As the asking price for rent in Montreal skyrockets, housing advocates are renewing calls for the Quebec government to set up a provincewide rent registry to support tenants fighting for affordable housing.
Currently, tenants can challenge rent increases through Quebec’s rental tribunal, known in French as the Tribunal administratif du logement (TAL), if their rent is higher than the lowest rent paid during the 12-month period preceding the beginning of the lease or sublease.
The TAL also provides guidelines on rent adjustments every year, but landlords aren’t required to follow them.
Despite the province having a rent regulation policy, the asking price of rent in Montreal has shot up nearly 71 per cent since 2019, according to Statistics Canada’s quarterly rent statistics report, published in June.
Between 2019 and the first quarter of 2025, asking rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Montreal grew from $1,130 to $1,930, the report says.
A public rent registry showing how much previous tenants paid would help renters contest excessive increases, housing advocacy group Le Front d’action populaire en réaménagement urbain (FRAPRU) argues.
“If it’s not in place right now, it’s definitely a political choice of not going forward with the registry,” Catherine Lussier, FRAPRU co-ordinator, said on Friday.
It’s an idea 14 municipalities have supported and mayoral candidate Soraya Martinez Ferrada, leader of Ensemble Montréal, is now promoting.
Adam Mongrain, director of housing policy at Vivre en Ville — a Quebec City-based non-profit focused on sustainable urban planning — admits that a rent registry isn’t “enough to upend the current market dynamics,” but it’s a good place to start.
“We have laws that protect the prices … and we don’t use those laws because this information is not freely available,” he said.
Plante drops plan for mandatory rent registry
Technically, Quebec had a non-government-run online rent registry since May 2023, created by Vivre en Ville.
The database lets you look up rent paid at a particular address for a given period. But since entering data is optional, there are gaps in rent information.
Affordable housing advocates say enforceability, supply of rental units and investments by large firms are among the reasons why the province’s rent control hasn’t worked in renters’ favour.
Over 40,000 Montreal rents have been registered on the website, according to Simon Charron, a spokesperson for the Montreal mayor’s cabinet.
In 2024, Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante backpedalled on her promise to institute a mandatory rent registry for the city, citing legal hurdles to have the TAL recognize data from what would have been a municipal database.
Charron said in an email the provincial government would have to establish the registry since the TAL is a provincial body.
Instead, the Plante administration contributed $30,000 to Vivre en Ville, with the mayor calling on the Quebec government to implement a provincewide rent registry.
“Our administration has always supported the establishment of a rent registry. It’s an essential tool for tenants to know the rent prices and for negotiating with landlords,” Charron said.
Quebec says operating registry would cost millions
Mongrain said when the organization pitched the rent registry to the Quebec government, it shied away from the idea, telling the organization the registry would cost $50 million to build and $20 million annually to operate.
After receiving a $2.5 million federal grant for the project, Vivre en Ville took matters into its own hands.
“You don’t have to do that because we built one for you,” Mongrain said he told the provincial government at the time.
He noted that since launching the rent registry, Vivre en Ville has been offering to transfer control of the website to the Quebec government, which has shown no interest in taking over the product and insists that it would cost millions to operate.
“I don’t think they have the credibility right now to say how much a website should cost,” Mongrain said, alluding to the $500-million cost overrun tied to the province’s automobile insurance board’s online platform SAAQclic.
Asked last week about the costs for a province-operated rent registry, Justine Vézina, a spokesperson for Quebec’s housing minister, deflected, saying in an email that Clause F and G — which require Quebec landlords to disclose the lowest rent paid in the last 12 months on a lease — are tools to make rent “more predictable and transparent.”
Quebec Landlords Association (APQ) president Martin Messier said that on principle, the group is against measures like the registry, which would restrict rent increase.
“We completely disagree with the fact that the rent should stay always at the lowest that it was in the last 12 months, because that is affecting the capacity of the landlord to keep up with the increase in costs,” he said, adding that tenants’ right to contest the rent after signing a lease goes against the notion of an agreement.
Since the pandemic, small landlords have been struggling to “see a future for themselves and [their] building” as they face rising costs for repairs, mortgages, insurance and property taxes, Messier said.
For Mongrain, affordable housing in Quebec depends on reimagining the relationship between landlords and tenants in a market that is “tipped in favour of sellers of housing services.”
Since that’s a lengthy endeavour, he said growing the rent registry in the meantime would help move the needle toward making affordable housing more accessible.
