The Battle For Heron Gate

- The Heron Gate Tenant Coalition

Fatima was quick to find another townhouse for her family when her landlord – the multinational, multibillion-dollar, Toronto-based Timbercreek Asset Management – issued eviction notices to dozens of families in the southeast Ottawa neighbourhood of Heron Gate in September 2015. Fatima (which isn’t her real name) was living in one of the 83 townhouses that sat on a parcel of land that developers, speculators, city councillors, and urban planners were salivating over as the prime location for a new “resort-style apartment” complex. She and her neighbours were told they had until February 29, 2016, to leave. Aside from the trauma of displacement, the dead of winter is not the greatest time to be moving in Ottawa.

City parcel by city parcel, Timbercreek is evicting us and our neighbours, and demolishing family houses. Over 400 residents were served eviction notices this spring. In an interview with Muslim Link, Fatima, a member of the Heron Gate Tenant Coalition, described the pain of coming to realize Timbercreek’s ultimate goal of erasing Heron Gate.

“Losing my house was less important than my fear of losing my community,” she says. “Timbercreek thinks because we are a majority immigrant community, they can take advantage of us, and because we are mainly low-income families that we do not know our rights – but they are wrong.”

Living with Fatima was her husband, their six children, and their granddaughter – nine people in a four-bedroom home. At the end of 2015, when she found another townhouse across the street in another parcel of the Timbercreek-owned property, she was denied the $1,500 promised to evicted tenants. Timbercreek told her she was disqualified because she found a place on her own, rather than through the proper “relocation process.” She fought back, but Timbercreek refused to give her the money.