A Toronto couple facing eviction over complaints about indoor smoking say the real culprit behind their landlord’s air-quality concerns isn’t cigarettes — it’s flatulence.
SE Grummett and Sam Kruger, who perform horror-comedy and interactive “queer theatre” under the name Creepy Boys, are contesting their eviction before Ontario’s Landlord and Tenant Board. The pair say air-quality readings taken by their landlord actually point to passed gas rather than smoking, according to the International Business Times.
“This is not a joke. We wish we were joking,” reads a fundraising page set up to help cover the couple’s legal expenses.
According to the fundraiser, the couple’s landlord, who has a chronic lung condition, moved to evict them after an air-quality monitor in her upstairs unit detected volatile organic compounds. Her unit shares an air duct with the couple’s apartment.
Grummett and Kruger say they do not smoke indoors and tried to track down the source of the VOCs themselves. Through trial and error, they say they ruled out appliance use and home fragrances as causes.
The fundraising page says a health specialist confirmed information from the monitor’s manufacturer indicating that VOC levels can be affected by bodily functions. The couple point to the fact that readings spike overnight as evidence that flatulence, not cigarette smoke, is behind the elevated levels.
The pair claim that once they challenged the smoking theory, their landlord switched course and attempted to evict them under the “personal use” provision, which allows landlords to reclaim a unit to live in themselves or return it to single-family use.
“We are currently being evicted for ‘personal use’ but we believe this is retribution for us enforcing our tenants rights, as well as, our landlords belief that the poor air quality readings in her unit are from us smoking,” the couple wrote on the fundraising page.
“We believe this to be in bad faith. In Ontario, such evictions have to be heard by the Landlord Tenant Board. So, we are going to court,” they added.
As of Sunday morning, about $2,400 had been raised toward the couple’s legal costs, roughly a month after the fundraiser went live.
Creepy Boys did not respond to a request for comment from the New York Post.
