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Based on his review of the Residential Tenancy Branch’s published decisions, Astifan believes evictions for child noise are rare to the point of non-existent in B.C.

Past branch decisions have found that children playing, occasionally running and even singing are associated with normal daily life, not by definition unreasonable, and therefore not alone grounds for eviction.

The ministry of municipal affairs and housing, which oversees the branch, could not say whether child noise has been grounds for evictions in the past.

While the branch handles 22,000 disputes each year, it does not release details of specific cases to protect the confidentiality of the parties involved.

Photo by Jason Payne / PNG

The trouble started a year ago when the building manager informally warned Astifan not to let his son run in the halls, which Astifan agreed to curtail, according to correspondence supplied to Postmedia.

“I used to take Marcus running in the hallways when I got home from work and he would play in the lobby with his RC car to burn off some energy,” he said.

The following month another informal complaint was made by his downstairs neighbour, who complained of “stomping with shoes, dragging of things (toys) across the floor, continual running from their child, and banging that disrupts us every single day and into the late evenings.”

When those neighbours moved out, new tenants complained to management in July about the noise of a child running into the late evening. In an email to Astifan, the building manager expressed surprise that a child so young would be up after 9:30 p.m. and warned that official breach notices would follow.