A Montreal renter says it was a protest in front of a St-Denis St. café that convinced her landlord to cancel a planned rent increase of nearly $300.

Lior Maharjan and other demonstrators had taken to the sidewalk in front of Le Club Café in the Plateau-Mont-Royal borough on Aug. 3, protesting the rent hike and handing out free iced coffee to would-be patrons of a business owned by her landlord’s son.

Three weeks later, Maharjan was declaring victory.

The landlord had agreed to cancel a planned increase of nearly 20 per cent. In exchange, Maharjan and her boyfriend, Kyle Croutch, would take on the cost of hydro and call off future protests.

While the landlord, Mario St-Cyr, told The Gazette the demonstration “resembled extortion,” Maharjan said the prospect of a $283 per month hike had left her no choice but to “think outside the box.”

A 20 per cent rent increase “would’ve totally changed our way of life,” Maharjan said, potentially forcing her and Croutch to spend less on groceries or even reconsider their careers.

The couple have lived there since 2021. Their monthly rent had already increased by $150 to $1,425 in 2024, with both the 2024 and the now-cancelled 2025 increase attributed to major construction work.

Montreal rents have soared in recent years, fuelled by a hot housing market and provincial guidelines allowing for rent hikes well above recent rates of inflation. This year’s guidelines suggested average increases between 4.1 and 5.9 per cent, depending on a unit’s heating source and who pays for it. In some circumstances, including major construction projects, rent increases can be even higher.

Though landlord advocates lauded this year’s increases as long overdue, tenant groups say the rent hikes only exacerbated an already acute housing affordability crisis. One such group, the Montreal Autonomous Tenants’ Union (SLAM), has responded by employing unconventional pressure tactics, in some cases “unionizing” buildings and convincing residents to refuse and negotiate rent hikes en masse.

Aside from their landlord’s son, Maharjan and Croutch are currently the only residents in their building, where other units are listed as short-term rentals. With no other tenants to work with, Maharjan, a SLAM member herself, said fellow members suggested protesting outside the café.

“It was a good move,” said Laurent St-Cyr, the majority owner of Le Club Café and Mario St-Cyr’s son.

It was “pretty audacious,” he said. “But it worked.”

Laurent is Maharjan’s neighbour, both living and running his café in his father’s building.

Though he is not the landlord, Maharjan said she thought it was fair to target Laurent’s café, showing The Gazette emails in which he had communicated on Mario’s behalf. Mario once held a stake in the business, which he has since sold to one of the café’s co-owners.

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“I don’t have any financial benefit” from helping Mario, Laurent said. “My father isn’t very good in English,” he said, sometimes asking for help communicating with anglophone tenants. Though Mario once held a stake in the café, Laurent said his father never played a role in making decisions.

The café lost about half of its usual revenue on the day of the protest, Laurent said, taking in around $700, as opposed to the $1,400 it earns on a typical day. Losing half a day’s revenue wasn’t significant for his business, Laurent said, adding that “it’s more the optics” that worried him.

“I can’t say we stopped everyone, but there were lots of groups” that avoided the café that day, Maharjan said. “Some large younger groups kind of looked at each other in front of the entrance and decided to go to the next restaurant over.”

Others “stuck around to have coffee” handed out by protesters, Maharjan said.

Lior Maharjan and other demonstrators had taken to the sidewalk in front of Le Club Café in the Plateau-Mont-Royal borough Aug. 3, 2025, to protest her rent hike.

Following the demonstration, Mario reached back out to Maharjan and Croutch, asking to reopen rent negotiations.

The trio’s rocky relationship long predated this year’s rent negotiations, as shown by almost three years’ worth of email exchanges. In 2023, Mario said he planned to stop renting out the couple’s unit, a plan he later dropped.

The emails show construction work had also been a source of contention, with Maharjan and Croutch complaining of the disruption to their lives, while Mario said the work was necessary. Rent increases were also a source of dispute.

In 2023, Mario attempted to raise the couple’s rent by $100 per month. But after the tenants refused the increase, he missed the deadline to take the case to the Tribunal administratif du logement (TAL).

“This is unfortunate for our relationship,” Mario wrote in a May 2023 email after the tenants pointed out that the deadline had passed.

In 2024, Mario agreed to lower a planned rent increase from $172 to $150 after the tenants asked to negotiate. This year, the three had begun sporadic negotiations in February after Mario had proposed the $283 increase, but hadn’t come close to an agreement before the protest.

“I’m absolutely not a dishonest landlord,” Mario said in a recent interview with The Gazette when asked about the increase. Since buying the property in 2022, he said he’d put over $350,000 into renovating the building, some of which Quebec guidelines allow landlords to pass on to tenants.

“It’s not construction that we wanted,” he said, but work that was necessary to prevent the building from falling apart.

SLAM’s tactics of protesting outside his son’s café were “extraordinary” and “very dishonest,” Mario said. Still, “it’s because of the protest that I gave in,” he said.

On Aug. 19, Mario and his partner met Maharjan, another SLAM member and one of her colleagues for negotiations. Croutch was out of the province at the time for work. Mario offered a 10 per cent increase, while Maharjan proposed a four per cent hike.

The parties left the table without a deal, but on Aug. 21 Mario emailed offering to cancel the rent increase, so long as the couple take on the cost of hydro. Maharjan and Croutch agreed, estimating it would cost them around $85 per month.

They also agreed to call off any further protests or boycotts of Le Club Café, cancelling a second protest scheduled for Aug. 23.

“We reached an agreement at the last minute,” Mario said, adding he learned “the problem was the tenants’ capacity to pay.”

“I’m extremely happy that they managed to find a compromise,” Laurent said. Without Laurent’s convincing, Mario said he likely wouldn’t have come to the agreement.

Maharjan said she was “looking forward to being able to sleep a bit more.” The situation had left her feeling “overwhelmed,” she said.

The result may have been a Montreal first, Maharjan said, telling The Gazette she has yet to hear of another landlord lowering a planned rent hike following protests targeting a business.

“Direct action is an effective means of protecting affordable rents,” she said.

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