Neglectful Montreal landlords beware, you can now be fined more easily
Plan includes tripling inspections, making fumigation reports public, creating website for tenants
With the July 1 moving day just around the corner, Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante has announced her administration's plan for taking on recalcitrant landlords with more inspections and harsher fines.
The plan includes:
- tripling the number of inspections to 31,200 over the next four years.
- issuing parking ticket-like fines to landlords for housing infractions.
- creating a website where tenants can get information on their building.
- making fumigation reports public.
Plante said the city has already more than doubled the number of housing inspectors, hiring 13 new inspectors to bring the total to 23.
Those inspectors will now be able to issue tickets for fines on the spot to landlords for housing-related infractions. Plante said until now, the city has had to build a case against a landlord before it could issue a fine.
Fines are being increased for negligent landlords, to a maximum of $20,000 for real estate companies and $15,000 for individual owners.
If the fines don't work, the city has the power to make repairs themselves, charging the costs back to the landlord. If the landlord doesn't pay for them, the city can reclaim the money if the owners sell the building.
When it comes to pest infestations, exterminators already have to report fumigations to the city. The mayor said that extermination data will now be public and searchable.
"We want to make information as open and available as possible," Plante said.
Concern over results
Maxime Roy-Allard, a representative with a Quebec housing association welcomes the new rules, but has also heard this before.
"Four years back Coderre proposed a similar plan and nothing happened," Roy-Allard said.
Kevin Lebeau, a spokesperson for the Quebec Landlords Association, says Plante's plan demonizes landlords.
"The city wants to penalize landlords, but it isn't always the landlord that is the one who is being lax and not maintaining the building properly," Lebeau said.
Not far from the news conference, Cote-des-Neiges resident Rida Souffi said the sanitation problems in the nearby apartments are so bad that he doesn't believe people can live in them.
Souffi worries that stiffer fines aren't enough.
"It doesn't help. The owner he's gonna tell you, me, I don't have enough money to make the construction inside," he said.
With files from Navneet Pall