Can a ruined shed be a heritage building?

When he requested a permit to demolish the old shed that was threatening to collapse in his backyard last spring, Damien Stryckman, a resident of Plateau-Mont-Royal, had no idea that his application would have to be submitted to the ministry. of Culture and Communications (MCC), in order to ensure that the building had no heritage value.

“It was nothing other than a fire nest,” explained the citizen, a few months after the demolition. There was nothing left to salvage. The garage door no longer opened, the rusty sheet metal structure threatened to fall, even the concrete slab could not be repaired. No one could have found anything heritage in there. »

If the request had to go through the MCC, it was because municipal documents showed that the shed had been built before 1940.

Since April 2021, before authorizing the demolition of any building dating from before 1940, municipalities must inform the MCC, whether it is a ruined shed, an ancestral house or a ‘a residential building. Quebec has three months to give its opinion.

Inventories

This obligation was imposed when the government asked municipalities to carry out an inventory to determine which buildings, among those built before 1940, have heritage value. Cities have until 1^er April 2026 to carry out this inventory.

Until the inventory is completed, demolition requests must be submitted to the MCC.

But these directives are causing discontent in many cities, underlines the president of the Union of Municipalities of Quebec (UMQ), Martin Damphousse, also mayor of Varennes, in Montérégie.

Firstly because the three-month delay in receiving a response from the MCC delays the issuance of demolition permits, which sometimes precedes the issuance of construction permits for new housing. And then, because all the cities must carry out their inventory at the same time, by soliciting heritage experts, of whom there are not enough in Quebec to meet the demand.

“We now have the obligation to send our demolition requests to the Ministry and they have 90 days to respond. This delay displeases owners and cities, says Mr. Damphousse. When we talk about housing, we often associate permit issuance deadlines with cities. But in this case, it is not a problem of city delays. We add three additional months, which delays construction projects of all types. »

Avoid demolitions?

The president of the UMQ insists that it is important to protect built heritage.

“No one in the municipal world wants to demolish a heritage building without valid reason. But when it is a house from before 1940 and it is obvious that the heritage value is very low, it would be easy and simple to grant demolition quickly, but we cannot do that,” explains he.

Has the deadline imposed by the MCC made it possible to avoid the demolition of heritage buildings until now?

When we ask the question, the MCC media relations team does not answer directly, but explains that the Ministry “supports municipalities in carrying out analyses, including characterization studies, inventories and one-off studies. This is particularly the case with the City of Gatineau, which will carry out a study on matchstick houses, an architectural type whose transitional layout has highlighted the fragility.”

We call match houses small wooden constructions built in the old town of Hull, where many workers working at the EB Eddy match factory lived at the end of the 19th century.^e century.

Recently, a demolition request for a house of this type sparked controversy. The owner, who wants to build a 159-unit building on this land, went to court and won his case in Superior Court two weeks ago. The City of Gatineau announced that it would appeal the judgment.

The MCC also highlights the intervention of Minister Mathieu Lacombe in the case of Charles Daudelin’s house-workshop, in Kirkland, a 1951 building whose demolition was prohibited, although the owners wanted to raze it.

Lack of expertise

The inventory that cities must make will allow them to determine the heritage value of buildings on their territory and to make the necessary decisions in the event of a request for demolition. But some municipalities are struggling to achieve this.

The UMQ recently asked the Quebec government to renew its municipal support program for real estate assets, and to allocate 70 million per year. This program has not been renewed since 2022.

The decision to ask municipalities for an inventory of their heritage buildings is a “step in the right direction” to ensure their protection, “but we still need to give them the means,” observes heritage expert Lucie K. Morisset , professor at UQAM.

M^me Morisset confirms that there are not enough experts with adequate training to carry out all the inventories for cities.

“We need specialists capable of evaluating construction techniques, of interpreting them, to be able to explain to owners why their building has heritage value,” she emphasizes.

According to the professor, a training program should have been created at the same time, at college or university, to train “heritage guardians”.

87,000 buildings to be assessed in Montreal

The City of Montreal has 87,000 buildings built before 1940 which will have to be evaluated to determine which ones have heritage value.

“It’s a major operation that we are embarking on,” recognizes Ericka Alneus, responsible for heritage on the executive committee.

The scale of the task is such that it is difficult to find experts to carry it out. A few months ago, the municipal council had to cancel a contract that had been awarded to a firm of experts to carry out a heritage inventory in the borough of Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie, because the specialists realized that they would not be able to meet the deadline.

Following this failure, the City of Montreal decided to create an internal team of eight people thanks to financial assistance of 10 million from the Ministry of Culture and Communications. This team will work exclusively on the inventory of heritage buildings, with the help of external experts.

We want to make sure we have the right data to know what we are talking about, underlines M^me Alneus. This includes modest heritage, so that we can support the boroughs in their protection efforts.

If you live in a building that has heritage value, consequences are to be expected.

Already, in certain cases or certain sectors, owners cannot do everything they want with their house, for example replacing windows or balconies, notes the expert. “But to maintain period doors and windows, it’s difficult to find workers to do the restoration,” he says.

According to Mr. Durand, it is above all “in support of maintenance that we can best protect heritage buildings”.