On the night of Thursday, Oct. 3 a fire engulfed a heritage building in Old Montreal, killing two people. The owner, Émile Benamor, was the same wealthy landlord whose illegal Airbnb burned down in March 2023, causing seven deaths. Benamor had turned his Airbnb into a death trap, notably by building windowless rooms and failing to install smoke detectors, condemning his tenants to burn alive. This time, the torched building was being used as a youth hostel. And once again, Benamor had set up windowless rooms!
At the time, we wrote: “Under this system, housing is not exchanged to meet everyone’s basic need for shelter, but to make as much money as possible. If the best way to do that is through short-term rentals, then people will do it, regardless of the law. And while we’re at it, why not put morality aside and save a few pennies by cutting corners on safety?” We’ve since learned that he’s involved in organized crime, which may have been behind the fire in October.
Benamor is a scoundrel of the worst kind: not only does he enrich himself by renting out death traps for inordinate sums, he was convicted of tax evasion in 2021, as well as being suspected of fraud.
Such practices grow like weeds in the fertile soil of the capitalist economy. As long as the profit motive reigns supreme, there will be Benamors sowing death—anything to reap a few more pennies. This class of parasites must be torn from our societies and thrown into the dustbin of history.
