Toronto tenants camping outside to avoid bed bugs: update

This update from citynews.ca complicates matters: tenant and landlord are now playing the “bed bug blame game.” Landlord says her couch is “the source” of bed bugs, so she must have moved them in two weeks ago. Tenant says she did not have them in her old apartment.

Here’s a new article from theStar.com which goes into further detail.

There’s a stalemate:

She said she’d gladly move somewhere else — if her landlord returns her $2,000 deposit.

He said he’d gladly let her go — if she paid his $212 exterminator bill.

And there’s also the matter of the second tenant camping in a second tent. The PCO says they second tenant does not have bed bugs. However, we do know that new infestations often are hard to detect. The suggestion is that the apartments may have become infested after the landlord “cleaned” a vacant store.

As the Star reports,

Two weeks ago, Priaulx, a 34-year-old on social assistance, moved into the seven-unit Lake Shore Blvd. W. with her three children.

Last Thursday, she said, after Salo fumigated the vacant retail store attached to the building, she began seeing the bugs.

“I saw them later on Thursday night. I found one in the living room, one in my daughter’s room, and then progressively I saw more and more and more until I saw clusters of them in the apartment. In the bedding, in our couch.”

If the landlord set off a fogger (since it sounds like he did his own “fumigation”) this is known to spread bed bugs into the walls and into other adjacent units. This is why people with bed bugs should not use bug bombs.

Since the tenants aren’t out for any kind of monetary awards, save a returned deposit, it is hard to believe they’d be sleeping in a tent, in the heat of summer, next to a garbage pile infested with raccoons, mice, and rats, and in an area frequented by hookers and drug dealers (by the tenant’s description) if they did not feel they needed to.