Many McGill University students may have arrived in Montreal for their first week of classes only to find they had more roommates than expected. Bedbug infestations have long been a problem for Montreal due to high poverty rates and many impermanent residents such as students, according to the Toronto Star.
McGill students aren’t the only ones fighting to get rid of bedbugs. Every Ontario college and university has experienced the pests, said Laura Storey, director of housing and residence life services at Carleton University.
Eric Ber, a representative of Go Pest Control’s Ottawa location, said he’s no stranger to receiving calls from landlords on behalf of student residents with bedbug problems.
Often, he said, these calls are concentrated in the months of May and September, when students are moving within the city and find bedbugs in their new residence.
Around this time, Ber said students usually inform their landlords, who arrange for the extermination. But the cost of getting rid of bedbugs can be off-putting to some students.
“Usually when students call and they hear the prices for bedbugs, they get scared of the prices,” Ber said.
Despite tenants being legally protected in Ontario from eviction for reporting bedbugs, infestations can grow worse if low-income tenants, such as students, fear being stuck with an extermination bill they can’t afford and don’t seek help.
According to the Residential Tenancies Act of Ontario, the landlord is responsible for maintaining their rental units to be fit for habitation and comply with health standards—which includes being free of pests.
The infestations aren’t exclusive to off-campus students. Out of about 3,500 beds in residence, Carleton had about five cases of bedbugs last year, according to Storey.
“We have a very well-documented procedure on how to deal with it,” Storey said, which includes bringing in a bedbug-sniffing dog at the end of each year to make sure bedbugs aren’t being passed on to the next resident.
Daniel Giacca, a fourth-year commerce student at Carleton, said he suffered an especially persistent case of bedbugs in his first year while living in Glengarry House.
Giacca said he first noticed bites on his body a few days after a room on his floor had been treated for bedbugs. After reporting the bedbugs to housing services, Giacca’s room was also treated for the pests, he said.
“But two or three weeks later, I started waking up with bites all over me again,” Giacca said.
The room was treated again, but a short time later, the bites started reappearing, prompting the contracted exterminator to rip up the baseboards and carpets of the room to find hiding bedbugs. Giacca said he asked to be moved to another room.
According to Storey, cases at Carleton like Giacca’s are rare. She said residence rooms are ordinarily treated without moving the students, including bagging the room, spraying once, then again a few weeks later.
Cities with large universities are especially prone to bedbug outbreaks due to students moving annually and frequently visiting each other’s homes and beds.
Carly Wolff, spokesperson for Ottawa Public Health, said the city received 100 calls about infestations in 2015.
Brent Brownlee, director of ancillary services at Algonquin College, said that the college has “had no significant case of bedbugs,” and that the school has recently replaced every bed and bed frame in residence buildings.
Bedbugs can also spread through textbooks and other course materials being shared or borrowed from campus libraries, according to the Hamilton Public Library, which budgeted $200,000 to exterminate bedbugs found in library materials in 2013.
According to Wolff, bedbugs can lead to “anxiety and a feeling of shame,” in addition to allergic reactions. However, she noted, bedbugs are not the result of dirty housekeeping or socio economic status.
