Quebec City steps up rat control at Saint-Roch church

Quebec City has stepped up rat control outside Église Saint-Roch in the Lower Town, adding poison bait, daily garbage pickup and evening cleaning crews after a video showed rats moving among people sleeping on the church’s forecourt.

City crews are now on site every evening from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m., seven days a week, to clear away food, and bins in the area are being emptied daily, Guillaume Giroud, a director in the city’s networks and living environments section, told Radio-Canada. Poison blocks installed in recent weeks are being eaten “extremely quickly,” which shows significant rat activity, he said (translated from French).

The city told Radio-Canada it received a significant number of complaints about rats in the area in September and called the situation exceptional and problematic. Community groups will give people sleeping outside sealed containers to store food, and the city said a planned installation of raised wooden terraces, benches and tables on the forecourt will be built so it cannot become a new shelter for rats.

The issue drew attention after a resident shared video with Radio-Canada of about a dozen rats going through the belongings and food of a person sleeping in a sleeping bag on the church steps on Rue Saint-Joseph.

Mayor Bruno Marchand called the living conditions of homeless people in the area “inhumane,” “impossible” and “unsanitary.” “Sleeping outside in these conditions, which are totally inhumane and incomprehensible in 2026, should not happen,” he said before Tuesday’s council meeting, Le Soleil reported (translated from French). He called the images “a black eye” for the city.

Marchand said the city had received about 10 complaints about rodents in the area over roughly 10 weeks and carries out rat control each time. He said homelessness is the biggest social problem in Quebec and urged the new Parti Québécois government to commit to ending it. “There is nothing better than taking people, offering them housing and supporting them,” he said (translated from French).

Stéphane Lachance, leader of the official opposition party Respect citoyens, said the images made his “blood run cold” and called for more frequent and earlier garbage collection downtown (translated from French).

Pest control specialist Guillaume Allard of Groupe Allard told Radio-Canada he believes several thousand rats live in the area and that the church steps are “the epicentre,” with rats nesting beneath them. He said treatment must be kept up over time and should be done before winter (translated from French).

The new provincial government took office this week. Read more about the PQ cabinet sworn in on Oct. 21. More Quebec City news is on our Quebec City page, and our coverage of the new Espace Riopelle looks at another side of the city this week.

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