Certainly.
First of all, you are quite correct to say, Mr. Trudel, that behind the numbers there are human consequences. They are disastrous. Every day and every week, we hear from tenants all over Quebec who are experiencing the consequences of this housing crisis and who are unable to find housing that they can afford. Earlier, I gave some figures on the number of tenant households who, even before the recent increases, were spending more than half their income on housing.
People have to resort to food banks and cut back on basic needs such as clothing, food and clothing for children. They have to cut back on electricity consumption during severe cold weather such as we are currently experiencing. This has significant consequences and there is distress among tenant households.
It must be said that the housing crisis and rising rent prices also have extreme consequences. In Quebec, July 1 is moving day, because most leases end on that date. This allows us to see the effects of the housing crisis in concrete terms. This year, the day after July 1, more than 500 renter households in Quebec had not been able to sign a new lease. A significant proportion of these households had lost their homes, not by choice, but because they had been subjected to “renovictions” or other fraudulent evictions.
Currently, we see schemes being used to raise rents, often by new landlords, including more and more investment companies. We are now seeing multinationals, such as Akelius, which is known to have contributed to the explosion of rental costs in several European cities and is now buying up housing in Canada. Stratagems are used to get rid of tenant households that were still paying affordable rent. The law is therefore circumvented and fraudulent evictions are carried out under various pretexts, including “renovictions”. These households who had no problems are now facing problems because they cannot find housing they can afford.
As I said earlier, vacancy rates are very low. But even in Montreal, where vacancy rates increased during the pandemic because of the drop in tourism and immigration, among other things, the number of renter households that were unable to find housing was extremely high. In mid-July, there were 200 such tenant households. At the moment, not all of these households have been rehoused and some of them are being housed by the city. Let me therefore point out that the effects of the crisis are very concrete. We are talking about human distress, but also about an increase in homelessness, visible or hidden. This has very important consequences. It creates social costs, but also financial costs that are much higher than they would be if we chose to invest in social housing.