It is an “awareness campaign” like the government of Quebec produces regularly, without fanfare. However, this one has a particular texture. On the last day of January, six months before moving day, the office of the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing and the Société d’habitation du Québec (SHQ) addressed themselves in these terms to all tenants of the province: “If you decide to move, find your new home without delay! »
The campaign, it was specified, constitutes the “first stage of an action plan” to come to support households in their relocation for the 1er July. This isn’t just a call to help yourself, so not at all, don’t worry: we have plans to help you too. But for now, if you have “decided” to leave your home at the end of your lease, do your research now. Have you thought of strategies to attract potential landlords? Do you know how to promote yourself? we ask without laughing on the Web page created to support tenants.
Obviously, we wouldn’t want to spit in the soup. There is, in itself, no harm in offering tips and tricks to tenants looking for a home. Still, we remain perplexed by everything that is not said about the context in which this “encouragement” to act quickly takes place.
First, there is the idea that tenants who are badly caught at 1er July, of which there have been hundreds in recent years, are mainly people who have “decided” to end their tenancy, but have started looking for a new home so late that they have found themselves water in summer. It happens, no doubt, sometimes, but after all, it is not the good story that we are told. Tenant households which, as the 1er July, have cold sweats are above all those who have been forced to relocate. According to an eviction, a repossession of housing, an excessive rent increase that we do not feel strong enough to challenge.
At the beginning of February, there is indeed an emergency: we must immediately concern ourselves with the fate of tenants looking for new housing. Except that by insisting on individual care, without naming the obstacles that have been left standing in the way of tenants without deigning to act, the “awareness” initiative takes on a perverse air. We still deny the constant and certain deterioration of the accessibility of the rental market, while transferring the burden of the housing crisis onto the shoulders of those who suffer from it.
Basically, it is a reflection of the spirit that presided over the management of the housing issue by the CAQ government throughout the last electoral cycle. If things are going badly for the tenants, it’s in the order of things and it’s up to you!
A few months before the next election, in fact, Minister Andrée Laforest presented her plan last week to accelerate the creation of new affordable housing throughout Quebec — a much-awaited initiative, especially since the November budget update, where funding for new social housing had been shelved, on the pretext that a new program would be rolled out soon.
This is how the Quebec Affordable Housing Program (PHAQ), presented as a “new housing business model”, plans to deploy $200 million for the construction of new so-called affordable rental housing, including for low-income people. The program is presented as innovative and designed to respond more effectively and quickly to the housing needs of tenants, including the most vulnerable.
Organizations that fight for access to housing and support tenants immediately saw that, beneath a veneer of generosity and action, hides a real decline in the place given to social and community housing. The PHAQ, by proposing to “mobilize all the partners” capable of supporting the creation of affordable housing, puts cooperative and community projects in competition with private investors, who, it seems, have been seen fit to make eligible for the program. “Mobilizing all the partners”, we understand, amounts to opening the public coffers a little more to promoters who act above all with a view to profit, naively saying to themselves that they too can, and subject to a few criteria , participate in the resolution of the housing crisis.
In addition, the notion of affordable rent is set in the PHAQ based on the median rent established by the SHQ for each region. However, this has the effect of establishing as a new affordability standard the prices observed in a market already considered unaffordable. By a curious reversal of things, we perpetuate the main symptom of the crisis that we claim to be combating.
Sorry, sorry, I forgot: there isn’t a crisis — there are only investors who need a boost, and disorganized tenants who have waited too long before setting up looking for new accommodation for 1er July.