The City of Quebec can and must do more in terms of social housing, believes the Auditor General’s report, which deplores a lack of initiatives and incentives to accelerate and encourage construction.
In terms of housing, even if the City has had a vision and an action plan since 2020, it can still do more to promote the construction of social housing units, according to Daniel Rancourt.
The Auditor General recognizes that the City remains dependent on government funding to achieve its social housing ambitions. However, he specifies that Quebec would facilitate the achievement of its own objectives if the City acted upstream.
The City could “acquire new land and buildings” to accelerate social housing construction once funding from senior governments is secured, he writes. Daniel Rancourt also encourages the administration to “implement incentive measures to include social housing in private residential projects”. No such encouragement, he notes, was in place as of February 2023.
The City of Quebec had 17,814 social housing units on its territory in 2022. It wants to add 2,600 to its housing stock by 2025 to meet growing demand. In February 2023, 1677 were built, under construction or in planning, underlines the auditor general in his report, which represents 65% of the objective.
Daniel Rancourt also notes a certain mess in the processing of requests. In 2022, the Office municipal d’habitation de Québec (OMHQ) received nearly 2,500, an increase of 20% compared to 2021. To this task is added the renewal, each year, of approximately 12,000 leases.
The Auditor General observes that the treatment process does not always respect the internal allocation rules. Daniel Rancourt points out that the OMHQ “does not always ensure that it obtains the supporting documents requested to judge the admissibility and admissibility of a request. The analysis of a sample of 25 applications revealed that “proof of Canadian citizenship is almost never collected” and that proof of residence is requested about “one time out of two”.
The report also notes that the average waiting time for housing was one and a half years in 2022. Of the 1,856 housing and transfer requests that remain unanswered, about a quarter, or 443 requests, are older than two years.
Lack of leadership
The Auditor General also warns against a flawed emergency vehicle renewal process in the City of Quebec. In particular, it tackles several shortcomings in terms of leadership, particularly in the definition and attribution of the roles devolved to each service concerned.
The collaboration between the service responsible for the management of motorized equipment at the City suffers from several confusions with the police and fire protection services. In the absence of clear governance, both have developed internally the definition of their roles and responsibilities, writes Daniel Rancourt.
Result: “the process of acquiring, replacing and putting vehicles into service is based more on the practices that have been adopted over the years”. The City’s annual budget for vehicle acquisition is $28 million in 2023.
The renewal of the emergency fleet also suffered several failures. During the first quarter of the year, for example, almost half of the Quebec police patrol vehicles had exceeded their useful life, established at six years.
The current system also does not make it possible to assess the time that elapses at each stage of the renewal. It is therefore impossible to calculate the time spent between the date of receipt of the vehicle and the date of its official entry into service. In this context, no framework sets the optimal deadlines for each stage of the vehicle acquisition process.
A vision without an action plan
The 2015-2025 Tree Vision formulates the objective of increasing the urban canopy index to 35%. However, denounces the Auditor General, it took until 2022 for the City of Quebec to develop an action plan to achieve its goal. This also has shortcomings, according to Daniel Rancourt.
“It is more of a roadmap,” he wrote in his report. The various actions are not linked to the objectives of the Tree Vision 2015-2025 nor accompanied by indicators and targets. It is therefore not possible to know whether the actions implemented will enable the objectives to be achieved. »
The capital’s canopy index had retreated halfway through its 10-year vision, from 32% in 2015 to 31% in 2020, a decrease attributed to increased accuracy of satellite imagery over this period.
Since 2022, the City of Quebec has been aiming to plant 130,000 trees by 2029, especially in the 13 neighborhoods that the tramway will cross and in the most treeless central sectors.
The City takes note
The mayor of the City of Quebec, Bruno Marchand, assures that the City has already responded to several problems identified by the auditor general. The elected official indicates that Quebec is “on the right track to reach its target” of canopy, while recalling that the contribution of the private sector, holder of 75% of the spaces, remains essential to claim victory.
The capital is already doing “all the way” to speed up the construction of social housing, underlines the mayor. “We are dependent on the Quebec government,” he recalls, adding that the City has already exhausted all the credits granted.
The director general of the City of Quebec, Luc Monty, confirms that the shortcomings pointed out in the report in terms of the acquisition of emergency vehicles are already known and in the process of being corrected.
“We had seen the situation slip, especially at the end of the pandemic. As of the last budget, we started to plan acquisitions earlier. We have therefore planned to purchase 120 patrol vehicles by 2026.”