These 12 Companies Received The Most Complaints In Quebec In 2022

Sometimes a good and/or service is simply so distasteful, upsetting and/or unfinished that it pushes the consumer to file a complaint. Ideally, this is rare. But for large companies, it can be pretty common. The complaints are catalogued by the province's Office de la protection du consommateur (OPC). It shared the list of 10 Quebec companies with the most complaints in 2022 with MTL Blog sister publication Narcity Québec.

Topping the list this year was furniture store Brault & Martineau, which received 1.6% of the total 21,929 complaints (365) filed to the OPC in 2022. This is a slight improvement from last year, when the company was responsible for 2% of the total complaints received in 2021.

Second, in terms of the number of complaints, was Farestore, an Ontario company that the OPC says was hit with a "flood of complaints" — bringing its annual total up to 296 — after mistakenly advertising an "unbeatable" airfare for flights to Europe amid a rocky restart to air travel in 2022. "This year has been marked by a chaotic recovery in the travel industry, where flight delays and cancellations increased the number of air travel complaints," the OPC wrote.

That said, Farestore's situation is an outlier case, according to the OPC, and most of the companies on the top ten list made it there because of alleged problems with long-standing goods or services, not from a one-off mistake.

Walmart and Best Buy tied for fifth place for most complaints (227 each). Videotron came in at number eight (176 complaints) tied with Ameublements Tanguay Inc. Amazon was in ninth place (147). The OPC credits Amazon's presence on the list to the popularity of online orders — more people making purchases means more people making complaints, too.

The other entries on the list were Surplus RD (third place; 286 complaints), The Brick Warehouse (fourth; 234), Whirpool Canada (sixth; 203), Star Laser Inc. (seventh; 192); and Bell (10th; 142).

The OPC cautions that this annual report includes the total number of complaints in 2022, including unverified reports.

This article's cover image was used for illustrative purposes only.