Theft of home prompts Ontario bill
Homeowners ’scared,’ MPP says
Liberals say help already on the way
Excerpt from an article by Harold Levy - Toronto Star
The story of an 89-year-old Toronto man who lost his home to identity thieves has left many homeowners in Ontario feeling “scared and vulnerable,” Tory MPP Joe Tascona says.
Tascona, the provincial government services critic, was referring to Paul Reviczky, who was recently shocked to learn that the thieves, using a fraudulent power of attorney, had sold the home he had owned since 1980 to an unsuspecting purchaser, and that under Ontario law he may never get it back.
After the Legislature reconvenes Sept. 25, Tascona plans to introduce a private member’s bill to pressure the Liberal government to take action. But Gerry Phillips, Ontario’s minister of government services, told the Star yesterday that he does not need prodding from the opposition through a bill.
Reviczky, a retired tobacco farmer who lived elsewhere, was using the rental income from the home to help out his relatives in Hungary.
Phillips has brought a group of experts from Ontario’s financial, real estate, and policing communities together for advice, and is intervening in a court case on behalf of a North York woman whose 100-year-old Victorian home was recently stolen by criminals. But Tascona says his constituents are telling him and many of his colleagues that the McGuinty government is not moving quickly enough to overhaul the system and ease owners’ fears that their homes can be stolen from under their noses.
Tascona also proposes to overhaul Ontario’s Land Titles Assurance Fund, which provides compensation to homeowners who have not purchased title insurance, so they will no longer have to go through costly, time-consuming litigation to sort the situation out. Under his proposal, fraudulent transactions would no longer be considered valid merely because they have been registered through the province’s land titles system under the proposed bill, and the homeowner would receive compensation “up front,” instead of first having to bring lawsuits against those who failed to protect them such as lawyers or lenders.
The bill would also make it more difficult for criminals to obtain information about people’s properties from registry offices and the province’s electronic land transfer system that can then be used to steal their homes. It would also give the province’s registrar of land titles the power to police the system by refusing to register apparently fraudulent transactions — and to rescind clearly fraudulent registrations that have fallen through the tracks.
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