A Pickering man says he was left scrambling to find a place to live after being evicted during the COVID-19 pandemic.

George McKay recently found a room to rent after searching for days.

“If I didn’t luck out and find this place here, there’s only so much money I have, paying for a hotel would have ran out, I probably would have ended up in a shelter,” said McKay.

McKay says he was forced to live at a motel for a couple of weeks, paying $70 a night.

He said he was evicted earlier this month by the landlords of the south Pickering home where he had been living for six months.

“They didn’t live there, they lived in a separate address but ran a business out of the place so her husband had emergency heart surgery and she kind of freaked out thinking I was going to bring COVID-19 into the house,” said McKay.

McKay says he had paid his rent for April.

“It was overwhelming, I didn’t know where I was going to go. How I was going to get there with everything shut down trying to find a place with 24 hours notice was impossible. I wasn’t able too,” said McKay.

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“You can’t just kick people out, especially right now,” said Ian Cumming, Pickering Ward Two councillor.

He was contacted by a friend of the 33-year-old the night McKay was evicted.

“It’s a safety issue. We don’t have someone who wasn’t paying his rent, we don’t have someone who was misbehaving, we’ve got a landlord that decided they wanted him out and the rationale and the reasons behind that, I don’t know,” said Cumming.

Global News went to the residence, looking for answers as to why McKay was evicted.

A woman McKay identifies as his former landlord answered the door and said: “I don’t have any comment. I mean it kind of sucks, you know, when there’s a roommate that has issues so I can’t help it.”

She wouldn’t delve further into the issue.

McKay says he was the only one that lived there.

While he’s moved on, he’s learned a valuable lesson and won’t be paying his rent in cash.

“Make sure there’s a paper trail,” said McKay.

McKay was told by the landlords that he would be getting a rent rebate for part of April. He says he has yet to receive that.

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