Protesters march during a National Housing Day protest in 2017 with individuals at the front of the march holding a red banner with the words: "Housing for all" written on it.
National Housing Day protest in 2017. Credit: Cathy Crowe Credit: Cathy Crowe

The Canadian Housing and Renewal Association (CHRA) says the following about National Housing Day:

National Housing Day began in 1998, with the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee (TDRC) urging all levels of government to declare “homelessness a national disaster requiring emergency humanitarian relief”. Later, in October that year, TDRC released their State of Emergency Declaration: An Urgent Call for Emergency Humanitarian Relief & Prevention Measures. Following this action, Toronto City Council passed a motion to support this declaration.

On November 22, 1998, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities’ Big City Mayor’s Caucus passed a similar motion. National Housing Day honours that motion. Almost a quarter century later, the disaster is worsening and we’re still living under a housing and homelessness crisis.

Since the 1990s, November 22 has been observed with public marches, rallies, sleepout protests, media conferences and panel discussions. Organized by grassroots groups in various cities, the events focused on disaster conditions and the need for federal and provincial housing solutions. Events were inclusive for people facing housing challenges by including them as speakers or performers, providing a communal hot meal and transit support to help people get to and from the event.

In recent years I’ve noted a shift in National Housing Day events.

November 22 is increasingly billed as a ‘celebration’. Sometimes its entire history is wiped out, this most noticeable on the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation website.

Toronto remains the epicentre of the housing disaster in Canada, but other cities are catching up. It’s why it’s important to expose the worsening conditions and government policy inaction.

These are excerpts from the original 1998 TDRC State of Emergency Declaration and there is little cause to celebrate. Spoiler alert: essentially everything is worse.

Why declare an emergency?

Our Moral and Legal Obligations: Homelessness is a Serious Human Rights Violation

All human rights violations are acts that disregard human dignity and the rule of law. The moral and ethical codes of the World’s religions, international law, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and federal and provincial human rights legislation, oblige Canadians and Canadian governments to refrain from acts, omissions, or other measures that result in violations of human rights.

The very existence of people who do not have any housing is by itself a most serious human rights violation. Societies with homeless people amidst great prosperity have established and are maintaining homeless-creating processes – day-to-day ‘normal’ mechanisms which result in people becoming unhoused and remaining unhoused, often for long periods of time. These are dehousing processes.

Disaster Now

  • Crisis facilities are already overcrowded. People are ending up in the streets, parks, and alleyways
  • Youth and families with children are the fastest growing population in shelters
  • Major cities search far beyond their boundaries for temporary housing for homeless families
  • Homeless people face poverty, hunger, malnutrition, and increased risk of violence, communicable diseases
  • Homelessness causes psychological and emotional pain that can exacerbate or precipitate agonizing deterioration of mental health
  • Prolonged homelessness permanently harms people; ultimately, it can kill them by exposure, illness, violence, or suicide

Worse To Come

  • Shelters and other temporary measures provide at best a stopgap. Crowding, insecurity and the risk of disease or violence means prolonged stays harm people
  • Homelessness is contributing to a developing toxic brew of disease including HIV/AIDs, tuberculosis, hepatitis, sexually transmitted diseases, and other communicable infections
  • Prolonged homelessness for children harms them for life
  • Repeated government task forces, other studies, inquests, and recommendations have produced little action, though documenting that the situation worsens yearly

Long-term Measures to be Implemented Now

  • Governments should implement a “one per cent solution”: All levels of government now spend an average one per cent of their total budgets on housing. Adding another one per cent, and henceforth devoting the total two per cent to long-term housing, would take the single largest step towards eliminating homelessness.
  • Governments should maintain and fund social benefits and services on a stable, long-term basis
  • Crisis shelters and aid agencies should receive stable, long-term funding until the homeless are housed

Sound familiar? Does this 1998 snapshot now describe your community? Have any of the long-term measures been implemented in your community?

Last month I submitted a deputation to a Toronto City Council committee and asked Toronto to declare November 22 as National Housing Day and to both fund and support a housing rally and press conference at Nathan Phillips Square.

It didn’t happen.

Instead, the City of Toronto is partnering with the Toronto Region Board of Trade to host a National Housing Day event billed as a fireside chat between Mayor Olivia Chow and broadcast journalist Steve Paikin.

Mayor Chow is well versed to speak on National Housing Day. If my memory is correct she attended Toronto’s first November 22 rally over 20 years ago and she certainly knows about the subsequent decades of advocacy by grassroots groups, the faith community, and unions for a national housing program.

But this fireside chat has some unusual co-sponsors: construction company EllisDon, Greenwin, Dream Unlimited, Habitat for Humanity and Options for Homes.

Maybe this is a strategy to bring developers on board with the City’s new plan for affordable housing but I’m skeptical. So is Greg Cook, an outreach worker at Sanctuary and Steering Committee member of Shelter and Housing Justice Network.

He notes “It is really disturbing that Mayor Olivia Chow is utilizing National Housing Day to promote corporations who directly benefit from the housing crisis and are some of the key drivers of the crisis.”

Case in point: Dream Unlimited Corp. is a leading developer of exceptional office and residential assets in Toronto, owns stabilized income generating assets in both Canada and the U.S., and has an established and successful asset management business, inclusive of $24 billion of assets under management across four Toronto Stock Exchange (“TSX”) listed trusts, our private asset management business, and numerous partners.

Cook elaborates on his concern: “Dream Unlimited, which has $24 billion in assets was recently critiqued by the York South Weston Tenant Union for raising rents by 17 per cent on housing built on public land. The tenant union is asking that Dream Unlimited not be allowed to purchase additional public land in the Port Lands. Olivia Chow recently convened a meeting between the tenant union and Dream Unlimited. Dream didn’t show up at the table.”

While Options for Homes and Habitat for Humanity have a long track record of building homes, the housing they create is based on the home ownership model which is not exactly going to solve the current affordable housing crisis or homelessness.

Do wine and cheese receptions, fireside chats, set the right tone in a social welfare disaster to mark National Housing Day? Who contemplates a celebration of this nature amid misery?

Professor David Hulchanski, co-founder of Toronto Disaster Relief Committee and architect of the one per cent campaign to fund a national housing program, also expresses concern about the changing tone of National Housing Day ‘celebrations.’

“People who use National Housing Day as opportunities to promote themselves, their careers, their organizations, or firms, need to ask what they have been and are doing to address the homelessness and housing disaster that continues to this day,” said Hulchanski.

Long-time housing activist Beric German sums up the current political dissonance on affordable housing.

“We have a need for affordable housing and the corporations and federal government are interested in unaffordable housing, so this requires that we be very active. If corporations dominate National Housing Day they are countering our needs for affordable housing. We must carry this message on our backs and repeat and repeat and repeat it,” said German.

Cathy Crowe

Cathy Crowe

Cathy Crowe is a street nurse (non-practising), author and filmmaker who works nationally and locally on health and social justice issues. Her work has included taking the pulse of health issues affecting...