Last week, we saw yet another debate take place on immigration in Quebec and Canada. The discussions are rather serene and calm, at least in the traditional media. In social media? We find the best and the worst, as usual.
This time, the debate focuses on the following question: is immigration a little, a lot or passionately responsible for the housing crisis plaguing Quebec and, it seems, other Canadian provinces? THE Duty recently echoed this questioning through the writing of Marie-Andrée Chouinard. The editorialist calls on leaders to carry out “an intelligent and sensitive rebalancing between the needs of economic migration and our international commitments to the world’s vulnerable populations”. That is well said.
But confusion continues to reign. Yes, Quebec received 65,000 asylum seekers in 2023, which constitutes 46% of the Canadian total. Ontario comes close with 63,400 people, 44% of the Canadian total. In other words, in both cases, these provinces welcome a disproportionate number of asylum seekers compared to their weight in the Canadian population (22% for Quebec). Quebec’s requests to the federal government are therefore justified, including better distribution of the reception of refugees and defraying the costs incurred by our government.
But do these refugees represent an immense burden in the housing crisis we are experiencing in Quebec? When you look closely, very little! Of course, the shelters are overflowing, but they were already overflowing in winter 2021, in winter 2022, in winter 2023… without the Quebec government being very upset. Because refugees are now resorting to these underfunded organizations, the Quebec state speaks to us of a “tipping point”.
Yes, this situation is worrying and calls for solutions, both federal and provincial. But the housing crisis has roots other than immigration, whether it is caused by asylum seekers, immigrants chosen by Quebec on a permanent basis or temporary workers.
The leader of the Parti Québécois, for his part, plans to reduce the threshold for immigration chosen by Quebec when these are largely people already settled here to whom it would suffice to grant permanent residence for them to they enjoy the same rights as all Quebecers. This reduction would have no relevance. He also questions the programs which bring in year after year around 500,000 temporary workers, including tens of thousands of foreign students. This is a real question!
Half a million additional people to be housed while a housing crisis has been plaguing us for decades and has worsened in recent times; this is a problem facing most regions of Quebec. Young people are looking for their first home, families are looking for a house at a reasonable price, seniors, often single women, desperately want to stay in their home, impoverished people no longer have the means to pay for even housing. small and unsanitary.
If we want to overcome the housing crisis, let’s discuss housing starts, construction labor, government assistance for various categories of affordable housing for everyone. Let us especially address the question of the right to housing.
A lasting crisis
We have to go back in time to understand the origin and scale of the current crisis.
In the early 1990s, the federal government completely withdrew from funding new social housing. If it had continued to finance the same number of units in Quebec as at the end of the 1980s, today we would have at least 80,000 additional social housing units (FRAPRU, Evolution of federal interventions in housing , 2021).
Since 1er January 1994, governments completely stopped investing in the construction of new HLMs while, year after year, 40,000 households are on a waiting list.
Since the federal withdrawal, successive governments in Quebec have been dragging their feet when it comes to investing in social housing. The Legault government is particularly slow to deliver the 16,000 housing units that it promised in 2018 based on announcements that had been made by previous governments. Barely a third has been completed to date.
The National Housing Strategy launched with great fanfare by the Trudeau government in 2017 is a fiasco. In September 2023, barely 10% of housing built with this Strategy was built in Quebec. And these accommodations are not necessarily affordable for the majority of people.
And did you know that at the moment in Quebec, more than 20,000 rental accommodations are rented on Airbnb alone?
Whether it is the government of Quebec or that of Ottawa, access to truly affordable housing is not really recognized as a fundamental right for all citizens. Worse still, few politicians dare to confront the speculators who, since the 2000s, have increasingly imposed themselves on the real estate market in Quebec. This is a real problem.
The chief economist of the National Bank wrote last week: “Under these conditions [demande de logements bien plus grande que l’offre]people have no choice but to increase the price of a decreasing stock of rental housing” (Gérald Fillion on the Radio-Canada website on November 23, 2024).
Fascinating: real estate developers feel authorized to insanely increase the price of rental housing… because there is a shortage of rental housing! This shows the extent to which we have lost sight of the fact that housing is a right and that we must seriously control the famous market forces!
Curious: the vacancy rate on the island of Montreal is 2.3%. This is more than in the majority of other urban centers in Quebec. Yet it is in Montreal that the greatest number of immigrants land! The problem is therefore not simply the lack of housing but its unaffordability.
I worry about the nouveau riche, and the corporations who have suddenly discovered a jackpot: rental housing. They have no respect for their tenants, even when these people are elderly. You just have to look at what is happening in private seniors’ residences (RPA) which are increasingly being transformed into housing that generates more income for their owners! How many seniors — and so many others — suffer dramatic evictions because many predators have only one goal: to make more and more money. What is the Legault government waiting for to bring order to this mess? Will he have the courage to bring into line the individuals and corporations who are downright harmful, throughout Quebec, to a healthy and effective policy, especially in terms of housing?
Debates on immigration can and must take place. But let’s go on factual, fair, sound bases. And above all, let us remember that the housing crisis has its origins in weak or downright harmful policies that it is high time to rectify!