Canada recently lost a public policy giant; the unhoused lost an advocate and I lost a mentor.
Charles Pascal, long time educator and social justice advocate, widely considered the architect of full-day kindergarten in Ontario has died.
Not as widely known, he was also the fuel, as in providing funding for a historic housing advocacy movement.
As Colette Murphy, current chief executive officer of the Atkinson Charitable Foundation has explained, Charles believed that the key to be a proactive organization to advance a better future was to channel energy to “the architecture of ideas” — big ideas with the power to drive change in political culture and public policy.
As the first executive director of the Atkinson Charitable Foundation, Charles had the rare gumption to fund a grassroots advocacy group, the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee (TDRC). This little organization mounted a national housing campaign called the “one per cent solution” – a reference to the amount of funding governments had allocated to social housing before they slashed it. TDRC also fought for safe and adequate shelters, defended Tent City, and helped to put housing and homelessness on the national consciousness.
I was personally fortunate to be ‘tapped on the shoulder’ (as Charles would call it) when I was awarded the Atkinson Economic Justice Fellowship which funded my advocacy work nationally for close to six years. During that time, I steered the TDRC, worked nationally, authored my first book Dying for a Home, and produced several national films on homelessness.
I had the unique experience of watching Charles firsthand as he would listen and show respect to unhoused people, whether it was during Tent City activist Marty Lang’s presentation to his board of directors or in the middle of a busy drop-in centre having coffee with its members.
Charles walked the talk and believed that: “When it comes to making good public policy it’s really important that authentic lived experience drives what needs to happen.”
It was this sentiment that drove us at Toronto Disaster Relief Committee to declare homelessness a national, man-made disaster in 1998. It was simply the truth as always told to us by people who were homeless.
This was a moment in history that sparked a national campaign.
In 1998 Metro Toronto Council voted 53-1 to declare homelessness a disaster requiring federal aid. Multiple cities from Victoria to Ottawa eventually followed suit.
The campaign motivated Toronto’s Mayor Mel Lastman (who was wallowing in the shame of having stated there were no homeless in North York only a day before a homeless woman died there) to allow then city councillor Jack Layton to take the appeal for federal housing aid to the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. The Big City Mayors Caucus then voted that homelessness was a national unnatural disaster necessitating federal relief.
Homelessness became front page news. The Toronto Star, for the first time in Canadian journalism history, appointed reporter Cathy Dunphy to cover the homeless beat.
The Chrétien Liberal government took notice. The result? Federal ministers toured the Toronto/Canadian shelter/homeless disaster, exactly as if it was a natural disaster such as an ice storm or flood.
The formulaic political response in a natural disaster is for leaders to tour the devastation, offer emotional support to community members, TV cameras would broadcast the images and the promises, politicians then announce funding. Same for a social welfare disaster like homelessness.
For the first time, possibly in the world, a federal cabinet minister was appointed as minister responsible for homelessness and a new billion-dollar federal homelessness program was announced. The Supporting Communities Partnerships Initiatives (since renamed Homelessness Partnering Strategy and then Reaching Home) continues to this day.
However, a homelessness program is about short-term (now long-term) disaster relief and is not a housing program.
Several recessions later, two decades of neoliberal policies cutting income supports, a global pandemic, and the insatiable financialization of housing have further pushed people into housing precarity, worsening health and earlier deaths.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s 2017 national housing strategy has in no way come close to the pre 1993 national housing program that produced 20,000 new units of social housing annually.
Today, the simple truth is housing precarity and homelessness are causing unmeasurable suffering and early death in all communities across the country.
Tim Richter, President and CEO of the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness, recognizes the national scope of the crisis and uses the strong comparison to a natural disaster that we used in the 1990s: “The mass homelessness we’re seeing in Toronto & Canada is without question a disaster. It’s a disaster on the same scale – or bigger – than most of the biggest natural disasters in Canadian history.”
In those types of disasters, when people lose their homes, herculean efforts take place to re-house them.
Why are Canadian cities and towns not declaring homelessness and housing an emergency?
It’s not for lack of trying however the burden of that advocacy work has been on the front-line workers, unhoused people, and NGOs.
A 2020 campaign by Toronto’s Shelter and Housing Justice Network attempted to convince city council to issue an emergency declaration, but their efforts were always thwarted, seemingly by then Mayor Tory and senior bureaucrats. A 2023 attempt by activists, notably mostly health workers at the city’s Board of Health, similarly was thwarted. Municipal lawyers love to tell politicians what they can’t do.
However, in 2020 the City of Ottawa declared a housing and homelessness emergency.
Last month Hamilton City Council declared homelessness, the opioid addiction crisis and mental health an emergency.
Recently, the City of Toronto’s Economic and Community Development Committee passed a motion to declare homelessness an emergency in the City of Toronto. It goes to a full city council vote on May 10. Advocates are saying this should be a motion to declare homelessness AND housing an emergency.
None of these motions guarantee a political response, and the words are meaningless without specific solutions and demands. They are a tool that, with political savvy and solidarity, can advance solutions. Politicians do not necessarily know how to do politics and they need to learn how to mount a campaign that reflects what we are doing in the community.
What should municipalities do? It’s not rocket science.
Declare homelessness and housing an emergency and invite their provincial, territorial, and federal ministers for a tour of their crisis. Show them the conditions in the shelters, in the encampments. Provide opportunities for unhoused people to share their experience with them.
Be part of the architecture to save this country and its people.
Listen to the people, not the lawyers.
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