Hamilton, ON: Rent Strikers Hold Rally

The following report comes from rent strikers involved in the Hamilton Tenants Solidarity Network.

On May 15th, rent strikers from the Stoney Creek Towers had a rally. After a couple of speeches from tenants and supporters, we went to the local office of the property management company CLV to hand in a stack of over 60 maintenance request forms, documenting a list of long-standing repair issues that tenants from the four buildings have been living with for weeks, months or years.

While this rally took place well within official office hours, when tenants went to deliver the letters they were met with locked doors. CLV seemed to think that this would make the problem go away. It didn’t. After a while, CLV eventually realized how bad this looked, and agreed to accept the repair letters. Behind the closed doors of the front office, we could see them on the phone – presumably to get instructions from the higher-ups in their Ottawa headquarters – and proceeding to photocopy all of the repair letters. When we left about a half an hour later, they were still busy feeding the photocopier more paper.