Renters in Nova Scotia will soon have a new opportunity to seek help for their housing concerns. Starting Oct. 1, the Dalhousie Legal Aid Services team will be hosting drop-in clinics every Wednesday across a rotation of four HRM libraries as follows:
- First Wednesday of the month: Captain William Spry Library on Sussex Street in Spryfield, 10am-12:30pm
- Second Wednesday of the month: Halifax Central Library on Spring Garden Road in Halifax, 10am-12:30pm
- Third Wednesday of the month: Sackville Library on Sackville Drive in Lower Sackville, 1-3pm
- Fourth Wednesday of the month: Alderney Gate Library on Alderney Gate Drive in Dartmouth, 10am-1pm
These clinics will run in addition to the regular Social Justice Clinic drop-in hours, Tuesdays (9:30am-12pm) and Thursdays (1-3:30pm), at the DLAS office at 5746 Russell Street in Halifax. For those who can’t make it to those clinics in person, limited phone appointments are available by calling DLAS at 902-423-8105. DLAS is also hosting the last in its summer series of eviction prevention workshops online this Thursday; you can register for the event here.
No phone appointments will be available for the Wednesday housing drop-in clinics, “so they really are first-come, first-served,” says Sydnee Blum, DLAS community legal worker and eviction prevention coordinator. “If you're interested in going, I recommend getting there early.”
Each drop-in session will have two or three members from DLAS responding to people’s concerns, with Dal law students on hand to help with intake. Blum says people should plan to be there for half an hour, and the sessions are designed to provide legal aid, referrals, information and help with form filling for any housing concerns, particularly public housing and issues with the Residential Tenancies Act.
People commonly ask for help with preventing evictions, options for ending leases, standards of maintenance and repair and understanding fixed-term leases.
“We deal with a lot of fixed-term leases,” says Blum, “whether that's tenants who come to us on fixed-term leases who are afraid to take action because they don't want to be evicted, or if that's people who are getting evicted on a fixed-term lease…or if it’s people who haven't signed a lease in Nova Scotia in a while, and they don't really understand the fixed-term leases you have to leave at the end and they think they’re getting evicted, but, unfortunately, we have to tell them that it's legal not to renew a lease.”
Blum says prior knowledge of the residential tenancies legislation isn’t necessary, but that “ideally, people will have their lease or any documents they’ve been served by the landlords, including any forms, as well as things we would consider to be evidence—although we don't need pictures of cockroaches, we believe you.”
Blum says these mobile drop-in clinics are intended to help people get answers to their questions faster than getting an appointment at the DLAS office. “You don’t have to have a specific problem to come in,” says Blum. “We can answer several residential tenancy questions quickly, and hopefully, by doing that, we can triage more urgent and complex cases into [the DLAS office] so that people can connect to resources faster.”
Libraries are public places, but Blum says everything discussed at the clinic is confidential. “There are very few reasons—unless we think someone's in acute danger—why we would have to break confidentiality,” they say. “If people are afraid of their landlord finding out information they give us—it never leaves the clinic.”
