Grace Vaccarelli is a 34-year-old staff lawyer with the Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario (ACTO), a specialty legal clinic in Toronto working to advance the rights of renters, co-op residents, and the homeless across the province. A graduate of York University in political science and industrial relations and Queen’s University law school, Vaccarelli was called to the bar in 2001. She worked in the Clinic Services Office at Legal Aid Ontario, and at two community legal clinics in downtown Toronto, most recently at Kensington-Bellwoods Community Legal Services, before starting at ACTO in 2005.
Grace Vaccarelli
Why is the work you do at ACTO important to you?
The Tenant Protection Act of 1997 — it’s a pretty ironic name — fundamentally changed how landlord and tenant law was being adjudicated in this province. It used to be in the court system, and the government at the time put it into the Ontario Rental Housing Tribunal, which has been described as an evictions factory. It really was a scary time for tenants, and advocates across the province were struck by the immense amount of work they were doing in the area. And they saw the statistics, like a doubling in the number of evictions cases they were dealing with. So ACTO was the result of advocates from across the province coming together and saying to Legal Aid Ontario, “We need you to fund this. We need you to create a legal clinic that can hear the needs of all of us across the province and be able to do that advocacy at a provincial level.”
What issues are really important right now?
Vacancy decontrol. There used to be rent control in Ontario, until the government introduced vacancy decontrol, which means that if an apartment becomes vacant, the landlord can charge whatever the market can bear. And because there’s vacancy decontrol, there’s a built-in incentive for landlords to evict longstanding tenants. If you’ve lived on College Street for 10 years in a basement apartment, and you pay your rent, there’s no incentive to evict you. But with vacancy decontrol, maybe that same apartment can rent for double, because a landlord can charge whatever the market can bear, and it’s a hot neighbourhood. So here’s a reason to evict people.
I still hear — and I’m still shocked, although I hear it all the time — about adult-only buildings, where landlords don’t want to rent to people with children, which is a violation of the human rights code. I still hear about landlords who use income criteria testing, where the landlords do this calculation and say if you spend more than, say, 30 percent of your income on rent, they won’t rent to you. That was found by the Human Rights Tribunal to be discriminatory 10 years ago. So it’s surprising to me in a somewhat progressive province like Ontario, those issues are still alive and well.
What’s the most common legal problem faced by tenants?
People sign their lease and they don’t read the fine print. Then they’re evicted and they don’t really understand the paperwork, and sometimes they go to the Landlord and Tenant Board and they think they can just explain their story. But it’s a very legal process from day one. So you spend a lot of time explaining that legal process and the legal implications of what’s happening to them.
What was your first apartment like?
My first apartment was flea-infested. I was moving my stuff in and my father had come to help me. I had shorts on, and as I walked in, I was swarmed. I had no idea what they were, I was so naive, but all of a sudden my ankles had all these little black things on them. The landlord was great, actually. She had the apartment sprayed. Her old tenant had moved out and it had been about a month, and the old tenant had cats. The fleas were starved, I guess, and they just saw meat.
Photography by Arantxa Cedillo