I am a second year Political Science student with a minor in Quebec Studies. I am interested in national politics, nationalism, municipal politics, policy making, as well as foreign policy. I also value working directly with citizens to understand how policies affect them. This interest explains why when the opportunity to complete an internship at the Comite logement de la Petite Patrie (CLPP) arose, I was eager to apply. As an intern, I would come to understand the inner workings of the housing situation in Montreal.
The CLPP works to fight for housing as fundamental human right and not a commodity. As such, they deal with various issues that directly tackle housing in the neighbourhood. They have four permanent employees who divide the diverse workload. One employee does one-on-one consultations with or without reservations. This member is the first point of contact with people who seek their service. Their job involves advising tenant of their rights, documenting the type of issues experienced, and even offering moral support. Another employee can help out with this reception, but does fieldwork and deals with specific issues, such as bed bugs. The founder is responsible for the finances, assists others in their tasks, represents the CLPP at conventions, and takes on all the other tasks not completed by the other employees. Finally, the fourth team member deals with broader, longer-lasting cases, such as the effects of Airbnb on housing in the neighbourhood, to name one.
This fourth member was my supervisor and I was working with him and another intern on one of these longer tasks. A hefty pile of incident reports of tenants seeking help deserved attention. Our primary task was to investigate these, opening new cases as well as following up on others, to determine whether the outcome had been legitimate, fraudulent, malevolent or, due to resource limitations, the outcome remained unknown.
The cases all involved a landlord employing a legal recourse—if they kept their word—to empty apartments of tenants. These legal recourses involve taking the apartment back for a close relative, evicting because renovations will change the surface area e.g. from a four-bedroom apartment to two-bedroom apartments, or changing the destined use of the apartment e.g. into a commerce.
Our investigation consisted of online research involving data bases and even social media as well as fieldwork to discover who truly lives in the apartments. The ultimate goal was to draw a portrait of the outcomes when landlord use their legal recourses to remove tenants from their apartments. We classified each case into four categories; fraudulent, malevolent, legitimate, or impossible to determine. We also used our findings to create statistics, such as the tenants’ average number of years of occupation, landlords’ average years of owning the premises, and average price of rent, to name a few.
We also created a digital map to document all the apartments where cases took place and colour-coded them based on their classification. This map included a layer of uninvestigated cases, extrapolated from previous files and a physical map from the 1980s.
This digital map, along with our statistics and classifications, will be used for the redaction of a report on the ways in which tenants lose their apartments and its broader impact on the housing situation. The report will tackle questions such as; do landlords abuse theses recourses to remove established tenants illegally? Are these recourses pursued to ultimately list apartments on Airbnb? When there is fraud, is the justice system accessible to past tenants? The report will be completed in the fall and given to the city of Montreal with some suggestions and its broader implications. For example, if a significant number of the investigated cases are discovered to be fraudulent in the neighbourhood, then it might suggest there are lot more throughout the city and it might be interesting to establish an investigative department instead of a couple students.
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I will not be receiving credit for this internship, but this experience has reaffirmed my interests in directly working with individuals to better their lives. I appreciated working towards a good cause and it instilled in me the importance of finding work that is gratifying. Seeing the real world impacts of laws and policies will inform my later decisions as, possibly, a politician or a policy maker. I am grateful that this work experience was funded by the Faculty of Arts Internship Award, made possible by Dean Antonia Maioni. Looking for internship experience as a student is a difficult task as many are unpaid, which allows only a privileged few to access this important life experience that is necessary for a competitive CV. Thanks to the award, I was able to concentrate on my internship as my necessary expenditures were taken care of. For this, I am immensely thankful.
