Pets in apartments: no-pet clauses before the TAL

A decision of Quebec’s rental tribunal illustrates the shift now under way in the province on lease clauses that ban pets — but the last word has not yet been spoken.

In a housing co-operative in Saint-Philippe, on Montreal’s South Shore, the board of directors could not agree on much. Some of its members had, for years, turned a blind eye to a tenant’s cats. A former manager saw things differently: a formal notice went out, and proceedings were launched before the Tribunal administratif du logement (TAL), Quebec’s specialized rental tribunal, to have the lease terminated. The result is a decision that, beneath an ordinary surface, neatly illustrates how quickly Quebec housing law is evolving on the question of pets. The case is Habitations La Gaillarde c. Martin, decided on April 27, 2026 by administrative judge Anne Mailfait of the TAL’s Longueuil office.

The facts, in brief

The tenant has rented her unit from Habitations La Gaillarde since 2014. Her lease allows pets in principle, but refers to the building’s by-laws, which impose a series of conditions: one cat per unit, vaccinated and sterilized; no dogs, except on medical proof of a disability requiring an assistance dog trained by a recognized school; a maximum weight of 12 to 15 pounds for any dog exceptionally tolerated; mandatory leash; and so on.

Ms. Martin had three cats. After a formal notice dated July 14, 2023, she agreed to part with only one of them and kept the other two. No complaint was ever made against her, either before or after that notice. The testimony of the landlord’s representative — herself the president of the board — revealed that the TAL proceedings flowed from a non-unanimous board decision, imposed by a former manager whom the tribunal describes as being full of her own authority. Ms. Martin, for her part, explained that her two cats are essential to her young son’s mental well-being, and filed two medical certificates dated 2021 and 2023 — certificates the board had received but, in the tribunal’s words, wrongly chosen to ignore.

The tribunal dismissed the application to terminate the lease. But it is the way it got there that deserves a closer look.

No complaint, no prejudice, no termination

The first ground is the most conventional. To terminate a lease for a tenant’s breach, article 1863 of the Civil Code of Québec requires proof of “serious prejudice” to the landlord or to the other occupants. Here, the evidence showed no complaint at all, before or after the formal notice. Judge Mailfait recalls that hypothetical or anticipated fears — in this case, the fear that dismissing the application would set a precedent for other tenants tempted to get pets — cannot establish serious prejudice. That gap in the evidence was, in the tribunal’s own words, fatal to the application: the landlord’s case was doomed from the outset, regardless of any debate about the Charter.

This is a useful and often overlooked reminder: whatever a lease or building by-law says, a landlord who wants to terminate a lease because of an animal must prove concrete harm — noise, damage, neighbours’ complaints, unsanitary conditions — not a mere management principle or a vague fear of losing control over the building.

A cat-versus-dog distinction that smells like a poorly drafted by-law

The second ground is more original: the tribunal questions whether the building’s by-law is itself potentially discriminatory. The by-law allows a dog owner to invoke a disability, within the meaning of section 10 of Quebec’s Charter of human rights and freedoms, in order to keep an assistance dog — but offers no equivalent opening to a cat owner who needs animal-assisted therapy. The judge essentially asks why a by-law would draw that distinction between two disability-based defences depending on the species of animal involved. The question is formally left open in the decision — the tribunal did not need to answer it to resolve the dispute — but it sends a clear signal to landlords who draft such rules: a set of criteria without a coherent and neutral justification may well backfire on its author.

Animal-assisted therapy: an increasingly recognized defence

Third ground: the evidence of the medical needs of Ms. Martin’s son persuaded the tribunal, which authorized the presence of the two cats on the basis of the case law recognizing that defence. The defence based on animal-assisted therapy (zoothérapie) — showing that an animal meets a genuine physical or mental health need — is thus taking firmer root in the TAL’s case law as an argument capable of neutralizing a prohibition or restriction clause.

Liberty and privacy: the TAL follows a decision that is… under appeal

This is the most striking passage of the decision. Although the three preceding grounds were more than enough to dismiss the landlord’s application, Judge Mailfait chose to go further. She states that there is no reason to confine the meaning and scope of this case to its particular facts, and fully endorses the reasoning of her colleague, administrative judge Suzanne Guévremont, in Desjardins c. Amilis inc. et SPCA, decided on March 12, 2026. In that Montreal case, the TAL went so far as to strike down a lease clause banning pets, holding that such a prohibition infringes the right to liberty (section 1 of the Quebec Charter) and the right to privacy (section 5), because choosing to share one’s daily life with a companion animal is a fundamentally personal act that reveals one’s values, sensibility and way of life.

Judge Mailfait picks up and extends that reasoning in tones that are almost legislative: she recalls that articles 1855, 1862 and 1863 of the Civil Code already give landlords every tool they need to act when a real problem arises, that article 976 requires neighbours to tolerate one another, and that society today recognizes animals’ right to live and to be protected from cruelty. Banning their presence outright from a dwelling, she writes, would amount to marginalizing tenants who own pets — unless the legislature one day decided to create two “distinct communities”, one of them made up of buildings reserved for households with animals, a scenario she presents as clearly undesirable.

Why this case stands out

What makes this decision singular is not so much its outcome — the tenant wins, which is hardly surprising given the weakness of the evidence of prejudice — as the way the tribunal chose to go well beyond what was strictly necessary to decide the dispute. In law, this is called an obiter dictum: a comment that was not required to decide the case, but that the court makes anyway, often to steer the future development of the law.

Yet the shift begun in Desjardins is anything but set in stone. That decision is the subject of an appeal duly authorized by the Court of Québec on June 22, 2026: according to an official statement by the Montreal SPCA, the Honourable Justice Scott Hugues found that several questions raised in the case are serious, new and of general interest, justifying an appeal. The Corporation des propriétaires immobiliers du Québec (CORPIQ), the landlords’ association supporting the appeal, rightly points out that the prevailing case law continues, for now, to recognize the validity of no-pet clauses. In other words, Judge Mailfait chose to endorse publicly, and enthusiastically, a precedent that is not yet final — a choice that reflects an assumed vision of the law as an evolving reality, but that also carries the risk, should the Court of Québec overturn Desjardins, of having to retrace her steps one day.

The fact that two administrative judges, in two different TAL offices (Montreal and Longueuil), some six weeks apart, converged on the same generous reading of the rights to liberty and privacy is nevertheless no coincidence. It reflects a deeper trend: a specialized tribunal increasingly receptive to Charter-based arguments in housing matters, in a social context where the emotional bond between people and their companion animals is better and better documented — and where the legislature, despite a petition of 33,157 signatures tabled in the National Assembly in 2022 and a bill to the same effect (Bill 494, introduced in 2023), has still not settled the question itself.

Key takeaways

For landlords: a blanket, automatic ban on pets, applied without regard to the circumstances, is becoming an increasingly risky bet — especially against a long-standing tenant with no history of complaints whose animal meets a genuine need. The mere wish to “keep control” of the building is not a sufficient objective to justify interfering with a tenant’s fundamental rights. It is far better to document every concrete problem systematically than to rely on the text of the lease alone, and to review internal by-laws to remove arbitrary distinctions between categories of animals that could appear discriminatory.

For tenants: a no-pet clause remains presumptively valid until a tribunal has struck it down in your own file — this decision is not an automatic green light for anyone. That said, a well-prepared file can make all the difference: keep evidence that your animal causes no nuisance, obtain serious medical documentation if the animal meets a physical or mental health need, and respond promptly to any formal notice rather than burying your head in the sand. The burden of proof lies first on the landlord, who must show real prejudice — an argument that is often stronger, and for now legally less uncertain, than relying on the Charter alone.

For everyone: the appeal in Desjardins c. Amilis inc. was heard on October 14, 2026 (in French) by Justice Chantal Massé of the Court of Québec, with the SPCA intervening; judgment has been reserved, with no date announced. The outcome of that appeal will determine whether the shift begun by the TAL in 2026 becomes the norm, or turns out to be an episode destined to be corrected.

Cats, Dogs and Residential Leases: Quebec Housing Law Is Switching Sides