Nanaimo landlord’s problem tenant turns out to be convicted fraudster with long history of unpaid bills

Documents show Jason James Simmons-Trudeau rented these homes on Jingle Pot Road, left, and Departure Bay Road, right, simultaneously in early 2024. He was evicted from both for non-payment of rent. (bcassessment.ca)

This is part one of a CTV News investigation into the case of a notorious Vancouver Island problem tenant with a history of fraud convictions. Part two will be published Wednesday.

From a distance, Jason James Simmons-Trudeau seemed like the ideal tenant for Tony Ogbechie’s property on Jingle Pot Road in Nanaimo.

A small business owner with a young family, Simmons-Trudeau was looking for a home for the long term, and the three-bedroom house – where Ogbechie himself had raised two kids before moving to Toronto and starting his own company – seemed like a good fit.

Simmons-Trudeau’s rental application showed he was already paying close to the same amount in monthly rent that Ogbechie was asking, and he was making more than enough income to comfortably afford the place. The references he listed had “nothing but great things to say,” Ogbechie recalled.

The parties signed their rental agreement in December 2023, and Simmons-Trudeau moved in with his common-law wife and their son in January 2024.

By February, Ogbechie had begun to suspect something was wrong.

Today, a little more than a year later, Ogbechie has had to hire a bailiff to evict Simmons-Trudeau from his home, and CTV News has uncovered convictions for fraud, penalties for violations of employment law, and numerous additional evictions in Simmons-Trudeau’s past.

For his part, the tenant maintains he did nothing wrong in Nanaimo, and is simply the victim of a difficult housing market and family obligations that have hurt his income.

‘I’m in trouble’

Typically, Ogbechie said, he and his tenants set up rent payments to automatically come out of the tenant’s bank account on the first of each month.

“I’ve always had it with other tenants, and it’s never been an issue,” Ogbechie said.

With Simmons-Trudeau, there were issues. Ogbechie said the pre-authorized debits from Simmons-Trudeau’s account “bounced back a couple of times,” prompting the banks involved to cancel the arrangement.

With e-transfers happening manually, a pattern emerged. Simmons-Trudeau would fail to pay his rent on the first of the month, and would not say anything to the landlord about this failure. Instead, Ogbechie said, he would have to reach out to the tenant and ask what happened.

“He would always pay,” Ogbechie said. “It might come middle-of-month, it might come, you know, at random, but somehow he would make it up. Sometimes he would send half now and then send the remaining one later on.”

Things continued like this until July, when Simmons-Trudeau did not pay at all, according to Ogbechie.

The tenant always had a “sob story” when asked why he hadn’t paid his rent, Ogbechie said, adding that he tried to be understanding and flexible.

He also started talking to friends and work colleagues about the situation, and soon learned he wasn’t the first Nanaimo landlord to deal with late or non-existent rent payments from Simmons-Trudeau.

A former colleague recognized Simmons-Trudeau’s name because a warning about him had been circulated in a WeChat group for Chinese-speaking landlords in the city. Ogbechie’s Realtor in Nanaimo also thought the situation sounded familiar, and put him in touch with another landlord, who confirmed she was dealing with legal fallout after renting to Simmons-Trudeau.

“I was already suspecting him,” Ogbechie said, adding that the conversations crystallized the depth of the issue.

“It was one of these things where you know, ‘I’m in trouble.’ But he’s in. I can’t do anything about it. I have to manage this. I’m in a mess now.”

The Departure Bay Road property

The other landlord Ogbechie spoke to owns a property on Departure Bay Road. She asked not to be named in this story, but agreed to share documents related to Simmons-Trudeau’s tenancy with CTV News.

The documents show a curious timeline. The Departure Bay Road tenancy agreement began on Dec. 1, 2023, just one month before Simmons-Trudeau’s tenancy in Ogbechie’s house on Jingle Pot Road.

Though Simmons-Trudeau has responded to various questions from CTV News via email over the last few weeks, he has not provided an explanation for why he rented two properties at once, despite being asked for such an explanation multiple times.

In his application for the Jingle Pot Road house, Simmons-Trudeau listed the Departure Bay Road address as his current address. However, the person listed as his “current landlord” was not the actual owner of the Departure Bay Road property.

Instead, the “current landlord” was listed as “Mark Stratton/Property Manager.” The Departure Bay Road landlord confirmed to CTV News that she self-manages her buildings. She does not have a property manager, let alone one with that name.

Further, she shared Simmons-Trudeau’s application for tenancy at her property, on which he again listed his current landlord as “Mark Stratton,” though he provided a different phone number for Stratton on each application.

The Departure Bay Road landlord issued Simmons-Trudeau a 10-day notice to end tenancy for unpaid rent in May 2024. The tenant challenged the notice at B.C.‘s Residential Tenancy Branch, but the RTB arbitrator’s decision on the matter indicates neither Simmons-Trudeau nor any other representative of the tenant’s side of the dispute appeared at the hearing.

According to the decision, the landlord testified that Simmons-Trudeau had been late in paying the rent from January through April, then failed to pay entirely in May and June.

“The landlord referred to copies of emails with the tenant submitted as evidence and testified that the tenant wrote that they were out of town, out of the country, and that rent would be paid,” the decision reads.

“It was not paid. The landlord testified that they spoke with the tenants of the lower unit, who indicated they have not seen the tenant in weeks.”

The decision also indicates that the landlord emailed Simmons-Trudeau a “notice of access” on June 12, 2024, saying that she would be accessing the property two days later for maintenance.

“The landlord testified that when they accessed the unit, it appeared vacant with only a couch and other minor items present,” the decision reads.

The arbitrator awarded the landlord an order of possession and a monetary order for $4,851.09 in unpaid rent.

The Departure Bay Road landlord won another monetary order against Simmons-Trudeau in December, this time for losses suffered because the tenants moved out before the one-year term of the lease had ended, leaving the landlord unable to rent the property for a month, as well as for the cost of repairing damage to the unit.

That monetary order was for a total of $4,101.29. Again, the decision indicates that no one appeared at the hearing on behalf of the tenant.

Multiple bailiff evictions

When Simmons-Trudeau failed to pay his July 2024 rent to Ogbechie, the landlord issued a 10-day notice to end tenancy for unpaid rent.

The tenant paid his outstanding amount, automatically cancelling the notice, but the following month the pattern of late and partial payments resumed.

When October’s rent went unpaid entirely, Ogbechie sent a one-month notice to end tenancy, citing repeated late payments. This type of notice cannot be automatically cancelled by payment of the outstanding balance.

Simmons-Trudeau again paid what he owed after receiving the eviction notice.

“(He was) asking me – begging me – to withdraw the eviction,” Ogbechie said. “I said, ‘I’m happy to withdraw it, because I – really – my intention is not to evict you. I just want you to treat the property well and pay your rent. That’s it.’”

Ogbechie and Simmons-Trudeau signed an undertaking in which the tenant admitted to repeatedly paying his rent late and committed to paying his rent in full on the first of each month going forward. Ogbechie, in turn, agreed to withdraw the eviction notice.

The following month, rent went unpaid again, and Ogbechie re-issued the one-month notice to end tenancy, which went uncontested, resulting in an order of possession from the RTB.

“He waited until the last day and then appealed it,” Ogbechie said.

A hearing for Simmons-Trudeau’s appeal was scheduled for Jan. 7 of this year, but – as with the Departure Bay Road cases – no one appeared on behalf of the tenants.

Ogbechie’s order of possession was upheld, along with a monetary order for $3,600 in unpaid rent and RTB fees.

On Jan. 31, a bailiff from Canadian Western Civil Enforcement enforced the order of possession, changing the locks and co-ordinating the removal of Simmons-Trudeau’s belongings from the Jingle Pot Road house.

According to Shawn Hildebrandt, a bailiff for Canadian Western, Simmons-Trudeau is a “frequent flyer.”

Hildebrandt said the bailiff he sent to evict Simmons-Trudeau was “familiar with” the tenant from a previous eviction he had conducted for a different company.

Mounties were called to attend the Simmons-Trudeau eviction, and the tenant’s possessions were taken to a storage facility in Nanaimo, Hildebrandt said.

He added that it’s not uncommon for police to accompany bailiffs to evictions, noting that his company ends up calling the police about 60 to 70 per cent of the time.

Hildebrandt added that in 25 years of work as a bailiff, he’s seen the demand for his services increase significantly. He said he’s gone from conducting “a couple of” evictions a month to more than one a week, a surge he attributes to a variety of factors, including the high cost of living and the toxic drug crisis.

Often, those evictions involve so-called “frequent flyers.”

“A lot of them are informed about how it goes down,” Hildebrandt said. “They’ll wait for us to show up. They want a free move.”

The tenant responds

In an email to CTV News, Simmons-Trudeau acknowledged that the bailiff who evicted him on Jan. 31 recognized him from a previous eviction, but alleged that both evictions had been conducted in “bad faith.”

He said a case is still pending before the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal against the landlord in the earlier eviction, alleging that that landlord had discriminated against him for having a service dog.

Asked if he could provide documents related to the HRT case, such as his complaint, Simmons-Trudeau said getting such documents would be “difficult” because of his recent eviction from Ogbechie’s property.

As for that eviction, Simmons-Trudeau alleged that he and the landlord had “an arrangement to bring rent up to date.”

Ogbechie told CTV News no such arrangement was in place, noting specifically that Simmons-Trudeau had asked him to sign another agreement to withdraw his eviction notice, which Ogbechie refused to do.

A search of Simmons-Trudeau’s name in the Canadian Legal Information Institute database yields nine decisions from Quebec. Two are from small claims court and seven are from that province’s housing authority.

The decisions stretch over a 10-year span from 2011 to 2021. All nine deal with landlord-tenant disputes. Six of them involve unpaid rent. Danielle Sickini, Simmons-Trudeau’s spouse, is named in five of them.

In response to questions from CTV News, Simmons-Trudeau did not deny that he was involved in the Quebec cases.

The tenant argued that his family has been struggling to make ends meet because of “extremely high rental rates and a lack of available affordable rental units and services.”

He also said his wife and son have disabilities and he is sometimes unable to work because he has to take care of them.

“We are stuck in a vicious circle and need help that’s not available,” Simmons-Trudeau said, in his email.

“The only affordable places available are apartment buildings owned by corporations and managed by real estate property managers. We have no way to be approved here. This is why we search for houses to rent. Again, I’m not trying to take advantage of people. I’m trying my very best to find suitable and affordable housing for my family.”

Asked specifically whether he had lied on his application for tenancy at Ogbechie’s property by naming “Mark Stratton” as his current landlord, Simmons-Trudeau wrote:

“I did what I had to (to) find housing for my family.”

He did not explain why he signed rental agreements – and made late or partial rent payments – on two properties at once. Nor did he say why he challenged the eviction notice he received from the Departure Bay Road landlord, which occurred during the overlap between the two tenancies.

“I admit we did file applications, as is our right, in hopes to bring our rent up to date and make amends with the landlord,” Simmons-Trudeau said. “We do not wish to live in someone’s house for free. We have many struggles. What we need is help to overcome our challenges, not to have our laundry aired out for everyone to see and make it that much harder for us to find suitable and affordable housing.”

Ogbechie said he’s sympathetic to cost-of-living concerns and tries to be accommodating to his tenants. An immigrant from Nigeria who struggled to find housing – and says he was denied it because of his race in at least one instance – when he arrived in Nanaimo, Ogbechie knows what it’s like to be in a precarious rental situation.

He just doesn’t believe that’s what’s happening in Simmons-Trudeau’s case.

After the eviction, Ogbechie posted warnings in Facebook community groups, advising Nanaimo landlords to look out for Simmons-Trudeau. He was overwhelmed by the response.

Other landlords, former employees and other acquaintances of Simmons-Trudeau all commented to share their own negative experiences doing business with him. Several of those who commented have since reached out to CTV News to share their stories, and the outpouring led to the discovery of multiple criminal convictions for fraud in Quebec, as well as allegations that Simmons-Trudeau has been involved in a similar fraud since relocating to B.C.

These convictions and allegations are the focus of part two of this investigation.

With files from CTV News Montreal’s Joe Lofaro