Access to property is one of the most important symbols of North American societies. The single-family home is always much more than a house, and certainly more than a “wool sock” for retirement. It has become in our post-war societies a form of ritual of passage to adulthood. With a house, you are someone, you have passed a stage in life.
This description is of course part of the social, political and economic myth. In fact, approximately 40% of Quebecers are tenants. Many people will be renters all their lives, and that’s completely normal. Except that in our North Americanity, we continue – especially, let’s say, from the suburbs – to perceive the status of tenant as a temporary condition for young people, or as a lack.
Even when we talk about the difficulties of access to property of my generation and the one that follows, we talk about it as an “unattainable dream”, or even the breaking of a “social contract”. The vocabulary used says a lot about the symbolic force behind the property, a force that pushes many households into dangerous debt, given the rise in prices in recent years. Personal finances are tight, but at least we own it.
And when you have always been a homeowner, or when you have “worked hard” to buy your home, it can be tempting to ignore the economic realities of our society to better convince yourself that the 40% of Quebec tenants have no only to roll up their sleeves to buy them too. This is how we can, politically, present a housing law reform project that undermines the only lever available to tenants to limit the meteoric rise in rents: the assignment of the lease. Somewhere, muted, you can hear part of the propertied class saying to themselves: if the tenants are not happy, they just have to stop being happy.
Even if we know that access to property is increasingly difficult, North American social myths are not dying so quickly. Under capitalism, the social judgment that weighs on tenants is well underway, and continues to be internalized in the form of shame or even a feeling of failure by many tenants themselves. It took the value of real estate in major Canadian cities to experience an unprecedented explosion for these stubborn myths about the “middle class” to begin little by little to be nuanced, even to recede somewhat.
With Bill 31, the Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ) calculates that this mentality is still largely established among its electorate. Because where are most of the tenants in Quebec concentrated? In Montreal, where we make up two-thirds of the population. In the center of Quebec City. And in cities where there is a large student population, such as Sherbrooke. Montreal, downtown Quebec and Sherbrooke are among the few places in Quebec where people do not vote for the CAQ.
In context, this is no coincidence. In our good old electoral system that is not proportional at all, Prime Minister François Legault and his Minister of Housing, France-Élaine Duranceau, could alienate practically all of the 40% of tenants in Quebec and be re-elected with a majority as strong.
It has often been said in recent weeks that the Council of Ministers seems out of touch with the realities of people who are struggling to find where to stay while the moving season is in full swing. And we are right. That said, for Minister Duranceau to amend her bill, she would have to find herself disconnected from her main electorate. This is why the tone of the debates at the start of Parliament will indirectly test the hold that the myths of property still have on our society today — particularly outside the major urban centres.
The current political debate is somehow rekindling the social divide that had been revealed by the containment measures at the heart of the COVID-19 pandemic. While in Montreal, we strove to repeat that a curfew is difficult to live in a cramped apartment, the ministers of the CAQ published images of their daily life in their huge mansions. But those who have allowed the government to remain popular in all this turmoil are not Quebecers as wealthy as ministers, but ordinary people outside the major centers, who do not lack space at home and do not necessarily identify with the realities of the city.
Similarly, between landlords of multiple rental properties seeking to assert their “right” to choose who they want to rent to, on the one hand, and tenants struggling to find affordable housing for their families, on the other, there is the in-between. There are bungalows all over Quebec, owners, of course, but certainly not landlords – and mostly residents of Caquist ridings. It is from them that the housing rights movement should tilt class solidarity in order to achieve political gain. And to do this, we must talk concretely about what is wrong with the proposed reform, of course. But also to evolve imaginations.