The Minister responsible for Housing, France-Élaine Duranceau, has drawn the wrath of housing committees for having advised tenants to become owners.
In fact, the bill she tabled aims to make it easier for a landlord to refuse an assignment of a lease. To the detractors of the idea, the Minister replies that the tenant who wants to manage his accommodation, “he must invest in real estate and take the risks that go with it”.
The Marie-Antoinette of real estate excuses her clumsy remarks on the pretext that she was “in a legal and economic description of things”. The statement, inaccurate, is revealing.
For what would be the “legal description” of things? The Civil Code is clear: the tenant has the right to remain in the premises; he is entitled to the renewal of the lease; he has the right to refuse a rent increase. And the tenant has, for the moment, the power to transfer his right, his lease, to a new tenant.
The Minister therefore does not speak in the name of the law; rather, it seeks to modify a provision without reflecting on its deeper meaning.
Real estate property is not a property like any other: Quebec law recognizes that it is accompanied by rights relating to those who benefit from its use, since housing is an essential need that cannot be solely subject to the forces obscure market forces, creating inequalities.
It is here that the economic “description” to which the Minister refers is essential: capital creates capital. The purchase of real estate creates capital gain, accompanied by responsibilities, of course, but in a context where the risk is minimal, more linked to anecdotal situations of bad tenants than to the uncertainty of a capital gain.
The blinders of the minister-real estate agent do not allow him to integrate real estate management into the overall framework of social inequalities.
Protection of rents is precarious, and the balance of power is almost always on the side of the landlord, holder of financial and informational resources.
The tenant who does not know his rights and who moves into a dwelling whose history he does not know must often rely on the good faith of the landlord. Unless you have benefited from an assignment of lease.
The assignment is therefore only a means to achieve an objective poorly defended in the Civil Code, that of protecting the price of rents from drastic increases. Other means could make it possible to achieve this objective, such as strengthening the obligation for the landlord to include in the lease the last rent paid and making it easier to contest an increase, or even to set up a national register .
Otherwise, the sight functions as a notch mechanism preventing rollback; enough of a passive tenant, unaware of his rights or indifferent for a landlord to be able to raise the rent as he sees fit, without a future tenant being able to recover the lost balance.
The Minister does not describe the facts; she offers a reading. And this reading suggests that she does not believe in the defense of the right to housing.