Winning Rent Abatement After a Landlord Let the Roof Fail

The situation

Chidi and Femi had run their construction company out of the same leased industrial unit in Brantford for six years — a fabrication shop, a fenced yard for materials and equipment, and a small office wing at the front. The lease was a standard commercial arrangement: a fixed base rent, a term running several more years, and a clause requiring the landlord to maintain the building's structure and roof.

In late winter, a section of the roof over the shop gave way after heavy snow load, letting water into the fabrication area and onto two pieces of stored equipment. The company moved what it could, but the shop floor was unsafe to work on and the yard access was partly blocked by the collapsed section and the equipment brought in to assess it. For a construction company, losing the shop meant losing the ability to prep materials, store tools securely, and run the business the way its crews needed to.

The landlord, Yusuf, arranged a temporary tarp over the hole within a week, but real structural repairs kept getting pushed back — first for an engineering assessment, then for permitting, then for contractor availability. Four months later, the shop was still only partially usable and the yard remained congested with Yusuf's own equipment. Chidi and Femi came to Treadstone Law after they had already stopped paying part of the rent and Yusuf had responded with a formal demand letter threatening to end the lease for non-payment.

The legal problem

Commercial leases in Ontario are largely governed by the terms the parties negotiate, not by a broad set of tenant protections the way residential leases are. That makes the specific wording of the lease — the repair covenant, the quiet enjoyment clause, and any provision addressing damage or destruction of the premises — the whole ballgame in a dispute like this one.

This lease put structural repairs, including the roof, squarely on the landlord. It also contained a standard covenant of quiet enjoyment, promising the tenants use of the premises without substantial interference from the landlord. When a landlord fails to make a repair it is contractually obligated to make, and that failure substantially interferes with the tenant's ability to use the space for its intended purpose, a tenant can generally claim an abatement — a reduction or suspension of rent proportional to the loss of use — without waiting for a court to bless it in advance. The risk is that this self-help remedy only works if the tenant is right. If a court later finds the interference wasn't serious enough, or that the tenant withheld more rent than the loss of use justified, the tenant can end up in breach of the lease itself, facing termination and a claim for the full arrears.

That was the landlord's opening position: that the roof damage was a minor, correctable defect, that the tarp had restored full use of the premises, and that Chidi and Femi were in breach for withholding rent unilaterally. If that position held, the landlord could terminate the lease and sue for all of the withheld rent plus damages for early termination — a claim that, combined with the tenants' own losses from months of disrupted operations, put well over a million dollars in dispute between the two sides.

What we did

1. Documented the loss of use in detail, not in general terms. A claim that the shop was "unusable" is weak evidence. We worked with the tenants to build a record of exactly which parts of the premises were affected, on which dates, and what work could and could not be performed in each area — photographs, delivery logs showing rescheduled material drops, and a summary of jobs the company had to decline or subcontract out because it couldn't stage equipment on site.
2. Quantified the abatement against actual rent, not against damages. Abatement is a reduction of rent tied to the proportion of the premises the tenant genuinely lost the use of — it is a different calculation from a damages claim for lost profit. We kept the two separate from the start, which mattered later when the landlord tried to argue the tenants were double-counting their losses.
3. Sent a formal notice asserting the abatement, rather than staying silent. Withholding rent quietly and hoping it goes unchallenged is a weak position. We put the landlord on written notice of the specific breach, the basis for the abatement, and what would restore full rent — a clear signal that the withholding was a considered legal position, not a payment dispute.
4. Responded to the landlord's demand letter by defending the lease, not walking away from it. The tenants had six years of goodwill in that location and no interest in relocating a working shop mid-project season. Our response made clear the tenants intended to stay, remained ready to pay full rent once full use was restored, and would resist any attempt to terminate the lease over a landlord-caused defect.
5. Filed a counterclaim once the landlord commenced its own action. The landlord sued in the Superior Court for the withheld rent and, later, added a claim for lease termination. We answered with a counterclaim for the abatement already taken, additional abatement for the ongoing partial loss of use, and damages for the disruption to the business, including the cost of the subcontracted work and the damaged equipment.
6. Retained an independent building consultant to assess the repair. The landlord's position rested on the claim that the tarp had restored full use. An independent inspection documented that the shop floor remained structurally unsafe in the affected bay and that the yard access remained obstructed — evidence that carried more weight with the court than either side's own account.
7. Pursued the case toward trial rather than accepting an early settlement that undervalued the claim. The landlord made two settlement offers during the litigation that would have restored the lease but conceded only a fraction of the abatement claimed. Given the strength of the documentary record, we advised against accepting either and prepared the file for trial.

The outcome

The case proceeded through examinations and document production and was resolved shortly before trial, once the landlord's own engineering reports — produced in the litigation — confirmed what the independent consultant had found: the roof repair completed months after the collapse had been inadequate, and the affected bay had remained genuinely unsafe for longer than the landlord had disclosed to the tenants at the time.

The court confirmed the tenants' right to the abatement they had already taken and awarded further abatement and damages for the ongoing disruption, bringing the total recovery, net of the rent the landlord had claimed, to a result in the tenants' favour of roughly $950,000 once the competing claims were set off against each other. The lease remained in place on its original terms, with the roof fully repaired as part of the resolution and rent resuming in full from that point forward.

Chidi and Femi kept the location their crews knew, avoided the cost and disruption of relocating a working shop, and came out of a dispute that could have ended their tenancy with their lease intact and their losses recognized. The case also produced something the tenants hadn't expected going in: a clear written record, now part of the file, of exactly what the landlord's repair obligations under the lease actually required — useful protection if a similar issue ever arises again.

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