Duranceau's game plan revealed too late, deplores the housing community

Photo: Jacques Boissinot The Canadian Press Appointed Minister of Housing in 2022, France-Élaine Duranceau was quickly asked for a game plan in this area.

Isabelle Porter in Quebec

Published at 2:05 p.m. Updated at 6:01 p.m.

• Québec

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Minister France-Élaine Duranceau’s strategy to tackle the housing crisis has been revealed very late, in the eyes of housing stakeholders who have been calling for an emergency plan for months, even years.

“It’s surprising that an action plan that the government has been working on for four years isn’t more substantial,” laments Véronique Laflamme, spokesperson for the Front d’action populaire en réaménagement urbain (FRAPRU).

The activist points out that the Coalition avenir Québec was holding consultations on a housing action plan as early as 2021. A forum was organized by the then Minister responsible for Housing, Andrée Laforest.

The action plan was finally unveiled Thursday afternoon in Trois-Rivières by her successor, France-Élaine Duranceau, in the form of a “strategy.”

Appointed Minister of Housing in 2022, Ms. Duranceau was quickly asked for a game plan in this area. In the months following her inauguration, the opposition hounded her on this subject session after session during question period.

In August 2023, after holding new consultations, she promised an action plan “in the coming months.”

The Association of Construction and Housing Professionals of Quebec (APCHQ) also deplores the slowness of the process. “We and our partners have been asking for a strategy for over a year. So, it’s certain that we found that it was quite long,” notes the communications director of the APCHQ, Karine Casault.

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A delay necessary to see the bigger picture

Questioned on this subject, the minister's office indicates that it had to postpone the release of the plan to include other ministries in the process. “The first work only concerned the Société d’habitation du Québec [SHQ],” mentions a source at the cabinet.

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The SHQ is the organization that manages social and affordable housing funding programs.

However, at the turn of 2024, the minister’s entourage decided to involve several other ministries and organizations, such as the Ministry of Municipal Affairs, the Régie du bâtiment, the Commission de la construction and the Ministry of Culture, which oversees heritage protection. “The scale of the crisis merited an interdepartmental solution.”

The strategy, which is detailed in a 72-page document, contains dozens of measures and initiatives, but no additional funding. Some measures are already known, such as the possibility for cities to deviate from their urban planning regulations to facilitate the construction of buildings or new protections given to older tenants.

The focus on prefabricated housing

Among the new features, the strategy explains how the government intends to support modular construction, not for houses, but for buildings with several dwellings. The document thus mentions “fabricated solutions”.

This will notably involve the launch, this fall, of a call for tenders for “digital models of prefabricated housing”, which should lead to the creation of 500 new dwellings. A government committee on “prefabrication” will also be set up and the State will distribute guides and guidelines to support private players in the field.

The strategy also provides for new regulatory relief to reduce “obstacles” to projects. This is where the Ministry of the Environment and the Ministry of Culture will be asked to give ground. The Ministry of the Environment will have to better “support developers” to limit “procedures associated with non-compliance”. And officials from the Ministry of Culture will have to “continue to optimize the progress of projects” when the issue of heritage is present.

The government will also create a “directory of surplus buildings” of the State with the aim of housing people there and it plans to do the same with churches and other religious buildings.

Finally, social economy enterprises and the SHQ itself will have access to new tools to make financial arrangements and develop new projects.

A timid step in the right direction

The government has committed to building 23,000 new housing units by 2029. It has set itself the target of 115,000 more housing starts than what is already planned by 2034, for a total of 560,000 over ten years, in order to counter the current shortage.

However, this is not enough, interest groups note. “This is less than half of the recommendation of the Housing and Climate Task Force, with a longer timeline,” estimates the organization Vivre en ville, which nevertheless welcomes the desire to mobilize all ministries behind the plan.

The Montreal Economic Institute (MEI) also finds that the target of 115,000 is too modest, noting that the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation recommends the creation of 1.3 million more housing units by 2030, or 150,000 per year. The MEI also finds that the deregulation measures lack “bite.”

As for the FRAPRU, cited above, it finds that the “mountain is giving birth to a mouse” with this strategy. “Even the modular housing pilot project that will be launched shortly has been in the works for several months,” argues its spokesperson.