Arnold Bennett

By Dan Laxer
The Suburban

Arnold Bennett says he will continue to work for tenants’ rights “until they carry me out on a stretcher,” but he is going to need help from the community to keep his Housing Hotline open.

The long-time social activist recently launched a GoFundMe campaign. Until now he had for the most part been funding the hotline himself. He did have some government funding at the beginning, but he says government money comes with conditions and limitations. His work as a professional translator, writer, and consultant afforded him enough steady income to do that. But competition from AI, he says, is starting to eat away at that revenue.

The actual hotline, a phone number that people could call for advice on tenants’ rights, was launched in 1980. Soon after, Bennett was running two in-person legal clinics a week with a staff of paralegals, access to lawyers, and other experts, in NDG, and then downtown, right up until the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Covid did a number of things,” Bennett says. “Whatever staff I had I either had to lay them off, or people retired.” Since then it’s just been the phone line. He still has lawyers he can refer people to, and an assistant. “It’s not like the old days where I would have people doing three shifts a day.”

The Arnold Bennett Housing Hotline had its beginnings about fifty-five years ago, when Bennett was at McGill University studying toward a BA, and then an MA, specializing in community and labour history. He wrote an article for the McGill Daily about the fight, spearheaded by late housing activist Lucia Kowaluk, to save the McGill-Parc area from development. He was 18 at the time. After that, he wrote a full-page article on the Quebec government’s rental board reform, detailing “all the new rights that people had, and suddenly I was the expert.”

His activism led, a few years later, to his being elected to city council in NDG with the fledgling Montreal Citizens’ Movement. It wasn’t his intention to seek office. But after suggesting to the party that they run a candidate in the neighbourhood, the party convinced Bennett that he should be the guy.

By the time Bennett spoke with The Suburban the GoFundMe campaign had been up for less than a week, but had garnered twice the amount he had asked for. “I knew we had some support out there,” he said, “I didn’t realize people were going to be so generous.” Which speaks to what the Housing Hotline has come to mean to the community over the years.

Bennett had originally hoped to raise $5,000. At the time of this writing donations totalled $10,429. He’s upped the goal to $15,000.

“Look, it’s a necessity,” says Bennett, now 73. “There are plenty of tenant groups around, even some good ones now operating in English which, when I started, we didn’t have. But there’s a certain type of advice you can give people that goes beyond what they can find on the (Tribunal administratif du logement) website, even with the jurisprudence that’s on there.”

“Every day or so,” he adds, “somebody calls me with something that’s really outrageous, and it really motivates me to keep going and do what I gotta do.” n