Our union is a network of tenants helping each other fight landlords. Through a model of combative action, including marches and picket lines in front of landlords' offices and homes, banner installations, and pressure campaigns, we've secured hundreds and thousands of dollars for ourselves and other tenants of various landlords.

We believe in solidarity, mutual aid, community organizing, and direct action. These strategies allow us to fight for decreased rents, to stop evictions or harassment, and to better our buildings’ conditions. We train each other to become organizers who can autonomously build tenants' unions between neighbours in our buildings and on our streets.

We are fighting for a self-managed egalitarian and liberated society. Today, our neighbourhoods are owned and controlled almost entirely by landlords, the real estate industry and other corporations. We must put an end to social hierarchies and create a new system of housing distributed based on need instead of profit; built and maintained, not by capitalists, but by free, equal, and self organized people. We do not believe in reforms, electoralism, or mounting legal challenges, but in developing a popular fighting force that can beat landlords, abolish rent, spread self organisation, and expropriate property.

We have branches across many of Montreal’s neighbourhoods. No one in our union is paid. We are run entirely by everyday people organizing on the basis of equality and helping however they can. If you're a tenant, you should never again have to fight alone. Join our union. Let's fight together!

Who We Are

  • A non-hierarchical and horizontal union of tenants open to new members.

  • Using direct action and collective mobilization to defend our interests.

  • Based on solidarity and camaraderie.

  • A center for planning protests, postering, tabling, social events, militant actions, and popular education.

  • A place to help tenants organize their buildings and their neighbors. We help with door-knocking, flyering, building meetings, and planning pressure campaigns against specific landlords.

  • In solidarity with our homeless neighbors who are the most affected by the housing crisis. Growing numbers of people are thrown into homelessness by the increasing costs of rent.

  • Autonomous: independent of governments, funders, or corporations.

  • Combative: wherever there are evictions, rent increases, harassment and abuse, we want to be there fully committing ourselves to direct actions to fight back.

  • For the expropriation of landlords and other capitalists. For the management of our buildings and all socially produced wealth on the basis of self-organization, equality, autonomy, and distribution based on need not profit.

What Distinguishes us:

  • We are not a legal clinic or a know-your-rights organization. While these tools can be useful, they direct energy into government tribunals. These tribunals are not meant to bring an end to the housing-market. They are meant to standardize it and reduce some abuses. They are often difficult to navigate, indifferent, and partial towards landlords. We need to start solving, and increasing our capacity to solve, our problems through collective mobilization and direct action.

  • We are not paid militants. We want to avoid union bureaucracy and people who use unions as a vehicle for making money.

  • We're not lobbyists: the changes we want go beyond legislation. Chasing politicians only dilutes our demands, and creates an elite of people within our organization who are capable of engaging with officials. This environment is not hospitable towards a mass organization focused on local battles with landlords and one-on-one conversations between tenants.

  • We are not a service organization: We expect tenants to help us in return, however they can, in exchange for our solidarity. We offer no legal promises or contracts. We are all responsible for fighting back against landlords and need strength in numbers!

  • We are not a bureaucratic union. Union dues don't go to paying staff.

  • We are not reformists: We do not just want lower rent increases or fewer evictions. We want an end to landlordship and capitalism. We want the right to housing, self-management, and a society based on egalitarian and communitarian social relations. This can only come through mass militancy.

  • We're not looking to make friends with our landlords or to create a long-term relationship of compromise. The union is a space for tenants, by tenants, to advance our common interests.

What we Offer to New Union Members

  • Assistance in building organizing

  • Support for planning and executing actions against your landlord, including protests in front of the house of your landlord, picket lines, banner drops, telephone campaigns, and boycotts.

  • Mutual aid and support, such as help with house-sitting, petsitting, childcare, and shopping.

  • Opportunities to meet and help tenants like yourself, to learn together, and to help build a new community in your neighbourhood.