A years-long battle with cockroaches
A tenant in downtown Sudbury, Ont., says her apartment has been infested with cockroaches for years — and the problem has gotten so bad that she and her teenage son now eat all of their meals outside their unit rather than risk bringing more bugs into their food.
The tenant, who has lived in the building for a lengthy stretch, told CBC News that she's tried everything from store-bought traps to repeated calls to her landlord, but the infestation keeps coming back. She says cockroaches show up in cupboards, on countertops, and even inside appliances, making it nearly impossible to keep a clean kitchen.
Calling on the landlord to treat the whole building
Rather than accept individual pest control visits to her own unit — treatments she says only offer temporary relief before the roaches return — the tenant is now petitioning her neighbours to push the landlord to fumigate the entire building at once. She argues that spot-treating single apartments does little good when cockroaches can travel freely between units through shared walls, pipes, and ductwork.
Tenants in older apartment buildings across Ontario have long dealt with similar complaints, and pest control experts often note that building-wide infestations require coordinated, building-wide responses rather than piecemeal fixes. Without every unit being treated simultaneously, pests simply migrate from one apartment to the next, undoing whatever progress individual tenants make.
Living around an infestation
</br>The tenant described the toll the situation has taken on her family's daily routine. Eating outside has become the norm, not the exception, regardless of the weather. She says the constant vigilance — checking food packaging, sealing containers, and inspecting surfaces before use — has become exhausting, especially while trying to manage it alongside raising a teenager.
She's not alone in wanting more accountability from landlords when it comes to pest control. Housing advocates across Ontario have repeatedly called for stronger enforcement of maintenance standards, arguing that municipal bylaws and provincial tenant protections don't always translate into timely action when a landlord is slow to respond.
What tenants can do
In Ontario, tenants dealing with persistent pest problems can file complaints with their municipality's property standards department, which can order landlords to address infestations. Tenants can also apply to the Landlord and Tenant Board if a landlord fails to maintain a unit in a habitable condition, which legally includes keeping a building free of pests.
For now, the Sudbury tenant is hoping that collective pressure from her fellow renters will succeed where her individual complaints haven't — pushing her landlord to commit to a full building fumigation rather than another round of temporary fixes.
Source: CBC News
