The General Star

Arnold Bennett is director of the Housing Hotline.

He works with about 15 staff and volunteers.

We spoke at the downtown YMCA on Sunday, 26 Nov., 2006 during one of his organization’s regularly scheduled two weekend clinics.

JDG: You get some interesting cases.

AB: Woah, we get interesting cases. Well you’ve been sitting here, you heard some of the stuff we had today. This is typical.

JDG: Well, I’m just scratching the surface. What exactly do you do?

AB: Well, it’s a nonprofit organization. We essentially assist people who are having problems with the Rental Board. Mostly tenants. Some small landlords.
And we basically provide them with additional advice that they won’t necessarily get from the board. We have lawyers, either as volunteers or on staff. We help them write their letters. We have a building technologist who will help them do inspections and testify in court. We have lawyers who will go with them to court.
And we have a hotline apart from these. The hotline operates five days a week. The clinic operates two days a week. And we’ve been doing this, basically continuously, since 1981.
And on a more or less regular basis since the mid-seventies.

JDG: Yeah, I remember you from way back. So this is basically the 25-year anniversary that you’ve been doing it basically full-time?

AB: We started doing it during the Bill 57 campaign in the fall of 1981, which is also when I started the Gazette column that I had for about seven or eight years. And the first ten weeks we were basically telling people how to get free money, so we were getting 200 people a week. We filled Victoria Hall. It was quite something. We discovered during that campaign, which was supposed to be an intensive campaign to get people to file for this money,  we directly induced about 30,000 people to file.  We discovered there were many, many other problems that people needed regular assistance on. That it was not sufficient to do what tenant groups did in those days, which was to have occasional press conferences and offices hours only in the middle of the week and so on.
So essentially we were the first organization to set up a weekend service. We were the first organization to set up a permanent hotline with someone actually someone answering the phone live, eventually twelve hours a day five days a week. And to provide all these additional services.
And as I said, we’re a non-profit. We used to have some government funding. We have no government funding now. We operate basically off private donations only.

JDG: Anybody getting rich here?

AB: On the contrary. Not only is nobody getting rich here but this is paid for out of pocket.

JDG: What was Bill 57?

AB: Bill 57 was a special law that was adopted in the late 1970s, when they abolished certain taxes on apartment buildings. And at that time, the MCM (Montreal Citizens Movement, a municipal political party) lobbied Quebec: ‘If you’re going to abolish taxes on big apartment buildings, then tenants should get a cut.’
But instead of Quebec making it an automatic cut, of course, being the government, they decided to make people do it the hard way. So they said, ‘You can get the money, but the tenant has to go and apply to the rental board. And they figured maybe only a few people would.  Forty-five thousand eventually did, largely because we did a campaign that went on for two years.

JDG: Is the Quebec rental board a generous system or a just system?

AB: There are problems with it, but on the whole it’s probably better than anything else I’ve seen in North America. Toronto, on some levels, Ontario used to have a better system for new tenants, but on the other hand, Ontario excluded anybody from rent control over a certain rent level. So it was obviously in the interest of these big landlords to force the rents up and get people out of rent control entirely. And of course, Harris went and gutted the system.
So the reason Quebec’s got the best system is because, even with all the home-ownership encouragement and whatever, the old City of Montreal you’re looking at 70 per cent tenants. Island of Montreal, it’s still a majority of tenants. Even throughout the province of Quebec, there’s a very large minority of tenants. So it’s basically political suicide for any government, no matter how quote-unquote free-market they are, to mess with this.
As the Liberals discovered back in the late 1980s, when they wanted to allow unrestricted condo conversion and then backed off dramatically and, in fact, improved protection for tenants.
There was actually a mayor of Westmount who was booted out of office because he refused to support the tenants on the issue of protection of tenants against condo conversions. This was in the campaign in 1987 and May Cutler got elected over Brian Gallery as a direct result. All those little old ladies south of Sherbrooke went out and voted en masse to kick out Gallery. That is the only time a sitting mayor of Westmount was thrown out by the voters and that was the reason why.

JDG: Did you like Robin Hood?

AB: What?

JDG: Were you a fan of Robin Hood?

AB: Oh yeah. And in fact, we run non-profit housing in N.D.G. And when we set up this non-profit housing, we called it Habitation Sherbrooke Forest (laughter) and there’s a great big Robin Hood logo on the building.

JDG: Is it one building?

AB:  It’s actually close to 500 units that we’re running in N.D.G.

JDG: How did you get started?

AB: Back a very long time ago. I started covering it as a journalist for the McGill Daily during Milton Park. And then I got elected to city council in 1974 and, of course, housing’s a big issue, so practically the day after my election my first complaint was a landlord complaint. As it turned out, that particular tenant was a total nutbar, and it wasn’t legitimate, but afterwards we got many, many other cases that were legitimate.

JDG: So there were a lot of things that needed to be addressed and you saw yourself as a guy who could do it, eh?

AB:  Well, basically I started doing it as an adjunct to other things I was doing as an elected councillor and it basically took my life over. So even after I stopped being a councillor I continued doing this. And then I branched into the other area, because I’m involved in N.D.G. community groups and we decided to actually take over buildings in N.D.G. and convert them into affordable housing. We initially did this, taking it on contract from the City of Montreal because during the Dore administration a lot of this was done. But then after Bourque got in, they stopped doing it, we went directly to the Quebec government, got the grants, bought and renovated buildings. And now we’re involved in a project at Benny Farm, creating affordable home-ownership. So I have my fingers in a lot of pies in this area.

JDG: How many people do you think you and your volunteers helped over the years.

AB: On the phones, half a million. In person, at the meetings, 50,000.

AB: Well, basically the math on it. On the phones, over a given year, we do about 25,000 calls and at the clinics we do about 2,500 in-person interviews. So, you know, put it together, do the math.

JDG: I didn’t notice a sense of desperation or nervousness when I came in her. People seem to think, ‘I’m going to be O.K.’

AB: Well I don’t know. A lot of people, yeah. But I think you walked in after some of the early people today. They were pretty desperate. We had one person here who has a psycho roommate, who has made physical threats and she wants to get out somehow and that was very difficult. The police wouldn’t help her. I don’t understand why. We have another woman whose landlord physically assaulted her and she defended herself. And now he’s trying to get her evicted through the rental board. So we turned her over to one of the lawyers today. We have other people who have just discovered they have an infestation of bedbugs and the landlord’s trying to blame them.

JDG: Are tenants nervous to stand up for their rights in some cases? Like they don’t want to cause trouble, right?

AB: Yeah although people are better educated now. You don’t have that many people coming in anymore who think they’re going to get evicted if they refuse a rent increase. You’ll find some people who don’t realize they’ve got rights, but most people — even recent immigrants who just got off the plane two months ago — have got some idea that they’ve got certain rights and that that there are organizations that they can go to. And you’ve just got to keep spreading that information.
One thing that we learned is that it requires constant repetition and education because people — unless they’re directly affected — if it’s not a basic issue that everybody knows about like, they can refuse a rent increase.  If it’s something more obscure, people will not know. Because people don’t go around reading the law in their spare time.

JDG: Have you ever been threatened?

AB: Ahh. We’ve had a couple of threats. Not lately but I have some interesting notes I’ve dug up from my old files.

JDG: I guess this is evidence you’ve got to keep on hand until whatever blows over. Um, how old are you?

AB: Now? Fifty-five.

JDG: And you’re been doing this since you were, what, in your twenties?

AB: Yeah.

JDG: Can people do a lot of this stuff themselves? Do they come here just for encouragement, do you think?

AB: Some things people can do themselves. Some things we consider that people need expert assistance. Cases that have any legal twists on them, we recommend that people have legal representation when they go to the Regie (du Logement). Even though you’re supposed to not need a lawyer when you go to the Regie, you don’t get the respect. Now, if it’s an ordinary, routine, open-and-shut case like, ‘My tenant did not pay the rent’ and/or ‘I’ve got this repair that needs to be done and here’s the picture’ or ‘I don’t like this rent increase and I’d like the Regie to look at the landlord’s bills.’ Those are fairly simple. You do not need a lawyer. But if it’s an eviction, you do not go to the Board without a lawyer. If it’s some complicated thing involving points of law, you take a lawyer.

JDG: Do you ever help landlords?

AB: I’d say maybe about ten, fifteen per cent of our clientele. I mean we’re talking small duplex owners. I don’t have the big property owners coming in here. They’ve got their own network.

JDG: Have your volunteers and staff been with you a long time?

AB: Everybody who’s with me now has been with me for a long time. Because I don’t use the government grant programs anymore. Some of the people started on government grants and then I hired them. Pretty much everbody. (Indicating person sitting next to him. Barbara Cyr is executive assistant and staff coordinator. Her duties include the running of the hotline.) She’s been here 18 years. But at a certain point, the government programs became unsatisfactory because anybody who — most people who are any good, they didn’t want them going on these types of programs. They basically wanted to send me people who were essentially unemployable, so at that point I said, ‘Forget it. We’re not a psychiatric institution here. We’re trying to help people.’ So I only kept people who were good.
Some of these people — she’s been here the longest — but I’ve had people here ten or fifteen years.

JDG: And the current real-estate market, how is that affecting tenants?

AB: Well, it was very bad a few years ago. I mean, you’ll remember ten years ago, when the market was dead, you had a seven-per-cent vacancy rate. It was very high. Landlords were begging people to take their apartments. Then it took a nosedive. It was even lower than Toronto at one point. And as a result, it wasn’t so much that people were getting gouged as existing tenants. Because a lot of those people knew they could refuse an increase. But if somebody moved out, a lot of the landlords were just jumping the rents two hundred bucks at a shot. We even saw some buildings where they were going up five hundred at a shot.
And because very, very few tenants who are new tenants realize that they can go to the board and get a rollback, or wanted to get into a scrap with the landlord about it. This drove rents up very high, very quickly.
Just to give you an idea: we run some non-profit buildings on Fielding in N.D.G. When we took these buildings over from the city in the early 1990s, they were at market. That is, they were 4 1/2s going in the upper five-hundreds. They’re still — because we don’t raise it except for cost — they’re still in the lower six-hundreds. But equivalent apartments in N.D.G., you can’t get below eight or nine hundred now. So, of course, we’ve got we’ve got almost no vacancies. Because people would be crazy to leave that kind of situation. But it shows you essentially what’s happend.  You know, the existing tenants who’ve stayed where they are, they’ve kept their rents down. But where there’s been turnover, the rents have gone up, up and up. So now, even thought the vacancy rate has improved. It’s very difficult for people to find affordable rents in a lot of neighbourhoods.
And it’s really going to hit the fan in some neighbourhoods in January, because as you’ve noticed the property valuations have gone very high in a lot of districts — especially in the southwest of Montreal, which up to now has been spared. And suddenly they’ve got tax increases, surtaxes, the energy costs are a big problem now, particularly for oil. It’s not going to be fun for tenants in 2007.

JDG: Particularly in the southwest, then?

AB: Southwest will be the worst, because of the taxes. But because of the energy costs and other problems that the city’s been having, generally all over.

JDG: So where are the emerging neighbourhoods, if people want to find affordable housing? Is there anyplace left?

AB: (Sighs) It’s getting more and more difficult. You see people moving off island.

Barbara Cyr: “Even then, it’s not cheaper off island.”)

JDG: And who will carry on your work in fifty years, when you’re pulling back?

AB: I have no idea.

JDG: Who else helps tenants.

AB: Well, there are many tenant organizations in the city. A lot of French organizations but they’re district-based.  The reason that I started to doing it — I used to work with a tenant organization in N.D.G. And then I left, I went to the private sector. And because I’d done all this radio work, we were getting calls from all over the place, because there was no service anywhere west of N.D.G. So they were getting all the calls from the West Island and the South Shore and Laval and people who were there, after I left, said ‘We don’t we don’t want to take all these calls from out of district.’ And I had a big fight with them and I said, ‘You can’t cut off all these people, they’ve got to go somewhere.’ So I started doing it basically out of my back pocket. You know, taking calls at my house. And then eventually, I gradually developed this whole — I tried all kind of, I tried government grants, I tried private-sector sponsorship at one point. That lasted for about a year. And eventually it ended up the way it is now.

JDG: And do you have a sideline? Make a living from this?

AB: Well of course, I don’t make a living from this. This is my volunteer work. I pay out of pocket for it. I have the consulting business that I do very well at.

JDG: In what?

AB: Corporate translation. That type of thing. Corporate communications. You know, like if you remember the referendum studies that they did in the last referendum? The secret studies?

JDG: Yeah, the ones that we didn’t find out about.

AB: Yeah well, I found out about them because I had the contract to translate them. (Chuckles) I used to do Lucien Bouchard’s crib notes for federal-provincial conferences, do a lot of stuff for law firms, calls for tenders, specifications, environmental impact studies — you name it. Collective agreements. Nurses unions.

JDG: Are you passionate about this?

AB: Yeah, otherwise would I be crazy enough to take money out of my own pocket and give up my weekend every week?

JDG: O.K. Could you do this in your sleep kind of thing?

AB: Phone it in.

JDG: You’ve heard it all, right? Have you heard it all?

Barbara Cyr: No, there’s something new comes in every time.

AB: Well, let’s see. We had the woman who thinks the witches are cursing her through the wall. Um. We had — my favourite one from years ago. The sweet little old lady who comes in and she’s complaining about the neighbour upstairs who’s making too much noise. O.K., we’ve heard that one before. ‘What kind of noise is this neighbour making?’ ‘He’s walking around in circles, dragging things.’ ‘Why would he be doing this?’ ‘Oh, he’s worshipping the devil.’ ‘Oh, really? How do you know that?’ ‘Well, he appears to me in smoke over my bed.’ ‘Oh, I see. And what’s the landlord say about this?’ ‘Well, he’s willing to let me out on a month’s notice, but I don’t think that’s fair.’ ‘Well, ma’am, I think you’d better take the offer. You’re not going to be able to prove this in court.’ ‘Oh, I was hoping you could help me.’ ‘Well what did you want me to do, get you an exorcist?’ ‘Yes, actually, I was hoping you could recommend on.’ (Laughter) Fifty people in the room, trying not to bust a gut laughing while this was going on. (Laughter)

Barbara Cyr: Then they guy who took the toilet bowl off because it was against his religion.

AB: He claimed that he had some religion that it was against his religion for him to use a toilet. So he took the toilet bowl out and he was using the hole. I have never heard of this. He came from some other country, but I have never heard of any culture that has that position. So I think it’s probably the one where somebody talks to him with tinfoil. (Laughs)

Barbara Cyr: It’s like the lady who put the tinfoil on her ceiling, over all her plugs and everything because the aliens who were coming in.

AB: I had the one woman in the ghetto who claimed the CIA was coming in in the middle of the night and beating her up while she was asleep. And she had a little tent in the middle of her living room and she was building campfires.
I had the one who had the boa constrictor in he bed because it had crawled down from her neighbour’s apartment and she took it and threw it out the window in the blanket. (Laughter)
Oh, I sent one of my inspectors to this guy’s place, because he was having a beef with his landlord about something or other. And he goes in the back room and he found that the guy had a pet snake. He was keeping a farm of rats that he was letting run loose to feed the snakes and the rats were pissing everywhere. This guy’s been in all kinds of places to check stuff for me and he said he has never smelled a smell like that in his life.

JDG: You’ve got non-profit housing in N.D.G. Anywhere else?

AB: No, we do N.D.G. There are other organizations with mandates in other parts of the city.

JDG: What’s the bottom line on Benny Farm. Will that be a good place?

AB: Well, yeah. Benny Farm was a hard fight. It took us about fifteen years but, as you may have noticed, there are a lot of good projects going up there. Now the ones that went up first, that are already there. Those were done under the nonprofit thing. But we went the hard way. We bid against for-profit companies to do affordable home ownership and we beat them on the bid.

JDG: Staffwise, what do you have?

AB: I have people who do letters. I have a paralegal who does accompaniment. I have a staff lawyer, we actually pay her salary, she goes to court. I have two other lawyers who come in here pro-bone, but then they take clients on the side. And I’ve got people who do the hotline and people who do computer research and whatever.

JDG: Do you look for new volunteers at all?

AB: Volunteers I could use. I could particularly use some law students who are about to start because one of my lawyers I need to replace, you know, back her up. Otherwise I don’t hire new people. I’ve got enough people.

JDG: What are accompaniments?

AB: Well accompaniment basically means if it’s a routine case that doesn’t need a lawyer I have a paralegal who will go to court with them because she knows her way around there and she’ll sit with them and keep them calm, make sure they’re prepared, whatever.

JDG: Thank you very much.

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