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How to eSign a document: eSignature legitimacy for Commercial Lease Agreement in Canada

Hello everyone welcome to our webinar. Today, we're going to be having a great conversation around understanding your lease and The Residential Tenancies Act. So there's a lot of words in that title but don't be frightened. We are going to kind of break down everything for you today and hopefully you'll walk away with some helpful tips for when you come here as a student and you're renting a space and you have a really good idea of what your lease is and how to read the Residential Tenancies Act and how to know what your rights are so that's the whole point of today's webinar. My name is Giordano Modesto. I'm a Community Legal Worker from Waterloo Region Community Legal Services. Not a Lawyer not a Paralegal not a Social Worker or so just a guy who knows what he's talking about but I work with Lawyers and Paralegals and be supervised everything I do that's why I can do what I do. And course my name is Janelle Vermeer. I work at Conestoga College at the International Office. I work as a Transition Coordinator there and I really look forward to meeting you all because it's my job to help you in regards to anything transition and essentially just to help you get set up on the right foot here as a student and in Canada. So the first thing we'll we need to get out of the way which is never a fun thing right essentially it's what Giordano said at the beginning is that we know we're not lawyers this isn't legal advice but we just kind of are presenting basic legal information to you and if you have any questions about this you can contact us but specific advice has to come from a legal professional and more information about that will be presented at the end of our webinar. So the first thing we're talking about today is your lease and understanding what really is a lease so essentially it's a legal agreement between you and a landlord when you rent home, an apartment, a room in a house or any form of residence. Your lease will contain matters know such as your name and contact information it's just sort of any identification information about you like that. How long the lease is? rent details so how much essentially when you are required to pay the rent in the month, how the payment is made? the date signatures so on and so forth. You may have also heard that a lease is called different things by different people sometimes, a rental agreement or a tenancy agreement those are different things you can hear. I think as of 2018, there was a standard form of lease that was instituted by the Government of Ontario. So landlords are required to use this standard form of lease it's actually very easy to find. If you go to Google and you type in Ontario standard form of least it actually is one of the first documents that pop right up and on this webinar here there is a website and there's a guide to this lease that you can find and it's actually available in multiple different languages including Hindi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Spanish, Chinese etc. So you can definitely look at that guide on your own time and take a look in your native tongue as well if you want to read it in that so you can get a really good understanding of what the standard form of lease entails. So we'll chat about why this lease document this tenancy agreement stuff that we're chatting about is really that important and it is hey yes we've encountered situations where there have been issues with not having a lease and or having a lease that wasn't you know signed or a lease that wasn't clear and it just really is important to have something in writing when coming into a legal contract between two people. So sometimes when a student is rushing to find a unit you know it might be something that they don't think about as needing the lease especially if the landlord doesn't say that they need it but it really is important to have that to protect you as well as to protect the landlord as well. So I think that what's really important when talking to a landlord about a lease let's say you feel the landlord feels comfortable with you let's say you're from the same country of origin and they say hey you know let's just help each other out I'll give you this rent and you can move in tomorrow that sounds great and a wonderful deal but really at the end of the day there might be issues down the road so here's an example of something you might want to say to the landlord in that situation so you would just express- Hi I'm really new to the country and I just want to make sure that I'm doing everything correctly. I've learned from Conestoga that a lease is important so hopefully you don't mind providing something in writing for me. There's a standard form of lease that you are to use online so it'll be really easy for you to print and we can go through it together and I feel like that would come across not as rude especially when you're just saying I'm new I just want to do things right and that will help them get on the right track too is being a landlord and I think that all parties would appreciate that. One other thing you want to do is to read the lease very carefully. It's important to know what you're signing, it's important to know what you're getting into so don't agree to anything that you don't understand. I know that it might be difficult there's gonna be so many new things you learn about being a student in Canada and some of which you might not understand right away which is understandable on our end right so please if you're having trouble understanding the lease take time to learn about it there's a lot of really helpful resources that you can find out there that we can provide for you. You can contact the legal assistance that's available to you here at Conestoga or you can contact the International Office as well. It's just important to know exactly what you're agreeing to so feel free to contact us if there's something that's confusing for you.