For tenants, the new CAQ housing law is a fool’s bargain. An idiot trap. A simpleton trap. Choose your synonym.
France-Élaine Duranceau, Minister responsible for Housing, however, swears that it simply restores a new “balance” between the rights of owners and tenants. However, nothing is less true.
Even the tightening of conditions surrounding evictions which, for years, have thrown more and more tenants onto the street or forced them to pay much more expensive rent elsewhere is a smokescreen.
Nothing to expand the protection of seniors against evictions either. With a serious housing shortage and exorbitant rents, a moratorium should have been imposed on all evictions while the crisis persists.
The minister swears that she is not abolishing the acquired right of tenants to transfer their lease. A nice smoke screen. In fact, it gives owners the right to refuse a lease transfer without serious reason.
Result: it kills the only tool remaining for the tenants concerned to prevent an abusive increase in rent by transferring their lease at the same price.
The minister is also pleased to add punitive damages for owners who do not disclose the rent paid by the previous tenant. In the midst of a housing crisis, the reality is, however, that tenants no longer have a balance of power when they are faced with an overly voracious owner.
The house is burning
The minister knows this reality and doesn’t care. Either she doesn’t know her and that’s even worse. Obviously, it also refuses to create a national register of leases.
In any case, the minister often repeats that THE solution to the housing crisis, according to her, would be to build more. So wait and wait. Meanwhile, thousands of tenants are trapped by a market gone crazy also because it is too poorly regulated.
In short, the house is burning, but instead of calling the firefighters – therefore, acting to better regulate the market – the minister is waiting for the rain to arrive to put out the fire. How surprising is it that no opposition party voted for this law?
Even more ubiquitous is his open letter published Thursday in The duty. Under a high-sounding title: “Dare to shake up the status quo in housing, it creates division!” – supporting exclamation mark –, Mme Duranceau nevertheless congratulates himself for his great “courage”.
The yard of clichés is full
She reduces the multiple criticisms of her law to “ambient noise”, to a “reaction of those who are used to the status quo” and even invites all of society to “get rid of our resistance to change”.
Don’t throw any more away. The cliché yard is full. The minister even adds this: “when we act, we often polarize.” A pearl of emptiness.
The truth is that in politics, when we act for the common good, without necessarily achieving unanimity, we unite. Even minimally. It is when we act against it that we polarize.
This explains why this “Act to modify various legislative provisions relating to housing” – the euphemism of the year – is so poorly received.
And this side is not that of the tenants, although they are the main victims of a housing crisis which continues to worsen.
More broadly, we come back to this keen observation of a good neighbor who, in fact, perfectly describes what a fool’s bargain is.
“Finally, elected officials who are all owners and decide on the rights of tenants, it’s like in the days of exclusively male parliaments, where women’s rights were decided in absentia.”