Quebec solidaire relaunches its solidarity pact to support first-time home buyers

People take part in a demonstration against the Quebec government's housing Bill 31 in Montreal, Saturday, February 3, 2024. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham Hughes

On the sidelines of Saturday's demonstration against Bill 31, Quebec solidaire's (QS) MNA responsible for housing Andrés Fontecilla issued a news release re-launching one of the components of QS's Solidarity Pact for first-time buyers: mandatory disclosure of simultaneous promises to purchase the same property.

According to the opposition party, home sales in Quebec will fall by 13 per cent in 2023 compared to the previous year. Fontecilla blames this state of affairs on a lack of transparency that opens the door to excessive bidding.

"What we're experiencing is a speculative bubble that's affecting all sectors," said Fontecilla in an interview with The Canadian Press as he joined anti-Bill 31 demonstrators gathered on Saturday in the Rosemont-La-Petite-Patrie borough of Montreal.

"What we're proposing today is to abolish the practice of blind bids. It's fuelling the speculative bubble," he said. "Households, especially young households, can't muster the financial resources to apply for a property. And if they do have the money to buy a property, they're going to get into terrible debt."

Fontecilla went on to say that households sometimes go into debt "without having the capacity to sustain that debt over the long term."

Fontecilla said that a market is only balanced "when we have all the information," hence his desire to put the transparency of commitments to buy back at the centre of the debate at the beginning of February.

"It's not the magic formula that we're putting forward today, but it will solve a number of problems, it will control a little more the runaway, overbidding in the property market, and it will control, in a way, the speculative bubble."

The timing is calculated, of course.

The Solidaire representative is counting on taking advantage of the popular movement against Bill 31 and public pressure on the government, the only real leverage left to get his plan through.

"We have to twist the CAQ's arms and force it to take action," he insists.

The Office de protection du consommateur, which oversees consumer protection in the case of property purchases, did not respond to our requests on the subject.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published in French on Feb. 4, 2024.