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“Bed bugs are a serious issue for us and we wanted to give ourselves the tools to handle this problem,” she said.

And the city is handling it – but just barely.

Data provided by the sanitation department reveals Montreal’s housing authority receives calls about bed bugs from roughly 10 per cent of its units every year. The numbers aren’t rising dramatically, but they aren’t decreasing either.

Ten per cent, however, is far from the total tally of infested homes owned and managed by the city.

“We inspect about half the units every year and we notice that 14 per cent have bed bugs – that’s on top of the calls we get,” Sanche said.

The problem doesn’t just affect lower-income residents. A few kilometres west of the large freezer, in the city centre, thousands of students are getting ready for the university year.

Many will realize the apartments they’ve just moved into had bed bugs waiting for them, says Leanne Ashworth, director of the Housing and Jobs Office at Concordia University.

September is a particularly bad time because the pests have had the hot summer to multiply and have been transported around town during the city’s big moving day, July 1, when thousands of leases expire.

“We have students who arrive and immediately start getting bitten and some who don’t know what’s going on until months later,” said Ashworth. “They think they have a rash or allergies.”

She says a significant part of her job is to educate new students about bed bugs and about their rights as tenants – particularly the fact landlords are legally required to pay extermination costs.