Out of breath, community organizations working in the field of housing, but also homelessness and mental health, are asking Quebec to wake up, put partisanship aside and act urgently to tackle the housing crisis.
Saying they are overwhelmed by the worsening situation and the explosion of their clientele, they are demanding an immediate increase in emergency aid for the thousands of households who will find themselves on the streets from 1er July. They are also demanding from the Legault government the creation of a transpartisan and interministerial committee to work on lasting solutions ahead of the crisis.
“What more does the government need to do to take concrete action?” asks Roseline Hébert-Morin, from the Plateau-Mont-Royal Housing Committee, who reports a 124% increase in service requests over the past five years in her organization.
“It’s as if we were facing a forest fire and we had small boilers of water to put it out,” adds Anne-Marie Boucher, from the Regroupement des resources alternatives en santé Mental du Québec, alongside him. .
Crisis in all regions
It is therefore a real cry from the heart that a common front of organizations launched, Thursday in Montreal, to express the dismay and exhaustion of their staff suffering from what they describe as “indignation fatigue » faced with the explosion of clienteles in precarious situations, everywhere across the province, including in rural areas.
Edith Lambert, from the Oasis de Lotbinière, confirms. “In the last year, we ourselves were surprised to see how much need there was in our community and how many people found themselves in precarious situations,” she explains, giving the example of a man thrown out of the restrooms of a gas station where he was sleeping or a woman who lost custody of her baby because she was unable to provide him with decent housing.
The data from Cédric Dussault, from the Regroupement des comités logement et associations de locataires du Québec, is enough to make you shudder. From 2020 to 2024, rent increases reached 27% in Montreal, 33% in Quebec City, 44% in Sherbrooke, 50% in Trois-Rivières, 49% in Rimouski and 37% in Saguenay compared to an inflation of 17% over the same period.
“The situation has deteriorated so quickly that, in the last four or five years, we have seen phenomena appear that we did not see before. There are more and more people who have full-time jobs and who are on the street, who sleep in their cars and this is the case everywhere in Quebec,” says Mr. Dussault.
According to Statistics Canada, 3% of Canadian households were evicted from their homes in the last 12 months, “which allows us to estimate that approximately 45,000 Quebec households were evicted in the last year,” he emphasizes.
A little empathy?
Community organizations, which represent the community social safety net under the public social safety net, accuse the government and the entire public sector of shirking their responsibilities and dumping their overflow into their backyard when “it is not up to the community to manage the worsening of social inequalities,” argues Anne-Marie Boucher. “If this social safety net collapses, there will not be much left to maintain humanity in our societies,” she warns.
“It is expected that at some point, [les élus] realize that if their peers end up on the streets by the ton, perhaps that could awaken something like empathy,” says Roseline Hébert-Morin.
Short and long term solutions
Community groups are therefore asking Quebec, in the short term, to tackle the explosion of costs and move forward with the rent control they have been demanding for years and to put an end to abusive evictions. . “Eviction is now the main cause of homelessness in Quebec,” says Cédric Dussault, who criticizes the three levels of government for their complacency in the face of these too often fraudulent practices.
Denouncing the fact that Quebec is at the back of the pack in terms of non-market housing in Canada, a country which itself is at the back of the pack compared to countries with comparable economies, the organizations reiterate that it is urgent, to in the long term, to build social housing sheltered from market fluctuations.
“Affordable” housing makes the problem worse
Mr. Dussault believes that public authorities continue to take the wrong path by favoring affordable housing. “It is indecent that all levels of government have completely abandoned lower-income renter households by almost completely replacing the financing of social housing with so-called affordable housing which, because it is subject to an overheated market, is unaffordable for a large part of the tenant population. »
Céline Duclap, from the organization Pas de la rue, which works with people aged 55 and over who are homeless or in precarious situations, argues that social assistance benefits “no longer allow you to find housing today. A simple room in a rooming house costs $700. With $800 in social assistance, there is nothing left to live on afterwards.”
Unsurprisingly, she says, “we’ve seen our numbers increase and explode in recent months. This is the first time we haven’t had a break after the holidays. Teams are exhausted and organizations are at the end of what they can offer. Some organizations are in agony, in fact.”