Last reviewed: 14 September 2026

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Quebec fixed a conflict of interest in its home warranty by creating one nonprofit

As our Canada home warranty guide explains, what Canadians usually mean by a "new home warranty" — a mandatory, statutory builder-defect warranty, not a purchased home-systems service contract — already has a well-known example in Ontario's Tarion. Quebec runs its own version of the same basic idea, under the Plan de garantie des bâtiments résidentiels neufs, established in 1999 under the province's Building Act. What makes Quebec's story distinct is a structural problem the program had for its first 15 years, and the specific fix the province chose.

The original problem: administrators tied to the industry they were policing

From the plan's creation in 1999 until the end of 2014, the Régie du bâtiment du Québec (RBQ) — the provincial regulator responsible for the plan — delegated its actual day-to-day administration, including deciding builder-defect claims, to a small number of private organizations, each affiliated with a provincial home-builders' trade association. That structure created an obvious appearance problem: the body a homeowner had to bring a claim to, when a builder had allegedly done defective work, was itself connected to that builder's own industry group.

2015: one nonprofit, at arm's length from builders

The Regulation respecting the guarantee plan for new residential buildings, which took effect January 1, 2015, restructured the plan specifically to remove that conflict. Under the new regulation, the plan can be administered only by a single nonprofit organization, and that organization is Garantie de construction résidentielle (GCR) — the only body authorized to issue a guarantee certificate on a new home in Quebec from that date forward. GCR's own governance was built to keep any one interest from controlling it: its board has 13 seats, 7 appointed directly by the RBQ itself (construction professionals, a legal professional, someone from the financial sector, and government representatives) and 6 appointed by GCR under a fixed split — 3 identified with construction-industry associations and 3 identified with consumer associations, including at least one representing condominium-sector consumers specifically. Builders' associations still get seats, in other words; they just no longer get to run the plan's administration the way the pre-2015 structure let them.

What the plan actually covers, and for how long

GCR's coverage runs on three separate clocks from a new home's reception (handover) date, not one blanket period the way Ontario's Tarion program structures its own 1/2/7-year windows: one year for defects and non-apparent problems present but undiscovered at reception, three years for hidden defects (vices cachés) discovered after that, and five years — running from the end of the work, not reception — for defects in design, construction, or execution, and for ground/soil defects. A homeowner who sells during any of these windows passes the remaining coverage on to the buyer; the warranty follows the building, not the original purchaser.

A verifiable, dated result: 100% inspection coverage since 2023

Since 2023, GCR reports that every new home covered by the mandatory plan gets at least one GCR inspection at one of several stages of construction, up from partial coverage in earlier years. GCR's own published figures say it has inspected more than 85,000 residential units since 2015, catching and getting corrected roughly 80,000 non-conformities before or shortly after handover, and that on-site construction defects have fallen by roughly half over the past several years — the kind of measurable before/after result the pre-2015, industry-affiliated administrator structure never reported in comparable form.