This year, the Minister of Housing, Andrée Laforest, decided to take action earlier to unveil her action plan for the 1er July. A slightly more generous plan than last year, but based essentially on the same recipe.
According to our information, the government is preparing to release more than $77 million to deal with the big Quebec moving party. This amount will be used, for the most part, to finance the addition of emergency rent supplements (Emergency Rent Supplement Program) in all municipalities in Quebec.
The plan, which is to be unveiled Thursday afternoon, also grants 2 million to new housing search assistance services. These services, already provided by certain municipal housing offices, would meet a repeated demand from the community.
Finally, the government is extending the hours of the staff of the Société d’habitation du Québec (SHQ) so that they can answer the telephone 7 days a week at the height of the crisis, until July 18. Last year, the SHQ’s time slots were only extended until July 4.
At the time, the Minister waited until June 11 before revealing her game plan for the 1er July. She was then criticized for not recognizing the very existence of the housing crisis, which she ended up doing very recently.
Last year’s plan was just over $60 million, mostly for emergency grants and grants to municipalities.
A tense situation
However, access to affordable housing has deteriorated greatly in one year in Quebec. The vacancy rate fell from 2.7% to 2.5% in Quebec; from 1.3% to 0.9% in Sherbrooke; from 1.6% to 1% in Gatineau; from 2.8% to 1.7% in Saguenay; and from 1.3% to 0.9% in Trois-Rivières, according to the latest report from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), presented in February and based on data from October 2020 to October 2021.
In Montreal, the market softened slightly during the same period (the vacancy rate fell from 2.7% to 3%). But conversely, the situation has worsened in small towns since the start of the pandemic, a less documented phenomenon since CMHC does not produce annual statistics for towns with fewer than 50,000 inhabitants.
This is the case of Rimouski, where the shortage of affordable apartments places people in situations of great vulnerability, as reported The duty in March. “We are in a situation where there is no accommodation. What’s left? 0.1% of dwellings. It’s easy to understand that what’s left are probably dilapidated housing or, at the other end of the spectrum, housing that is probably at exorbitant prices,” said the director of the street work organization En tout CAS, Luc Jobin, in an interview granted to the To have to earlier this week.
However, the municipalities are better prepared this year, several of them having set up crisis units in anticipation of the 1er July.
In Quebec, for example, the Municipal Housing Office (OMHQ) concedes that it faces more needs than before, but ensures that the situation is under control. “We still have people who are in search, but the indicators are not red”, explained to the To have to its Director of Organizational Development, Sébastien Olivier.
Unlike other municipalities, Quebec City already has a housing search assistance service, created twelve years ago. At least 331 people have used it since January, which is much higher than last year (394 requests over the whole year). But Mr. Olivier believes that the OMHQ will be able to find them all an apartment and that no one will end up on the street on 1er July.
lightning bill
Remember that Minister Andrée Laforest has also committed to table a bill by the end of the parliamentary session to prevent certain abuses in housing. The new piece of legislation aims to limit abusive rent increases caused by clause F, to counter the sale of non-profit housing to third parties, to grant the right of first refusal to all municipalities and to better protect senior tenants.
Last week, the mayors of major cities told the minister that housing was their number one priority during the assizes annual of the Union of Municipalities of Quebec.
In her speech, Andrée Laforest said that, according to what she heard from the municipal housing offices, we were going to “have a 1er intense July”, but “that everything was under control”.