It appears that Mr. Miloon Kothari, the UN's special rapporteur on adequate housing, has had as significant an impact across the country as he had when he visited our squat here in Vancouver last week.
UN to Canada: Take action on housing, homelessness!
Oct 22nd, 2007 by Michael Shapcott
The Wellesley Institute
Canada has received both a sharp reprimand and a strong call to action in the preliminary observations of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing, Miloon Kothari, in his preliminary observations at the end of his fact-finding mission to Canada (October 22, 2007).
The Wellesley Institute was proud to host Mr. Kothari during the Toronto portion of his mission, and we helped to co-ordinate his meetings with non-governmental groups across the country. We'll be posting lots of material from the Canadian mission on the Wellesley web site in the coming days.
The preliminary observations are the first stage towards completing a major review on Canada’s compliance with its international housing rights obligations. Mr. Kothari, who visited five Canadian cities and several Aboriginal communities during his mission from October 9 to 22. He met with senior government officials, representatives of non-governmental organizations and people who are directly experiencing Canada’s nation-wide affordable housing and homelessness crisis.
“Everything I witnessed on this mission confirms the deep and devastating impact of this national crisis on the lives of women, youth, children and men,” said Mr. Kothari. “Canada is one of the richest countries in the world, which makes the prevalence of this crisis all the more striking.”
Mr. Kothari’s preliminary observations are a devastating indictment of almost two decades of funding cuts by governments in Canada, not just of housing programs but also income assistance and other initiatives.
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Feds urged to draft housing planBy MEGAN GILLIS, SUN MEDIA
The federal government must launch a national strategy on housing to pull the country out of a decade-old national crisis, the United Nation's special rapporteur on adequate housing said in Ottawa yesterday.
Miloon Kothari visited cities and First Nation territories across Canada to study homelessness and poor housing, the problems faced by women and aboriginals, and the impact the Olympic Games will have on Vancouver.
"Everywhere that I visited in Canada I met people who are homeless and living in inadequate and insecure housing conditions," Kothari said. "On this mission, I heard of hundreds of people who have died as a direct result of Canada's nationwide housing crisis."
The United Nations deems it a "national emergency" when reviewing Canada's compliance with the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Kothari said. Yet Canada has had an annual multi-billion dollar federal budget surplus for almost a decade.
"Everything that I witnessed on this mission confirms the deep and devastating impact of this national crisis on the lives of women, youth, children and men," Kothari said.
Canada once led in progressive housing policies but no longer, since governments have cut budgets, cancelled a national housing program that created 500,000 homes, and slashed income support programs as housing costs spiked, he said.
Kothari recommended that the federal government:
* Start a large-scale plan to build social housing units across the country;
* Renew the Affordable Housing Initiative and National Homelessness Strategy, both set to expire, for the next decade;
* Renew a program that helps low-income people fix up their homes, to combat bed bugs, cockroaches, mice and chronic mould;
* Make sure every household has clean water and proper sanitation when a quarter of aboriginal households now don't;
* Work with the provinces to create a consistent system of tenant protection and rent control.
Kothari didn't just say that Canada has to act to end the crisis, said Mary-Martha Hale of the Alliance to End Homelessness.
HIDDEN PROBLEM
"He also made the point Canada has done this before and has been very successful in providing social housing," Hale said. "Then, in the mid-1990s, it stopped and social assistance rates across the country dropped. That combination has created the problem we have now.
"People working in the field have been speaking up. It's appreciated that an international body has turned a light on just how shocking the situation is here in Canada. There hasn't been a lot of political will."
In Ottawa, Kothari visited Centre 454, the Shepherds of Good Hope and emergency shelters for women and teens.
"I was repeatedly told that those few sanctuaries that are there have to turn people away," Kothari said.
He also heard that gentrification is pricing the poor out of Ottawa neighbourhoods and there isn't a municipal plan to ensure mixed-income neighbourhoods and to protect social housing.
In the capital, the housing "crisis" is less visible than in other cities.
"A lot of the housing crisis is hidden-- the condition of social housing, the density situation of multiple families living in an apartment and the disrepair of buildings that are aging," he said.
"The homeless are out on the street -- there are thousands more who are one step away."
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articleUN housing envoy scolds Canadians
`Radical shift in policy' needed to tackle crisis, official warns after visit Oct 23, 2007 04:30 AM
Bruce Campion-Smith
Ottawa Bureau Chief OTTAWA–An ambitious national housing program and a strategy to combat poverty is urgently needed to tackle the disaster-like conditions of homelessness and inadequate housing found across the country, a United Nations envoy says.
Miloon Kothari, the UN's special rapporteur on adequate housing, warned yesterday that Canadians are becoming complacent to the crisis unfolding on the streets and that public attitudes could soon mirror the indifference found in the United States.
"What is beginning here has already happened in the U.S., where you speak to people (and) they say, `the homeless are there by choice,' or `it's those drug addicts,'" Kothari said in an interview yesterday. "That is a very serious mental shift."
Kothari ended his two-week visit to Canada yesterday with harsh words for provincial and federal politicians, painting a dramatic picture of a crisis caused by governments' deep funding cuts in the mid-1990s to housing programs and social assistance that once helped impoverished Canadians afford a home.
The result is crowded homeless shelters, tenants living in substandard housing and aboriginal communities without safe drinking water.
"I am very disturbed by the housing situation in Canada," he told a news conference. "The national housing crisis ... needs national attention."
During his visit, he travelled to Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton and Montreal as well as aboriginal reserves. He visited shelters, talked to housing advocates and reviewed reports. And at the end of his visit yesterday, he questioned how a country like Canada, with its rich surpluses and history of progressive housing policies, had let the housing crisis get so out of hand.
"You have had a history of very progressive housing policies which were summarily abandoned in the mid-'90s, and the consequences of that are here tragically for all of us to see," he said.
"I hope there is a radical shift in government policy," Kothari said.
Coupled with the cuts to government housing programs, Kothari said an "astronomical rise" in house prices has placed rental and ownership housing out of reach for many.
NDP MP Bill Siksay (Burnaby-Douglas), who attended the briefing, said the federal government has stripped the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corp., a Crown corporation, of its mandate to tackle the affordable housing shortage.
Recommendations in Kothari's preliminary report include:
Federal funding and programs for a comprehensive housing strategy, co-ordinated with the provinces. That includes extending Ottawa's affordable housing program, due to expire next year, by another 10 years.
A large-scale initiative to build social housing units and more money to refurbish existing affordable housing.
Special attention and funding to help people on the "margins," such as women, youth, seniors and aboriginals.
A "comprehensive and properly funded" poverty-reduction strategy. "Grossly inadequate" social assistance programs have left many impoverished tenants unable to break the cycle of poverty, he said.
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Of these hotels, all were open and operating except for the Pender, Marr and Rainier hotels, although some were operating at less than full capacity.
