The shortage of rental housing complicates the recruitment of teachers in several remote regions of Quebec, where school service centres (CSS) must support their new recruits as best they can to help them find housing, sometimes going so far as to offer them an apartment themselves. For some, the impact on their finances is major.
On the Lower North Shore, the CSS du Littoral concluded a one-year private contract last month with a resident to rent him a residence located in Blanc-Sablon, where a teacher from outside the region has been living. The transaction amounts to $28,376.76, which is equivalent to a rent of approximately $2,365 per month.
The amount paid by the teacher who lives there, however, amounts to a few hundred dollars at most. The CSS covers the rest of the bill under regional disparity clauses included in teachers’ collective agreements and which apply in some remote communities, particularly on the Côte-Nord, in Nord-du-Québec and in Abitibi-Témiscamingue.
It is in this context that the CSS du Littoral has built up a real estate portfolio of a few dozen housing units over the years. However, it happens “from time to time” that the apartments under its management are not sufficient to house all of its employees from other regions of the province, explains the CSS’s director of human resources, Valérie Roux. “In these cases, we resort to rental requests” from “individuals,” she adds. Transactions that “inevitably have a financial impact” on the organization, which must also ensure the maintenance of these housing units, she notes.
However, providing subsidized housing for teachers is “an essential element” in their recruitment, notes Mr.me Roux. “Without that, it would be even more difficult to recruit them for our schools.”
“A huge impact”
This observation is shared by the Kativik School Board in Nunavik, which is nevertheless facing a housing shortage of incomparable magnitude. The organization, which manages more than 400 housing units for its employees, estimates that it would need more than 150 additional apartments to house them properly.
Since building a single housing unit costs at least $1.4 million in this region in the far north of Quebec, the organization estimates that it would need $210 million to build the housing units that are missing to house its employees. And that’s without taking into account the financial challenges the organization faces in maintaining its current housing stock in good condition.
“The housing shortage in Nunavik has a huge impact on the education sector. It affects recruitment, retention and equal working conditions for all our employees,” says Kativik School Board Director General Harriet Keleutak. Because, currently, teachers are forced to share their housing with other colleagues, “whom they don’t know,” while the School Board is forced to eliminate “certain services,” not due to a lack of manpower, but because of a lack of housing, the manager laments.
The latter therefore expects that the question of access to housing will be one of the key issues in the negotiations for the renewal of collective agreements for teachers in Northern Quebec, which are continuing with the Quebec government.
Supporting staff
The CSS de la Moyenne-Côte-Nord, for its part, does not have access to budgetary measures that allow it to finance the construction of housing to house teachers in certain remote regions of Quebec. The housing shortage is, however, a “major issue” there, which complicates the recruitment of staff in this sector, underlines its director general, Éric Faguy.
“It is understood that we can make every effort to hire rare gems to come and work in our schools. If we hire an employee who lives very far from here, and he arrives here and is not able to find housing, all the efforts we made to recruit him are in vain,” says Mr. Faguy. The CSS thus ensures that it “supports” its new employees as much as possible in order to “put them in contact with people in the community who may have apartments or houses to rent,” he continues.
The CSS de Charlevoix decided to take the bull by the horns after realizing that the housing shortage was hampering its staff recruitment efforts. For about two years, it has been renting “a few units to house newly hired staff members,” the organization said in an email.
“They can occupy accommodation for a short period when they arrive in the region, while they find a place of residence that suits them,” adds the CSS.
Comprehensive childcare services
In the Magdalen Islands, even though the shortage of rental housing is significant, “the shortage of daycare spaces is even more glaring,” says the general director of the CSS des Îles, Isabelle Gilbert, who points out that this situation is linked to the lack of educators that the region’s early childhood centres are able to hire. Teachers with children are thus deciding not to work in schools in the archipelago because they are unable to find a place to have their children looked after.
“Teachers and professional staff, who often could come from outside the region, well, they try to find places in daycare services and it’s very difficult,” also notes Nadine Desrosiers, general director of the CSS de l’Estuaire, at the entrance to the Côte-Nord. “We have a lot of daycare services that have closed in the territory in recent months, but we don’t have much power over that.”