After years of government negligence and punitive policies targeting unhoused people, the Quebec Homelessness Prevention Collaborative (QHPC) has created a set of guidelines to confront homelessness in the province. The collaborative, co-founded by McGill University and the Old Brewery Mission and now involving over 20 research and advocacy groups, seeks to prioritize the prevention of homelessness over its treatment. Its recommendations include instituting a winter truce period for evictions, expanding social housing to 20 per cent of rental stock, strengthening the Tribunal administratif du logement (TAL)’s data collection and anonymity obligations, and recognizing housing as a right within the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms.
With homelessness in Quebec still on the rise, it is clear that Montreal’s historic homelessness prevention measures—oriented around punishment and criminalization—fall short of addressing the crisis’ underlying causes. Far from serving as an effective deterrent, punitive measures have only entrenched Quebec’s homelessness crisis more deeply. To truly address the systemic roots of homelessness, the province must internalize the QHPC’s recommendations and prioritize its prevention.
While current treatment-focused institutions in Quebec, such as shelters and warming centres, do connect vulnerable people with access to sanctuary and healthcare, they consistently function at full capacity, forcing individuals to search for refuge in public spaces such as metro stations. This pattern reflects how such strategies are unable to wholly effectively combat homelessness.
However, rather than supporting unhoused people who are unable to access shelters, the Quebec government continues to criminalise those placed at risk by its self-created shelter capacity shortage. In April 2026, the Société de transport de Montréal re-instituted its loitering ban in metro stations despite significant backlash during the ban’s trial period in March 2025: effectively penalizing unhoused people using these spaces for survival. Arrests relating to the loitering ban only further entrench unhoused people in the homelessness crisis, as a criminal record can stand in the way of one’s ability to secure housing and find work.
QHPC Recommendation 13, which proposes a yearly truce period on evictions and residential expulsions from Dec. 1 to March 31, calls for a shift from this history of punishment and displacement. By forbidding landlords from pushing tenants out of their homes during the dangerous winter months, this recommendation creates a necessary buffer period for individuals to meet the terms of their lease.
Each of the QHPC’s guidelines stands alongside the organisation’s underlying recommendation: to enshrine housing as a right in the Quebec Charter. Reconceiving housing as a human right would mandate local and provincial governments to protect the right to secure, affordable and habitable housing, forcing these institutions to act quickly and effectively to ensure adequate shelter for all in need. Enshrining the right to housing in the Charter would also provide a legal basis for challenging any provincial legislation that undermines or obstructs this right, rendering measures that penalize homelessness without providing pathways to housing—including loitering bans and encampment evictions—unconstitutional. Evictions would become far harder to justify under a constitutional right to housing, allowing unhoused people to escape the traumas associated with displacement, property confiscation, and the fragmentation of encampment communities.
Treatment-focused approaches also neglect how systemic risk factors fall disproportionately on marginalized groups: Individuals with disabilities are four times as likely to experience homelessness, and Indigenous people remain vastly overrepresented in the unhoused population. The QHPC’s recommendations, on the other hand, recognize the need to address the interrelated structural roots of homelessness—the province’s shortage of accessible and adaptable housing units, lack of affordable and social housing, and poor capacity to detect at-risk individuals.
The Quebec government must commit to implementing the QHPC’s preventative measures in addressing the homelessness crisis. Montreal Mayor Soraya Martinez Ferrada, for example, earmarked $29.9 million CAD of the 2026 budget to combat the crisis, a threefold increase since 2024, and has claimed the city’s focus will be shifting from reactive to proactive—a genuine step toward progress. However, for Ferrada’s budget increase and pledge to prevention to amount to more than lip-service, the Quebec government as a whole must unequivocally cease its history of punishment and criminalization and instead invest consistently in the QHPC’s vision of prevention.