Her nightmare started in the bath.
A young single mother looked up and felt her privacy evaporate when she noticed a tiny camera in the bathroom ceiling of the basement apartment she lived in with her toddler.
She said it looked like a screw, no bigger than a pinky nail.
“But I had a feeling it wasn’t a screw. I was shaking, I was in sheer, utter panic,” she said in an interview from her mother’s home in Digby County, N.S.
The woman, who CBC News cannot name because her identity and the identity of her son are protected by a court-ordered publication ban, said finding the camera turned her world upside down.
“I still feel sick to my stomach because of it,” she said. “It was the sickest feeling of my life. I don’t even know a word to describe how low and violated I felt at that time.”
She immediately called the RCMP, who she said pulled the camera from the wall, along with a long wire that they traced to the landlord’s home upstairs.
“He actually had a space in his bathroom that he intentionally put,” she said. “He cut out specific floorboards and put in a special vent to watch on this camera.”
Nova Scotia RCMP confirmed to CBC News that officers executed a search warrant at the address and seized “items associated to the offence of voyeurism”.
According to the Public Prosecution Service, the landlord was charged with voyeurism, and has been released on conditions before a May court appearance.
CBC News cannot identify the landlord to avoid indirectly identifying the woman who was his tenant.
Privacy experts say what this woman and her child were subjected to is extremely dangerous in today’s digital era.
“There’s a concern about, was it recorded? Where is that recording, where did it go? Was it shared with anybody? Was it posted online? Is this going to be a recurring intrusion into their life?” said David Fraser, a privacy lawyer with McInnes Cooper in Halifax.
Fraser said voyeurism is “an incredibly serious offence” on its own, but other charges could also be on the table as the RCMP continues to investigate, depending who was caught on camera and what was done with the footage.
“Somebody who observes a young person in this particular state voyeuristically is also creating child pornography,” he said. “There’s a charge of creation, there’s a charge of just simple possession … then there’s an additional offence related to the dissemination of it.”
The woman says many of her family members had been to her rental unit and used the bathroom since she moved in last November. She said she’s waiting for more information on the footage from police.
She said since she moved in, she felt unsafe in the apartment. The landlord made crude comments about her, texted her at all hours and entered her home without notice.
She said she called the police about him before finding the cameras, in an incident when he kicked her door in.
“I was always scared … I have anxiety as it is and me being alone, raising my little boy there, it was very hard,” she said.
The woman said she’s on income assistance and receives other benefits like the provincial rent supplement. But she struggled to find anywhere else to move in her rural area, and she was told she would be waiting years for a spot in government-owned public housing.
“I didn’t have anywhere else to go. There’s a super bad rental crisis as everyone knows, but I was looking ever since I moved into that place.”
Housing advocates say this is a sad story heard too often.
“This is a chronic problem I would say, in communities across Canada,” said Erica Phipps, executive director of the Canadian Partnership for Children’s Health and Environment.
“We’re going to continue to see these unfortunate stories with tenants trapped essentially in their current housing because they don’t want to risk the only housing they can find, the only housing they can afford.”
The woman and her son are now staying in a small house where her mother rents a room. She’s sleeping on the couch while she searches for a new home.
She says she wants to send a message to other tenants.
“Trust your gut instincts,” she said. “You should feel safe in something you’re paying to rent.”
