Out of breath, community organizations working in the field of housing, but also homelessness and mental health, are asking Quebec to wake up, put aside partisanship and act urgently to tackle the housing crisis.
Saying they are overwhelmed by the worsening situation and the explosion of their clientele, they are demanding an immediate increase in emergency aid for the thousands of households who will find themselves on the streets from 1is July. They are also demanding that the Legault government create a transpartisan and interministerial committee to work on lasting solutions before the crisis.
“What more does the government need to take concrete action? “, says Roseline Hébert-Morin, of the Plateau-Mont-Royal Housing Committee, who reports a 124% increase in service requests over the past five years in her organization.
“It’s as if we were facing a forest fire and we had small boilers of water to put it out,” adds Anne-Marie Boucher, from the Regroupement des ressources alternatives en santé mentale du Québec.
Crisis in all regions
It is therefore a real cry from the heart that a united front of organizations launched on Thursday in Montreal, to express the dismay and exhaustion of their staff affected by what they call “indignation fatigue” in the face of the explosion of clients in precarious situations, and this, everywhere across the province, including in rural areas.
Edith Lambert, from the Oasis of Lotbinière, confirms. “In the last year, we ourselves were surprised to see to what extent there were needs in our community and to what extent there were people who found themselves in a precarious situation,” she explains, giving the example of a man evicted from the toilet of a gas station where he was sleeping or a woman who lost custody of her baby because she was unable to provide him with a decent home.
The data from Cédric Dussault, from the Regroupement des comités logement et associations de locataires du Québec, is enough to make you shudder. From 2020 to 2024, rent increases reached 27% in Montreal, 33% in Quebec City, 44% in Sherbrooke, 50% in Trois-Rivières, 49% in Rimouski and 37% in Saguenay compared to an inflation of 17% over the same period.
“The situation has deteriorated so quickly that, in the last four or five years, we have seen phenomena appear that we did not see before. There are more and more people who have full-time jobs and who are on the street, who sleep in their cars and this is the case everywhere in Quebec,” says Mr. Dussault.
According to Statistics Canada, 3% of Canadian households were evicted from their homes in the last 12 months, “which allows us to estimate that approximately 45,000 Quebec households were evicted in the last year,” he emphasizes.
A little empathy?
Community organizations, which represent the community social safety net under the public social safety net, accuse the government and the entire public sector of shirking their responsibilities and dumping their overflow into their backyard when “it is not up to the community to manage the worsening of social inequalities,” argues Anne-Marie Boucher. “If this social safety net collapses, there will not be much left to maintain humanity in our societies,” she warns.
“It is expected that at some point, [les élus] realize that if their peers end up on the streets by the ton, perhaps that could awaken something like empathy,” says Roseline Hébert-Morin.
Short and long term solutions
Community groups are therefore asking Quebec, in the short term, to tackle the explosion in costs and to move forward with the rent control they have been demanding for years and to put an end to abusive evictions. “Eviction is now the main cause of homelessness in Quebec,” says Cédric Dussault, who criticizes the three levels of government for their complacency in the face of these too often fraudulent practices.
Denouncing the fact that Quebec is at the back of the pack in terms of non-market housing in Canada, a country which itself is at the back of the pack compared to countries with comparable economies, the organizations reiterate that it is urgent, to in the long term, to build social housing sheltered from market fluctuations.
“Affordable” housing makes the problem worse
Mr. Dussault believes that public authorities continue to take the wrong path by favoring affordable housing. “It is indecent that all levels of government have completely abandoned lower-income renter households by almost completely replacing the financing of social housing with so-called affordable housing which, because it is subject to an overheated market, is unaffordable for a large part of the tenant population. »
Céline Duclap, from the Pas de la rue organization, which works with people aged 55 and over who are homeless or in precarious situations, argues that a social assistance benefit “no longer allows for housing today. A single room in a rooming house costs $700. With $800 in social assistance, there is nothing left to live on afterwards. »
Unsurprisingly, she says, “we’ve seen our numbers increase and explode in recent months. This is the first time we haven’t had a break after the holidays. Teams are exhausted and organizations are at the end of what they can offer. Some organizations are in agony, in fact.”
