The Problem Tenant
A criminal court asks whether the state proved an offence. An urgent eviction hearing asks a different question: whether conduct is so serious that waiting for ordinary notice would be unreasonable. In that smaller administrative room, a police visit can matter without a charge, a charge without a conviction, a neighbour’s fear without a forecast, and a guest’s conduct without a clean answer about control. The result is not criminal punishment. The result can still be the immediate loss of a home.
§01 · The urgent route
Section 68 of Saskatchewan’s Residential Tenancies Act, 2006 permits a landlord to apply for possession without first serving the ordinary notice when the landlord alleges that waiting is unreasonable because the tenant or a person permitted on the property has seriously jeopardized health or safety, put a landlord’s lawful right or interest at risk, or caused extraordinary damage.primary law
The route is deliberately exceptional. The Act also permits oral or written submissions, gives another party an opportunity to rebut them in the manner the hearing officer considers appropriate, allows a hearing to proceed after proper notice when an affected person is absent, and permits evidence outside formal evidence law when the officer considers it credible, trustworthy and relevant. Appeals are confined to law or jurisdiction.primary law
None of those rules proves a defective decision. Together they identify the point of discretion: a hearing officer must decide what happened, who is responsible, what may happen next, and whether the ordinary timeline is too dangerous to use.
§02 · The study
Sarah Buhler’s 2025 article in the Osgoode Hall Law Journal conducts a reflexive thematic analysis of urgent ORT decisions issued from January 2020 through June 2021. She calls the category “crim-eviction”: cases in which alleged criminal, illegal, frightening or dangerous conduct is governed through the civil machinery of tenancy.article’s analysis
The claim is not that the tribunal secretly becomes a criminal court. It is that crime-and-disorder logics can travel into an administrative system with different rules, remedies and participation. Buhler reports that tenants did not appear in about 54 per cent of the cases where attendance was tracked. Every consent order in her dataset required the tenant to move. Those figures belong to this dataset; they are not the broader outcome figures reported in her separate 2021 pandemic-eviction study.
The tribunal does not convict the tenant. It produces the tenant for whom exclusion appears reasonable.
§03 · Good tenant, problem tenant
Buhler identifies a recurring binary. The “good tenant” is quiet, orderly, autonomous and able to control the people around the home. The “problem tenant” is read through disruption, damaged property, visitors, police attendance and the fear of others. Once the second identity coheres, individual facts begin to confirm the category that arranged them.article’s analysis
This is not an argument that broken doors, threats or repeated disturbances are imaginary. It is a question about inference. Property damage may establish damage without establishing who caused it. Police attendance establishes attendance without establishing an offence. A guest’s conduct may engage tenancy obligations without establishing that a vulnerable tenant freely invited, directed or could stop the conduct.
| What the record may show | What still requires a finding |
|---|---|
| police attended or investigated | what occurred, who did it, and what weight the contact deserves |
| a neighbour or landlord was afraid | the source, credibility and prospective meaning of that fear |
| property was damaged or disordered | cause, responsibility, severity and relationship to future safety |
| a guest caused harm | the tenant’s legal responsibility, control, coercion and available alternatives |
§04 · Fear becomes future
Buhler draws on the idea of fear as an “affective fact”: anticipated harm produces present effects before the predicted event occurs. In an urgent eviction file, fear can be both evidence of an existing disruption and the bridge to a forecast that the danger will continue or escalate.article’s framework
Fear deserves to be heard. The structural question is what work it is asked to perform. Does the decision identify the conduct creating the fear? Does it test competing explanations? Does it distinguish the seriousness of an event from the probability of recurrence? Does it explain why immediate displacement is the proportionate safety response?
The article’s critique becomes strongest here: urgency compresses the gap between “this was frightening” and “this person’s continued housing is an unacceptable future risk.” Written reasons are the only public place where that conversion can be inspected.
§05 · The police marker
The article finds that hearing officers were quick to associate evidence of police involvement with immediate eviction. Its cited decisions include police letters, investigations, arrests, statements about charges and accounts of police advice to landlords.article’s finding
Police information can be probative. The error would be to treat contact as empty merely because it did not produce a conviction. The opposite error is equally available: to let the institutional fact of police involvement stand in for the conduct it is supposed to prove. An arrest is not a finding of guilt. An investigation is not its conclusion. Advice to apply for eviction is not adjudication of the application.
Section 75 supplies a gate—credible, trustworthy and relevant—but the gate remains evaluative. A reasoned decision should show what crossed it and why, especially where the consequence is immediate loss of a home and the person affected is absent or unrepresented.
§06 · Victim recast as manager
Buhler identifies decisions in which tenants describing themselves as victims of violence or coercion were met with skepticism and made responsible for the people who harmed them. Tenancy law can impose responsibility for people a tenant permits onto the property. The difficult cases are those in which “permission” and “control” are assumed precisely where abuse has stripped them away.article’s analysis
The administrative conversion is subtle. A person unable to control an abusive partner may be redescribed as the person who failed to control a guest. Vulnerability becomes evidence of bad tenancy. The safety event remains visible; its direction changes.
This does not answer every case. A housing provider still owes duties to other tenants and workers. It establishes the required question: whether the order distinguishes complicity from coercion and tests an available safety alternative before making the victim bear the housing consequence of another person’s conduct.
§07 · The order that lets you stay
Not every case in the study ended in immediate eviction. Buhler borrows Nicole Summers’s term “civil probation” for conditional arrangements that permit a tenant to remain while expanding landlord control and making future housing depend on compliance.attributed term
A conditional order can be a genuine alternative to eviction. It can also preserve the eviction application as a continuing disciplinary instrument. The correct test is concrete: what condition was imposed, for how long, who can allege breach, what hearing follows, whether the condition reaches lawful private life, and whether the tenant had representation when agreeing.
The label should not decide the analysis. The order should. A narrow, reviewable safety condition is not identical to open-ended supervision. The article’s contribution is to make that distinction visible rather than let “not evicted” end the inquiry.
§08 · The mechanism
The dirty input: allegations, police contact, damaged property, other people’s conduct and fear of what may happen next enter as fragments requiring separate findings.
The wash: the fragments pass through the familiar category of the “problem tenant.” Urgency makes prediction actionable; institutional contact gives allegation administrative weight; disorder supplies a visual grammar; absence leaves fewer competing facts in the room.
The clean output: immediate exclusion returns as a safety measure directed at a person whose risk now appears to have been established by the coherence of the file.
What is laundered is uncertainty. The order does not hide the allegation. It converts the unresolved distances—between contact and guilt, fear and forecast, guest and tenant, damage and author—into a tenant identity stable enough to remove.
§09 · The strongest case against this reading
The strongest reply is that the article turns ordinary adjudication into ideology. Housing providers cannot wait for a criminal trial while neighbours face threats, violence, extraordinary damage or repeated disruption. Section 68 exists because the ordinary notice route can be dangerously slow. Civil hearings use a different standard for a different remedy. Police information and experienced fear can be relevant without a conviction, and a landlord cannot be required to supply social services beyond its capacity.
Grant all of it. Urgent authority may be necessary. The article’s questions remain: whether the officer identifies conduct rather than category, evaluates police material rather than merely invoking it, distinguishes coercion from control, explains prediction, and considers a viable alternative where one exists. The demand is not criminal proof beyond a reasonable doubt. It is reasons proportionate to the speed and consequence of the power.
§10 · Safety after the order
The decision record ends where the public question begins. The article does not establish what happened after each immediate eviction or conditional order: whether a tenant found housing, entered homelessness, returned to an abusive person, faced another application, or whether neighbours experienced durable safety.
That limit matters. Eviction can remove a source of danger from one building. It can also relocate a conflict without resolving it. An alternative is not viable because an editor can name it; it must have existed, had capacity, accepted the person and addressed the actual safety problem at the relevant time and place.
The reform ledger is therefore procedural and empirical: publish reasoned decisions; support tenant representation; train decision-makers to recognize recurring tropes and the consequences of eviction; identify real alternatives; and measure outcomes after the order. The tribunal’s success cannot be read from the possession order alone.
§11 · Sources
- Sarah Buhler, “Crim-eviction: Eviction and Social Control at a Residential Tenancies Tribunal”, Osgoode Hall Law Journal 62.1 (2025), 109–152, DOI 10.60082/2817-5069.4098. Primary source for the study, findings, decision references and reform proposals.
- The Residential Tenancies Act, 2006, SS 2006, c R-22.0001, especially ss 68, 70, 72, 73 and 75. Primary law; linked consolidation should be checked for amendments when relied upon.
- Sarah Buhler, “Pandemic Evictions: An Analysis of the 2020 Eviction Decisions of Saskatchewan’s Office of Residential Tenancies”, 35 Journal of Law and Social Policy 68 (2021). Separate study; not merged with the 2025 dataset.
- Office of Residential Tenancies, Rules of Procedure, updated March 2026. Current procedural context only; not evidence of practice during the study period.
§12 · Conclusion
Mechanism, not motive. That is the record. The rest is yours. Crew, not cargo. Keep the file open.