MONTREAL—The Quebec government has issued just two fines totalling $25,000 to short-term rental platforms since a March 2023 fire at an Airbnb in Old Montreal, which killed seven people.

The almost total lack of action belies the reality of the short-term rental crisis in the province’s largest city. More than 47 per cent of the short-term rentals on Airbnb in Montreal are unregistered, according to data from Inside Airbnb, which analyses rental activity on the platform. This, despite a 2021 law compelling people with short-term rentals in Quebec to register their properties with the provincial government.

Many hoped the devastating Old Montreal fire would finally give that law teeth. In the fire’s wake, fingers pointed everywhere, particularly at Airbnb, the rental platform on which six of the deceased booked their accommodations. 

The paltry number of fines reflects how, despite the Quebec government’s promise to crack down on the platforms, the situation remains fundamentally the same as it was nearly two years ago: scads of building owners and operators willing to break laws to make bank, and a number of companies—Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com and others—seemingly willing to accommodate them.

For its part, Airbnb says the data provided by Inside Airbnb is “false.” Airbnb spokesperson Matt McNama told me that it doesn’t differentiate between short- and long-term listings, though the Inside Airbnb data provided to The Logic does, in fact, differentiate between the two. McNama didn’t respond to a request for Airbnb’s data on short-term rentals.

Quebec has made companies like Airbnb liable for up to $100,000 for each unregistered listing appearing on their sites. Yet this law, enacted in the months after the fire, has in many regards been a paper tiger.

Short-term Airbnb listings plunged by 68 per cent in the months after the fire, according to Inside Airbnb, though they’ve ticked steadily upwards since the fall of 2023. Overall, short-term rentals in Montreal have more or less returned to the status quo, according to data from AirDNA, which analyses listings on all short-term rental websites.

Airbnb said it takes concerns about illegal listings seriously. McNama said the company has complied with what he called the most “cumbersome and duplicative” set of municipal and provincial laws in Canada. Meanwhile, the new provincial law has had an effect since taking effect on Sept. 1, 2023, with a dramatic increase in compliance rates since its enactment, according to the province.

Yet the new law hasn’t necessarily forced dodgy hosts off the platform, only created loopholes for them to crawl through. Last month, an investigation by Ricochet found that more than 1,500 entire homes and apartments in Quebec were being rented out illegally, either because owners were fraudulently listing them as primary residences, thus allowing them to rent properties in otherwise restricted areas, or because they were using the same registration numbers for multiple addresses.

Over 70 per cent of Airbnb “hosts” in Montreal list multiple properties, according to Inside Airbnb data—as strong a suggestion as any that most aren’t hosts in the Airbnb sense at all. Apart from being illegal, such short-term rentals aggravate Montreal’s existing housing crisis. “The new law has changed absolutely nothing on the ground,” a housing rights advocate told La Presse just over a year after the fire.

For short-term rental landlords, the risk is apparently worth it, with the average rate in Montreal increasing almost 40 per cent in the last three years to roughly $230 per night, according to AirDNA data. That’s about $6,900 per month—far more than the $1,096 an owner typically gets for a two-bedroom apartment in Montreal. 

Meanwhile, the city has a total of three dedicated inspectors operating in three boroughs to police roughly 10,000 short- and long-term rental listings on the island of Montreal. They have doled out all of 126 tickets of up to $4,000 for bylaw infractions since March 2023, according to city planning advisor Marie-Claude Parent. 

Airbnb may well be concerned about illegal rentals, yet the company has arguably always had a conflict of interest. Unlawful listings deliver the company reservation and booking fees just as well as lawful ones. Shedding dodgy listings might well be a corporate and legal imperative, but doing so necessarily hurts the company’s bottom line. 

So it was a surprise to hear Montreal city councillor Serge Sasseville blame not Airbnb but the Quebec government for the relative inaction on illegal bookings in Montreal. To be sure, Sasseville is no fan of Airbnb rentals, which he calls “a scourge” that proliferate in his downtown borough, despite only being allowed on Sainte-Catherine Street. 

Yet the government of François Legault, he pointed out, could fix the bulk of the Airbnb problem simply by enforcing its own laws—it just chooses not to. Montrealers, after all, don’t much like Legault, if his on-island seat count is any indication, and the feeling is apparently mutual. “They govern as though Montreal doesn’t exist,” he told me, suggesting that Quebec’s callousness is ultimately Airbnb’s gain.

Quebec Ink will return in January.

Martin Patriquin is The Logic’s Quebec correspondent. He joined in 2019 after 10 years as Quebec bureau chief for Maclean’s. A National Magazine Award and SABEW winner, he has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Walrus, Vice, BuzzFeed and The Globe and Mail, among others. He is also a panelist on CBC’s “Power & Politics.”