We are heartbroken and outraged by the death of a 36-year-old tenant in Lachine. She took her own life on the morning of March 4th, 2026, the day a bailiff and three Montreal police arrived to evict her from her home.

We are hosting a vigil Thursday, 6PM, at the Tribunal administratif du logement, Village Olympique, to honour this tenant’s memory and to continue the fight against evictions.

It's hard to not assume, because of the date she chose, that she took her life because she was having her housing forcibly taken away from her. She lived in a rooming house. Her room was only roughly 19 square metres at $700/month.

Her building is owned by a numbered company, 2617-2700 Quebec Inc, or Montreal Living, run by John Knot. Knot lives on a $1.6 million property in Beaconsfield almost fifty times the size of the small space his tenant died in.

Her death was reported in a CTV News video titled “3 Montreal police officers hospitalized after exposure to toxic gas,” with a similar title in the Francophone mainstream news. Apparently, her death was not worth mentioning in the headline.

News articles focused on the mild physical symptoms experienced by the cops who opened her door — who have no lasting injuries. We had to read a few paragraphs in to find her death discussed so passingly: “They also found a 36-year-old woman inside the apartment who was pronounced dead at the scene.” We are told to care more about three nauseated cops than the life of one poor person sentenced to eviction.

We want to be clear that we had no relationship with this tenant. From our research, it seems she moved to Lachine to reduce her cost of living because adequate housing, and social and institutional support were not available to her. She worked on and off in call centres while trying to build her own business. She was known as a talented and intelligent writer, and loved poetry and her cat.

She was evicted by the TAL for missing four months of rent. She was evicted — taking her life — so that John Knot could continue to make money off of his unit. With his millions of dollars in property, how much did he need this monthly $700 tribute? Was it worth a human life?

We know and understand the violence of evictions. We have worked with seniors who have been evicted or harassed out of homes, mothers who have been kicked to the streets with their children, and, one woman who took her own life shortly after her eviction. Other people, like Raphaël “Napa” André who froze to death while sheltering in a chemical toilet in January of 2021, have died from the impossible conditions of living on the street.

There are enough empty houses, storefronts, abandoned buildings, and AirBnBs to house everyone in this city. And yet, we can only speculate on the multitudes who die from suicide under financial stress or despair, or who are sooner or later killed by their eviction. We know and feel the unforgiving nature of a system that advantages landlords and property systems while slowly and insidiously stripping away our dignity and stability as tenants.

We are not talking about a case of an especially bad landlord, cruel individuals, or a broken system. These are private property relations working as they logically will and have always worked.

We call for justice against the TAL that ordered this eviction. As rents are increasing, the TAL processed a record of over 41,000 evictions across Quebec for nonpayment of rent last year. People are expected to find homes while systematically being refused apartments because of their history of eviction.

We call for justice against the landlord who forced through the eviction for the sake of maintaining his rental revenues. We call for justice against the police and bailiff who came to execute the eviction. How much fear and despair that this woman died feeling because of these people and institutions – how much distress and defeat – we can only speculate from her final actions.

For the tenants of Montreal we have the following message:

Justice can only come from us, from our neighbourhood and tenant councils; from our acts of resistance against evictions and rent increases. The right to housing is universal. Nobody should own our homes for profit or push us out into the street. We must defend our homes, expropriate them, and build a new world together.