PQ leader points to high immigration for school and housing crises. Is he right?

In the early days of the provincial election campaign, Parti Québécois Leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon used the Roger-Comtois High School in Quebec City as a backdrop to explain why his party wants to reduce immigration levels.

He said the school had to add 24 modular classrooms to deal with overcrowding, blaming the issue on Quebec’s “greatly exceeded” immigration capacity.

Days later, St-Pierre Plamondon made a similar connection, this time between immigration and the housing crisis.

“We are not talking about blaming anyone, but rather about blaming very bad policies under the CAQ, and more specifically, under Christine Fréchette’s CAQ when she was minister of immigration,” he said last week in Quebec City.

He said those policies “created an imbalance between supply and demand and an undeniable impact on prices.”

But is the province’s immigration rate truly behind these problems?

Most of the experts CBC consulted agree that a surge in immigration does contribute to supply and demand issues, but they say it’s important to acknowledge longstanding trends that created these problems.

WATCH | Fact-checking PQ on immigration claims:

PQ fact check: Is immigration contributing to Quebec’s housing crisis and school overcrowding?

During its campaign, the Parti Québécois linked a “loss of control on immigration” to overcrowded schools and a lack of affordable housing in the province. But education and housing experts we spoke to say it’s not that straightforward.

Unusable classrooms, existing issues

According to data from Statistics Canada, the number of new immigrants in Quebec climbed under former prime minister Justin Trudeau’s government. 

Temporary immigration in particular surged even higher after the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021, the number of combined permanent and temporary immigration numbers rose by about 54,000. In 2024, it rose by almost 140,000.

According to the Association québécoise du personnel de direction des écoles (AQPDE), a surge in the number of first generation immigrant students has indeed driven school overcrowding in regions like Quebec City and the Montérégie.

“Right now, we’re asking teachers to teach outside instead of going to the gymnasium, we ’re asking teachers to go eat in their cars because we don’t have any room, we’re moving libraries to [turn them into] classrooms,” said André Bernier, the association’s president.

But Bernier points out overcrowding existed prior to the recent immigration surge, though at a lower level. 

He says the problem also exists in regions where immigration is much less significant, like in the MRC des Appalaches or Beauce.

Bernier says there’s also been a lack of investment in maintaining school infrastructure.

“In some schools there are areas which are not available because the schools are too old. They cannot use the rooms,” he explains.

Variety of factors contributing to housing crisis

The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) does draw a link between immigration and vacancy rates in its 2026 Housing Market Outlook report.

But Olivier Jacques from the Université de Montréal’s school of public health says that a variety of factors have contributed to the housing crisis.

He says measures by the federal government to help homeowners — like the exemption on capital gains tax for a primary residence or letting landlords deduct mortgage interest from rental income — have also increased demand and driven prices up.

“Fiscal policies were just giving too much money to owners. It increased prices because there’s incentive to put your money in housing,” he said.

He says new housing construction has also not kept pace with the need and even less so when it comes to social or affordable housing.

“The federal government basically withdrew from the housing field in 1995 to 2020. Trudeau tried to come back in but by the time the program was implemented it was basically 2020, so that’s 25 years without any federal spending on housing,” he said.

He explains that while Quebec has invested in social housing since then, it hasn’t been enough.

Pattern of ‘scapegoating’ immigrants

The Comité d’Action de Parc-Extension adds that new construction has been dominated by  “condo” style rentals, which it says don’t meet most people’s needs. 

“What it has actually meant concretely is an enormous amount of public money being handed out to real estate developers to build so-called “affordable housing” or in some cases, luxury housing that is far too expensive for the vast majority of people who are struggling,” said Amy Darwish, the committee’s co-ordinator.

She argues that political parties have a pattern of “scapegoating” immigrants to boost their popularity. 

“What we really need is a serious investment in social housing and measures that actually protect tenants such as rent control, and rent freezes, as well as a moratorium on evictions,” she said.

“I think these are things that would actually make housing more affordable.”

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