The ‘Elbows Up’ movement, in response to Donald Trump’s economic war on Canada, has galvanized Canadians to reflect and act on their sense of identity and home. From individual efforts to buy Canadian and spend vacation dollars at home to fighting to protect our natural resources and industries, the lens through which we see our lives is forever changed.
We could have used some elbows up 25 years ago to protect one of our social programs: building homes.
In 1993 Canada’s federal government terminated its national housing program and most provinces ended their contributions to building affordable homes. In Ontario alone, 17,000 units of social housing were cancelled by the provincial Conservative government of Mike Harris. Homelessness exploded across the country making headlines and activists declared homelessness a national disaster.
In the early 2000s, a program called ‘Housing First’ gained huge traction in the United States. The model was based on research that showed offering housing with supports to chronically homeless people with addictions or mental illness worked. It should be noted that this approach took place in a country that was still reeling from the housing and social service cuts of the Reagan era.
While homelessness worsened in Canada, big city mayors and planning departments turned to the Americans for the cure, seemingly convinced that the United States was somehow better at developing social policy than Canada.
Soon American ‘Housing First’ gurus were on speaking tours in Canada racking up flying points on the homelessness and housing conference circuit in Canada.
Philip Mangano, known at the time as George W. Bush’s ‘Homeless Czar’ while he was head of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, was a charismatic and enticing speaker. I heard him speak in Calgary with a religious fervor, imploring the audience to take up the Housing First model, calling it the American dream of a home for everyone.
Canada did in fact adopt Housing First as policy. It was a rapid and infectious engagement with an American policy that transformed the social and political landscape in Canada. Within a few years it was federal policy and embedded in the lingo and approach of all levels of government. A five-year Canadian study ‘At Home/Chez Soi’ showed it worked but we already had that proof. Canada had a decades old successful track record of housing people with supports when they were funded.
This is when our elbows should have been up. I mean, homelessness was not exactly diminishing in the United States, nor was the George W. Bush administration known for implementing progressive social programs such as health care or housing.
Housing First was never ‘Housing for All’. As it was rolled out in Canada, it was discriminatory and focused on chronically homeless people with addictions and mental illness, but primarily those who were living outside. It was not Housing First for families with children, women and children in Violence Against Women shelters, seniors or people with disabilities in shelters. It became a tool for removal of the most visible unhoused people – those on the streets with addictions and poor mental health.
In the absence of a homemade national housing program, specifically supportive housing units, the primary beneficiary of Housing First efforts were private landlords, not known for their expertise in providing social supports, let alone safe housing.
Housing First’s rollout in Canada was accompanied by a package of equally harmful policy tools: 10-year plans to end homelessness, homeless counts, bylaws that criminalized homelessness, defunding of outreach services and survival supplies like sleeping bags.
Housing First, similar to its American practice, became the tool used to introduce and justify economic policies that ensured further withdrawal of life-saving aid to a vulnerable population.
The mantra of those policies is emphatic: cut services, they’re inefficient; cut supports, they’re too expensive; eliminate shelters, they’re a blight on the neighbourhood; encampments, shut them down in a whack-a-mole fashion.
Housing First facilitated a policy amnesia whereby Canadian politicians, bureaucrats and researchers forgot the impetus to restore our fully funded national housing program that would create housing for all. It also contributed to the weakening of housing activism.
Today, the housing crisis has resumed a prominent place on the political agenda. Let’s not repeat the American mistakes. The recently published book ‘Housing for All. How Toronto Built the St. Lawrence Neighbourhood’ by Frank Lewinberg and Vince Pietropaolo shows us the success of building housing for all, the Canadian way.
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