ACORN gives Mayor of Toronto and local councillor a tour of Rexdale apartments in disrepair

On Saturday, June 7, 2025, ACORN members and tenants of 9-27 Bergamot Avenue were joined by Mayor Olivia Chow and Councillor Vincent Crisanti for a tour of their homes. The tour, organized by the Bergamot Avenue ACORN Tenant Union and attended by over 50 people, lasted just over an hour and highlighted a wide range of issues faced by the tenants.

The first stop — the management office located at 9 Bergamot Avenue — started off with tenants speaking out against a lack of ramps and accessible doors to the buildings. Tenant leaders Monique Gordon and James Maroosis then spoke out against illegal charges tenants have received for repair work, or for replacement appliances that they don’t get to keep. Attendees also decried the process for submitting work orders as cumbersome and inaccessible, calling for the City of Toronto to provide a standardized paper work order form that must be accepted by all landlords and property managers in the city.

The tour then stopped outside of 11 Bergamot Avenue, where Mayor Chow pointed out the mold growing underneath the building’s windowsills due to poor water drainage. A RentSafeTO supervisor was present, and vowed to start an investigation to get the windows fixed.

Near the parking lot, tenant leaders took a moment to describe the lack of security on the properties. Multiple car break-ins, thefts, and even a an incident with a burnt out car on the property have left residents feeling alone and scared. ACORN, and even the Toronto Police Service, have asked the property manager, Pinedale Properties, to install security cameras, to no avail.

The tour’s final stop was the townhouse apartment unit of Greg Desgroseilliers, an ACORN member and longtime tenant of Bergamot Avenue. Greg explained to the mayor, councillor, and press that every time someone runs a load of laundry in the laundry room, his apartment floods. As a result, he’s has to remove the parquet flooring permanently and paint the concrete sub-floor black. He and his neighbours, meanwhile, have had to resort to using a local laundromat for three years while the issue in their laundry room persists.

Throughout the tour, ACORN members and tenants noticed the site superintendent, employed by Pinedale Properties, recordings videos of the event and its attendees. ACORN leaders explained to the news that Pinedale has retaliated against them in the past for speaking out, sending threatening eviction notices to tenants who attended an ACORN-organized town hall meeting in March 2025. Pinedale also has refused to recognize or negotiate with the tenant union. Ontario’s Residential Tenancies Act, 2006 makes it a provincial offence for a landlord to harass, hinder, obstruct, or interfere with a tenant for “participating in a tenants’ association or attempting to organize a tenants’ association.”

At the tour’s conclusion, Mayor Chow committed to taking action to improve the tenants’ conditions on Bergamot Avenue, signing onto ACORN’s demands for the City of Toronto’s RentSafeTO program and promising to give it teeth. The demands ACORN won commitments for include:

• RentSafeTO should not close work orders when the work hasn’t been done; there should be follow-up enforcement.
• RentSafeTO should have a standard timeline for how they enforce the property standards bylaws.
• RentSafeTO should be expanded to all rental buildings, including townhouses.
• RentSafeTO should accept work orders from neighbours about common areas in the same complex.
• When the landlord fails to do repairs, the City should step in to do the repairs themselves and bill the landlord on their property taxes.
• RentSafeTO evaluation scores and inspections should include in-unit issues.
• Evaluation scores should be reweighted depending on the severity of the issue.
• RentSafeTO should be empowered to issue an order to comply when they discover an issue, not just tell the tenant to ask the landlord to fix it.
• Audits should be expanded to include a 10% random sampling of units in all rental buildings.
• RentSafeTO should provide a standard paper work order form that must be accepted by all landlords and property managers.
• Tenants should get the same notice of upcoming RentSafeTO inspections as the landlord.
• RentSafeTO building scores should be posted with colour-coded signs similar to DineSafe.
• RentSafeTO should provide the property owner’s name, not just the property manager.

While Councillor Crisanti did not sign onto the demands, ACORN will continue to advocate to his office for the changes that are needed to this program to provide safe and healthy homes for all tenants.

Live in Rexdale? Want to see change in your community? Get organized! Contact ACORN at (416) 461-9233 or [email protected].