Maintenance and occupancy bylaw
Updated: Apr 21
Though the majority of the content on this page consists of information and notices, it is also important to explain my votes and positions taken at Council meetings. At the last meeting, held on April 7th 2026, I chose to cast dissenting “no votes” on 4 key items on the meeting agenda. The new maintenance and repair bylaw is the subject of this post and the commentary below. Unfortunately, though the text is no longer confidential, the City has not published the draft bylaw online, distributing only paper copies at City Hall. I am therefore including the version I received here so that you can read it for yourselves:
The video of my speech at the Council meeting can be seen below.
For those who watched the meeting and are wondering, I took about 8 minutes and thirty seconds to speak (minus interruptions); The Mayor falsely claimed I had exceeded the maximum allotted time of 10 minutes to which I am entitled under the rules of procedure for Council meetings, breaking the rules and using his position as chair to prevent me from concluding. A conclusion would have likely taken another 30 seconds and allowed me to propose the changes that would allow for me to vote for the bylaw in its final version.
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5.3 Adoption of a first draft By-law concerning the occupancy and maintenance of buildings and heritage immovables.
The government of Quebec now requires cities to have maintenance and occupancy bylaws for heritage buildings. However, the proposal put forward by the Administration is to apply this bylaw to every home in Pointe-Claire. I believe this goes too far. Appropriate measures should be limited to heritage properties and vacant buildings left to decay. I would note in particular that:
· Offenses: Finable offenses include things as broad as “any part” of the exterior of a building from which there have been leaks, metal components that haven’t been painted, any rusted elements, cracks in a brick or foundation wall, damage to a staircase or walkway, “inadequate devices” (gutters/eavestroughs) for redirecting rainwater, and the inability to heat any particular room up to 21 Celsius.
· Inclusion of lived in homes: Comparing the list of offenses with my experience of going door to door last Fall, I’ve seen streets where 1/4 homes have one of these issues. These homes are lived in and the occupant is often a senior on a fixed income or a young family struggling to get by in an economy where construction costs have risen by more than 30%. Not all of Pointe-Claire has been in a position to keep up with the gentrification of the past decade. The scope of the bylaw goes well beyond dealing with what its objective should be: homes that have been left abandoned, whether through negligence or to facilitate their demolition.
· Fines: Fines (for individuals owning non heritage homes; the amounts for heritage buildings and corporate owners are even steeper) would be a minimum of $5,000 for a first offense and up to $25,000 for subsequent offenses, with an option for the City to charge an additional fine for every day the situation goes unfixed. Fines could thus range into the hundreds of thousands of dollars and have the effect of forcing residents to sell their homes. By contrast, Montreal’s minimum fine is $1,000 and its maximum fine $10,000. The average minimum fine for the 10 biggest cities in Quebec that have a similar bylaw is $1,155. I see no good reason why Pointe-Claire should be charging five times that average.
· Legal: The size of the fines is such that the City can expect costly litigation and will have to service notice and action them very rapidly, since fines levied for the same infraction continuing over consecutive days are regularly thrown out by the courts for even a modest delay.
· Corrective work: The bylaw includes a process whereby the City can order corrective work by the owner within 12-18 months for buildings that are in a “state of dilapidation” or “obsolescence” defined to mean that the structure of the building no longer serves the purpose for which it was intended. The perverse result of this process is that the biggest offenders, whose buildings are vacant and unlivable, may find themselves paying nothing to the City; just receiving a notice to fix their building within a year, during which time they may have already filed their demolition request and replacement plans with the Planning Department. By contrast, a resident whose non-dilapidated home is livable but has a missing eavestrough, or a crack in the foundation wall or a walkway with loose or missing stones can be fined a minimum of $5,000 per day for offenses that could in some cases be fixed for less.
· Notice: Inspectors can visit homes to enforce the bylaw without prior notice. The City Clerk disputed this at Tuesday’s meeting after the Mayor demanded that she “correct” my speech but sections 1.3.2-1.3.3 of the draft bylaw clearly indicate that an inspector may visit and enter a home at any reasonable time (i.e. not 2am) and that the owner, tenant, or occupant is required to allow this entry or be subject to the fines in the bylaw. There is no provision requiring prior notice to be given by an inspector before a visit or any specified notice period. Setting aside the deeply inappropriate nature of calling on a staff member to debate a councillor on his behalf, I would suggest the Mayor and those council members voting in favour of the bylaw should be sufficiently well informed to debate and “correct” me on its provisions on their own.
· Expertise: Inspectors can, at their discretion require homeowners to pay for any architectural or other building expertise they ask for, potentially adding thousands of dollars in additional costs.
· Heritage: Though perhaps too complex to add to an already long discussion, certain provisions may be problematic for heritage buildings, including the Windmill (which is permanently unoccupied and has never had heating or a sprinkler system) and Convent. The latter seems to be a chief target of the bylaw, but the City would do well to consider its own responsibility for the state of the Convent roof. When the Archdiocese of Montreal became the owner of the Convent in 2020, it apparently sought to replace the current shingled roof (in place for decades) with a new shingled roof, but was told by the City that it should replace it with metal. This had the effect of increasing potential costs from a $300,000 range to well over $1 million dollars. It would be an act of bad faith for the City to maintain that position and refuse to allow a shingled roof while fining the Archdiocese for its failure to repair the roof.
Now some have argued that the arguments above are fear mongering and not the intention of the bylaw, or even suggested that I am impugning the good name of our City Inspectors (in fact the bylaw allows inspections by designated persons including the ISP and urban planning). My legal training and experience (and this is Law School 101, not some unique personal insight), is that “intention” only matters when a contract or regulation is contradictory on an issue or fails to address it. Otherwise, you have to assess it based on what the text provides for under a worst-case scenario. If the “intention” of the bylaw is not to fine $5000++ per day for issues that many homeowners have or allow for inspections without notice, then why allow for those options at all? As for our inspectors, I think it’s reasonable to assume that as professionals they will enforce the bylaw as written and use the powers given them in response to the complaints they receive, whatever their level of personal goodwill. If those complaints come from the most difficult neighbour on every street or the house flipper and the contractor looking to push residents into selling, then that is what our inspectors will respond to, imposing the fines that are required if the offense exists. They will not have the option of limiting themselves to abandoned homes that are falling apart since Council, deliberately, has provided otherwise.
For the reasons outlined above, I voted against the bylaw. I would be open to voting in favour of a revised version at final adoption on May 5 2026, provided that its application is limited to the mandatory heritage buildings and buildings that have gone unoccupied for a specified time. Failing that, Council should at the very least reduce the fines to the same levels as Montreal’s, require a reasonable notice period before inspections, and make corrective work within a reasonable period the default for minor specific individual offenses like many of those at section 2.1.2.
