Urgent action needed on resolving housing crisis, advocates say
Ottawa urged to ensure a concrete and comprehensive National Housing Strategy is in place by early next year.

thestar.com
By Emily Mathieu
Nov. 22, 2016

Canadian housing advocates are calling on the federal government to work quickly and collaboratively to ensure a concrete and comprehensive National Housing Strategy is in place by early next year.

The continued push for action follows the release of a new federal report Tuesday summarizing what was heard during country-wide consultations on what is widely recognized as a national housing crisis.

The government is listening, advocates agree, based on the long list of proposed solutions detailed in the report, but urgent action is needed.

Councillor Ana Bailao, when asked to weigh in on the level of urgency needed to address housing issues across Toronto, said the emergency light is officially on.

“We are starting to hit roadblocks on all these files, we have shelters that are over capacity, we have the backlog on (Toronto Community Housing),” where more than $900 million has been invested, but an additional $1.7 billion is needed to repair aging housing stock, said Bailao, after speaking at a homelessness event at the Church of the Holy Trinity.

“We have units right now that are boarded up and if we don’t have the commitment from the other levels of government, if we don’t have this long-term strategy, there are some pretty tough decisions that will have to be made,” she said.

Tuesday’s report, entitled What We Heard: Shaping Canada’s National Housing Strategy, capped off four months of consultation. Almost 7,000 Canadians weighed in through reports, focus groups and written submissions on the need to boost and repair affordable housing stock, improve the living conditions of vulnerable people and indigenous communities, collect data, and examine existing laws and policies.

Minister Jean-Yves Duclos, in the report, said “Canada needs a National Housing Strategy as a vehicle for social inclusion,” and the ministry has said the plan is expected to be in place by early 2017.

The authors also stated there would be hard work ahead, as all parties involved worked to find ways to use “finite government funds to maximum effect” and balance expectations against those financial constraints.

The release coincided with National Housing Day, which is why advocates, activists and politicians gathered at the church and site of the Toronto Homeless Memorial.

The mood was a mix of optimism and frustration.

“We don’t need strategy. We need action,” said Don Weitz, an anti-psychiatry and social justice activist, who read a spoken word piece he dedicated to missing and murdered indigenous women.

Also at the church was Pedro Barata, co-chair of the National Housing Collaborative, a coalition of non-profit and private housing associations and charitable foundations.

Barata said it was encouraging that the report contained what the collaborative had identified as key policy solutions; a federally led pan-Canadian initiative to end homelessness in 10 years, a national housing benefit, the creation of financial initiatives to boost the supply of market and non-market rental housing and a renewed commitment to improve and expand social housing.

“We know that it is much more expensive to just allow homelessness to go on then it is to actually deal with it on the front end, Barata said in an interview. The latest estimate on the cost of homelessness in Canada is $7 billion a year and a substantial portion of that cost is preventable or related to hospitalization and incarceration, he said.

Barata said it was vitally important that federal politicians and staff spend the next few months working with all levels of government, as well as advocates, community members and representatives from the housing and financial sectors to make sure a concrete strategy with substantial investments is in place and on schedule.