The Superior Court of Quebec has refused to extend a legal saga involving a Montreal businessman. He has been trying for several years to evict the tenants of three adjoining buildings that he wishes to demolish in order to carry out a real estate project.
A hearing was held before the Superior Court on February 27, followed by an oral judgment on February 1.er March. Judge Andres Garin then decided to reject the application for judicial review made by Mr. Bellini’s company, indicates a record of the hearing obtained by The duty.
The businessman and his lawyer could not be reached to comment on this decision.
The lawyer Julien Delangie, who represented eight of the ten tenants who occupied the buildings that Mr. Bellini wishes to demolish in recent years, indicates, for his part, that the businessman had until March 31 to contest this decision before the Quebec Court of Appeal, which he did not do. This legal saga would therefore be closed, according to the lawyer specializing in housing law. “The owner has used all the remedies available to him”, summarizes Me Delangie.
A long saga
In March 2021, the Administrative Housing Tribunal (TAL) rejected the eviction requests opened by a numbered company owned by Giancarlo Bellini and which concerned three buildings on rue Clark, in Little Italy. The owner wants to demolish these buildings, which have eight rental units offered at a rent below the market average. He wants to carry out a three-storey real estate project there. Some tenants had been living in the same dwelling for several decades.
In her decision, administrative judge Camille Champeval noted that the tenants had signed agreements to terminate their lease believing that their departure was “inevitable”. However, the owner had not approached the borough of Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie to validate the demolition of the buildings in question. He has still not obtained the required permits from the borough, which refused his requests in 2019.
“The tenants would thus have benefited from another option, that is to simply let the process follow its course with the City, knowing that they could possibly challenge it”, notes the decision of the administrative judge. These agreements were thus deemed void, which allowed the tenants to remain in their dwellings.
Dismissed before the TAL, Giancarlo Bellini turned to the Court of Quebec, which validated the decision of the administrative tribunal in June 2021. “Nothing allows the Court to conclude that the assessment of the evidence by the administrative judge results from ‘a manifest and decisive error,’ wrote magistrate Nathalie Chalifour.
The owner then appealed this judgment to the Superior Court of Quebec in the hope that it would force the Court of Quebec to look again at this file, but his request was again rejected on 1er last March.
The right to remain in the premises is therefore retained for the tenants of these buildings. But that does not mean that the owner will not try to find other means of ousting them, specifies lawyer Julien Delangie. “That does not prevent the owner from continuing to take steps with the borough to obtain permits” in order to demolish these buildings, he warns. To be continued.