogers to park off campus during the day - nearly a 30 minute walk - and pay five dollars to park on campus overnight. The claim states that the university’s decision to refuse Rogers a parking space “aggravated the hardship suffered by the Rogers family,” especially when transporting Erica Rogers to appointments with her obstetrician and there was a need for ready access to a vehicle in the event of an emergency. The dispute at the centre of the lawsuit involves Rogers’s claim that there is a serious legal error in the eviction order. As detailed in the statement of claims, Rogers received an offer to lease a UTM housing unit in early July, 2007 under the condition that he is a full-time student at UTM. Shortly after, Rogers received another notice from the university informing him that his transfer application had been denied. “They told us that before they can offer us the lease that they have to go through the system to make sure my
photo/Melissa Di Pasquale
The Rogers family has filed a lawsuit against UTM for an administrative error that has left the family without access to necessary resources. Ava, age 6 (far left), was pulled from elementary school after the couple’s OSAP funding was cut off. Without the funding, they could not afford proper nutrition for their three children. They worry that their newborn child may have also been harmed during Erica’s final trimester.
status is clear as a full-time student. So if the status is not clear, there’s no lease,” said Rogers. Yet according to the offer made by the university’s housing department, Rogers was qualified for an offer to lease, but unknown to either party, the admissions department had already rejected his application. Rogers was also told that if he did not decide to take the offer of lease soon after the initial offer, he would have to give it up for other students looking for residence. Rogers consulted with his advisors at the University of Waterloo and was told that early denials of admission can usually be successfully appealed by providing further information on the applicant’s academic background. Based on previous conversations with University of Toronto admissions representatives, Rogers was under the impression that he had sound academic standing to apply for what was supposed to be his final year of undergraduate studies. Believing that the offer to lease vouched for his prospective admission, and worried about losing his home while waiting to hear back about his status, Rogers appealed his admissions application a second time, signed the lease
agreement, and moved into the Schreiberwood unit on August 16. “I called downtown five or six times and admissions down there didn’t know what was going on. The people I needed to talk to were all on summer holidays,” said Rogers. Around September 6, Rogers received another letter from the university stating that his request for a transfer was denied. According to the statement of claims, “this confounded Mr. and Mrs. Rogers, as they believed that the administrative error, which they believed was committed by the admissions department, would have been rectified by this point.” While Rogers claims that some staff at the university did acknowledge that an error was made, none of the university’s representatives have gone on record to admit so. The statement of claims also notes that instead of addressing the possibility of an error, Mark Overton, dean of student affairs, attempted to coerce the family into willingly terminating their lease. When Rogers refused, the university filed an eviction order. The family then appealed the order of eviction twice and was denied both times by the Landlord and Tenant Board
- a neutral arbitrator - on the grounds that no administrative error was committed, nothing was legally wrong with the eviction order, and that the Rogers family was violating the reasonable enjoyment or lawful right, privilege or interest of the landlord by refusing to leave the property. “They basically shut down our whole lives because we can’t do anything. They knew right from the beginning what this decision was doing, how severe it was, we let everybody know. It was really bad, all we were eating was Cheerios and bread,” said Rogers. Restricted to an income of $1,080 a month from Child Tax Benefits, the family had to resort to getting their meals from the food bank, which did not supply the adequate amount of nutrition needed by their young children. The couple also had to pull his oldest child out of school because they could not afford to pay for supplies, meals and transportation. The stress was particularly hard on Erica Rogers, who began her final trimester of pregnancy just as the university filed for eviction - a fact that UTM continued on next page