Veteran Montreal housing advocate fights to keep hotline alive

Montreal Gazette

7 days ago

By
Longtime Montreal housing advocate Arnold Bennett is seeking public aid to save the tenants' rights hotline he's run for 45 years.
Over nearly half a century, Bennett has been fielding questions from renters and homeowners facing evictions, rent increases, unsafe conditions or excessive renovation bills. Bennett, or one of his employees, would inform them of their legal rights and how to defend themselves before Quebec's tenants tribunal, often referring them to organizations or lawyers who could help.
Once operated by multiple staff and supported by pro-bono housing lawyers and paralegals, Bennett has been manning and paying for the phone line by himself for decades.
'Arnold, figuratively and literally, wrote the book on tenants' rights in Quebec,' said Sharon Sweeney, a project manager for the NDG Community Council non-profit organization. 'He's pretty quick — it takes him no time to process what's happening and give an efficient response.'
The N.D.G. organization refers clients to him so often members know his number by heart, Sweeney said. The council calls him when they're dealing with complex cases that require deep background knowledge. He also counsels fledgling housing rights' groups creating their own services to aid renters.
Dwindling funds forced Bennett to launch a GoFundMe page Friday titled Help Keep the Arnold Bennett Housing Hotline Running! with an initial goal of $5,000.
With income from the translation work he does on the side diminishing in recent years, Bennett said he needs more funds to keep the line operating Monday to Friday from 9 to 5.
There are many tenant organizations on the island of Montreal providing good services, Bennett said, but many don't work in English, or don't have an information line available five days a week.
'I'm still doing it because it's necessary,' said the 73-year-old Bennett, who wrote his first tenants' rights article as a teenager in 1969. 'I'll retire when they carry me out on a stretcher.'
For 40 years, Bennett ran free weekend clinics attended by housing lawyers and legal assistants who could help write letters, offer legal advice and represent tenants at the housing tribunal, sometimes free of charge. Government funding helped to pay for extra employees to staff the hotline in the 1990s, but regulations requiring new staffers be hired every few months to replace experienced ones were untenable, Bennett said.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, many support workers and a core group of volunteers who had helped for years had to be let go. They found other jobs and were no longer available once the pandemic was over. The weekend clinics ended.
Bennett, who served as a city councillor for three terms in the 1970s and '80s, kept the hotline going on his own.
In between stints as a councillor, he worked at community organizations, including the NDG Community Council and the former NDG Tenants' Association. He recalls noticing the organizations weren't getting enough phone calls, so he started going to the media.
'Suddenly, we got flooded,' he said. 'We were getting a couple of hundred calls a day at one point.'
They lobbied against condominium conversions that were diminishing rental housing stocks, and fought to tighten loopholes in the system so tenants would get better protections, particularly during housing crises.
These days, most of the calls are from tenants who can't shoulder rising rents.
Quebec's housing tribunal released its 2025 guidelines in January, suggesting average increases of 5.9 per cent for tenants, the steepest hikes in decades.
'The rent increases are unaffordable — even if they're legitimate, as in legal,' Bennett said. 'For people to get whacked like this every year when they're already at the borderline on their incomes, they can't take it anymore.'