[EDIT: thank you for the support & encouragement. it means a lot. if you’d like support the Rebel Alliance we’re recruiting volunteers and of course need both moral & financial support:
https://rest2resist.org/donations/mutualaid/ ]

« I was supposed to do a live interview with CBC Daybreak today but they changed their minds. i think the story might still be worth telling so i thought i’d share here.

My neighbours and i are entering the second month of an apartment-wide rent strike against a multi-millionaire landlord who is escalating his retaliation against us. or at least against me.

On April 1st, ten (now eleven) tenants in my building in La Petite-Patrie signed a letter to landlord Henri Petit, CEO and President of ERH Investments Inc and Emergia , formerly known as Delma, a real estate company with millions in assets & listed on the Canadian Stock Exchange, whose board chairmen is former Quebec Finance Minister Yves Séguin, and which says on its website it plans to generate revenue of $1 Billion by 2024.

My neighbours are standing in solidarity with me & other tenants who cannot pay rent while we shelter in place & try to stay safe during the coronavirus pandemic.

I suffer from SUNCT trigeminal autonomic cephalgia – often referred to as the “suicide syndrome” It’s a rare brain disorder which causes paroxysmal seizures & excruciating pain. The main trigger is lights. I can no longer use the laundry room in the basement or the storage closet i pay for because the lighting is dangerous for me. My neighbours & friends changed the bulbs in our apartment’s stairwell to provide amber light instead of fluorescent so it would be safer for me to get up and down the stairs.

Henri Petit is very soft-spoken, polite and charming. He’s the nicest land lord i’ve ever had. He’s also a multi-millionaire, property magnate and lawyer who frequently takes his tenants to the Régie and usually wins his cases. He knows how to work the system. But does he know how to take on a popular mobilization if kind and compassionate people like you stand up with me and fight back?

For several years, Petit has refused to do essential repairs in my apartment. Temperatures fell to -13º last week. Yes, it’s April. It’s Montreal. There could very well be a heatwave tomorrow, but for now the lack of insulation in the South wall of my apartment means my kitchen floor is often colder than my fridge. It’s been this way every fall, winter and spring for six years. Petit knows about this and has lied to my face about fixing it.

Petit’s very sweet and earnest son told me in December he would take care of the problem just like he told me the winter before. Petit himself came personally to my apartment and promised to address the issue though his real purpose was to insist i change the lightbulbs back because of regulations, though he was unable to provide them to me when i asked to see them

Since the pandemic began Henri Petit has sent me threatening emails stating he will take me to the Régie du Logement over my rent increase refusal, demanding that i reverse the accommodations my neighbours made for me and insisting that i change the lightbulbs back or he will charge me the replacement cost, (a couple hundred dollars.)

Just to make it clear: our landlord is demanding that i be subject to excruciating pain & seizures and that my compassionate & caring neighbours not be allowed to help me.

One of the ways my hard-working immigrant family scraped its way out of poverty was my scrimping enough to put out a down payment on our small home and rent part of it out to help pay off the mortgage. I support mortgage deferral or forgiveness for folks like that and if they treat their tenants well i stand in solidarity with them.

Landlords like property magnate Henri Petit are demanding that tenants use their Canada Emergency Relief Benefit cheques to pay their rent. That it should go straight from tenants into the landlord’s pockets. He insuated as much in the threatening lawyerly so different from the face he puts on in person.

Do you think the CERB should use tax-payers’ money to subsidize to multi-millionaires like him? I’d rather that Emergency Relief go to those who need Emergency Relief.

The unpaid work i do through Rest2Resist — in close, active and meaningful partnership with the Black Indigenous Harm Reduction Alliance, and other allies like the Immigrant Workers Centre,(Imi Wo Cen)i the Indigenous Sex Workers Art Collectif, the Indigenous Harm Reduction Outreach Programme and other members of our Rebel Alliance — is Emergency Relief for those of us who have been in crisis since before the crisis.

i am blessed to have the best neighbours in the world. When folks who can comfortably afford to pay their own rent stand in solidarity with neighbours who can’t, it can help a broke-disabled-mentally-ill -Queer-Trans artist and community-organizer like me stand up to two-faced bullies like our multi-millionaire landlord and let me get back to getting Emergency Relief to people in need – my people.

It would be too hard to do it on my own.

My landlord wants me to give him a pound of flesh. My neighbours & community are helping me say no.

[EDIT: thank you for the support & encouragement. it means a lot. if you’d like support the Rebel Alliance we’re recruiting volunteers and of course need both moral & financial support:
https://rest2resist.org/donations/mutualaid/ ]