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A Victorian lawyer has come under fire in a British Columbia Supreme Court ruling that found she used the court system to postpone an eviction order against her and her mother.
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According to to failure Judge David Crerar, attorney Joanna Lee was given a month’s notice to vacate her rented Victorian townhouse on February 11, 2021 following complaints from a neighbor about excessive noise, which also resulted in the owners being fined by the strata. Police were called twice to the suite, shared with Lee’s mother.
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Lee subsequently filed a dispute resolution application with the BC Residential Leasing Branch requesting that the eviction notice be rescinded, while denying that he made too much noise in his suite.
On June 16, 2021, the RTB ruled against Lee, in favor of the owners, who issued another eviction notice four days later.
From there, Lee used the British Columbia Supreme Court and the BC Court of Appeals in various ways in an effort to reverse the original eviction order. He vacated the suite on October 21, 2021 and paid all rent.
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The most recent ruling found that Lee had not raised compelling grounds for judicial interference in RTB’s decisions.
Crerar said that Lee had deliberately delayed his eviction from the suite.
“From the Court of Appeal hearing in October 2021, Ms. Lee has redoubled her delaying tactics, despite the reprimand and special costs imposed on her by the Court of Appeal. Despite that court’s clear condemnation of her two duplicate motions, she persisted in upholding both, requiring an unnecessarily voluminous and largely overlapping double set of materials and motions, and serving as the basis for her attempt to schedule two hearings. two days apart on identical events. .
“She has continued to seek deferrals at every step of the process. Aside from these earlier issues, at the actual hearing of this petition, she tried to play the clock to obtain de facto the continuance that she had requested three times and had been denied three times. She abused the process of this court by simply reading her materials instead of presenting precise and concise arguments, as she was instructed to do,” Crerar wrote.
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“He made statements in court, orally and in writing, that, to be charitable, bordered on dishonesty or are highly dubious. He implied that the court staff was dishonest, denying that he had been late to court (on both hearing days) or that he had received a voice mail from the registry confirming the hearing.
“She implied that the court staff was incompetent, where no mistakes were made. She made frivolous, inflammatory, damaging and unfounded accusations of bias, which, as stated above, should never be made lightly, against adjudicators at every stage of the process.
“In his written submissions, he made meritless and irresponsible attacks on the professional reputations of two attorneys for the defendants. He filed three improper ex parte motions in which he failed to provide full and frank disclosure to the presiding judges, including critical information and material about prior orders and proceedings.”
Crerar ordered special costs against Lee to pay the owners.
“These deliberate, calculated, multiple and serial abuses of the judicial process by Ms. Lee, a lawyer, court official and member of the Bar Association, who purports to conduct the trial, speak strongly in favor of an order for costs. specials. Her prolonged and dilatory conduct of the litigation has been reprehensible, scandalous and outrageous,” she wrote.
Lee did not respond to a request for comment.