Crim-eviction: Eviction and Social Control at a Residential Tenancies Tribunal

Because eviction from rental housing can lead to highly negative outcomes, including homelessness, trauma, neighbourhood instability, and deepening inequities, it is important to understand the reasoning processes employed by tribunals when they wield the power of eviction. This article conducts a critical reading of decisions of the Office of Residential Tenancies, Saskatchewan’s residential tenancies tribunal, that deal specifically with urgent landlord applications for immediate eviction based on tenant behaviours that are alleged to be criminal, illegal, frightening, or dangerous. Coining the term “crim-eviction” to help describe this category of decisions, the article identifies that residential tenancies tribunals like the Office of Residential Tenancies are actively involved in the governance of perceived crime and disorder, as well as the discipline and management of marginalized tenants, through eviction processes. Whether or not criminal or illegal activity is alleged, the crim-eviction cases mobilize tropes and fears about crime, disorder, risk, and danger to rationalize the expulsion of tenants from their homes. Hearing officers draw on these familiar discourses and tropes, applying them in an administrative law context where formal rules of evidence do not apply, where appellate scrutiny is rare, where tenants almost never have legal assistance, and where tenants are already highly marginalized. Focusing on an eighteen-month period of eviction decisions, the article identifies several interrelated themes to support its arguments. First, it argues that the disciplinary lens adopted by the tribunal is characterized by a reliance on a conceptual binary that pits “good” tenants against “problem” tenants. Second, it shows how the tribunal uses ideas about “fear” and “risk” as justification for eviction. It shows that the tribunal is quick to associate evidence of police involvement with immediate eviction orders, and that it often views tenants who claim to be victims of harm with skepticism, depicting them instead as being responsible for the actions of those who have caused harm. The ideology of control taken up by the tribunal also manifests in a reliance on concepts from quality of life policing discourses, wherein damaged property is easily seen as a sign of disorder requiring eviction. Finally, the analysis identifies disciplinary attitudes towards even those tenants who are not evicted and the utilization in some cases of types of “civil probation” orders that serve to increase landlord power and further entrench tenant precarity.