According to Éric Duhaime, high rents and renovated homes should no longer be subject to the current house price controls. He considers deregulation to be the “only solution” to the current crisis.
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“The government needs to remove barriers to housing. If we liberalize real estate investment, thousands of households will have access to cheaper housing,” the leader of the Quebec Conservative Party (PCQ) said in a press release Monday morning.
In addition, Éric Duhaime agrees that the government must mitigate the effects of the housing crisis through targeted subsidies for tenants, but believes that the state should not subsidize the construction of new homes.
“Financial support should help tenants make decisions that suit them, but public funds should not be added to subsidize concrete,” he argued.
For the rest, the government should leave as much as possible to the market, says Mr Duhaime, who proposes to deregulate high and renovated rents so that they are no longer subject to the current control of house prices. It also proposes that, as in Alberta and New Brunswick, the government should entrust the review of rent-setting criteria to an independent agency.
Such deregulation would ensure housing “would be in better condition, safer and would benefit from greater energy efficiency,” according to the PCQ press release.
Remember that housing minister France-Élaine Duranceau tabled a bill at the very end of Parliament’s session in June that aims to rebalance the relationship between landlords and tenants.
This bill has provoked strong reactions as it fails to include measures to stem the sharp rise in rents while many Quebecers are struggling to find housing. The government has spoken out about the importance of housing construction and hopes its bill will boost housing construction.
Since 2018, the Legault government has focused primarily on the construction of housing funded through the AccèsLogis program. In fact, nearly 3,000 AccèsLogis units are currently awaiting construction in Montreal.
To solve this problem, the government has decided to open the door to private companies looking to invest by replacing the AccèsLogis program with the Quebec Affordable Housing Program (PHAQ).
In the last budget, a third of the new housing construction planned by the PHAQ was reserved for the private sector.