Legault: kidding himself on housing costs vs income
François Legault’s Achilles heel may well turn out to be housing. Everyone needs a place to live and Legault has been stubbornly blasé about how he doesn’t want Quebec to lag behind the rest of Canada so that housing can remain affordable.
In the Journal, Michel Girard crunched some numbers to show that since Legault was elected, house prices have gone up 71% and condo prices 52% while the average salary has only risen 23.7%. He doesn’t even get into rises in rent.
But hey, Moving Day has always gone off without a hitch and no one has been left in the street, right?
carswell 15:19 on 2023-06-23 Permalink
It’s definitely an issue in Montreal, which doesn’t vote CAQ and which Legault has probably written off (actually, he seems to find it useful as a target for bashing). But what about the regions, where his base is? Do they have “Let them eat cake” projections on the sides of landmark buildings? Organized protests against the banning of lease transfers?
Kate 15:51 on 2023-06-23 Permalink
There have been stories about shortages of housing in other Quebec towns – Quebec City, Trois‑Rivières, Sherbrooke, Saguenay, Gatineau – but I haven’t been blogging them. It’s everywhere across Quebec, but even then sometimes Montreal gets blamed for the rent increases elsewhere because some folks left town during the earlier part of the pandemic and went to work remotely from places with cheaper housing at the time. (Housing shortages and surges in housing cost are also worldwide issues, let’s not forget.)
I don’t know how long it will take to sink in that Legault’s tendency to deny facts and pretend everything is hunky‑dory is causing real, painful problems for people – and for a viable political alternative to be offered. A Journal writer says the PQ and QS need to team up.
Ian 18:02 on 2023-06-23 Permalink
Even in the Gaspé there’s a shortage. A lot of the more touristique regions saw a huge influx over covid that ate into rental stock.
Meezly 11:30 on 2023-06-24 Permalink
Hope it will be his downfall…
Kate 12:39 on 2023-06-25 Permalink
It’s going to take time. And change doesn’t always make things better.
In 2012, when general protests brought down the Charest government, the next election brought us back the PQ. While the PQ has a history of being beneficial to cultural ventures, it has also spent years spinning its wheels and wasting our money on the sterile plan to extract Quebec from Canada.
And the PQ didn’t freeze tuitions either, which is what the initial protests had been about, and which was dangled as a ploy for them to get back into power.
The PQ wasn’t around long that time. The 2014 election gave us a Liberal majority under Couillard, and the fumbling inefficiency of the Couillard government helped usher in the CAQ.
That Journal writer may be correct in one sense that if the PQ and QS teamed up, they might begin to build a front that could challenge the CAQ. But the CAQ will almost certainly be back in 2026, so it may be 2030 or 2034 before we see any real evolution, and by then the political landscape will have evolved in ways we can’t foresee now.
And of course the main raison‑d’être of the PQ is to secede Quebec and always will be. QS is also separatist on paper: although it doesn’t lead with that, it would certainly be forced to do so if it linked up with the PQ. And then we’d be back into the old loop of Quebec’s government threatening to secede, or duplicating the efforts of the federal government to show that it can, and so on.