[homeles_ot-l] Fund affordable housing, not war. by Cathy Crowe.

[lj1967 at sympatico.ca]

Fund affordable housing, not war. 
November 15, 2007  TheStar.com
Cathy Crowe.

Homelessness: a national emergency or disaster - whatever you call it, our government finds money to go to war but not build affordable housing.

In 1998, the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee formed and issued a State of Emergency Declaration, declaring homelessness a national disaster. The group's signature 1 per cent logo, a 1 per cent symbol under a roof, was crafted on a restaurant napkin late one night as a group of us lamented the amount of suffering we witnessed on a daily basis in our work on the street. 

The 1 per cent campaign was a distress call - an appeal to the federal, provincial and territorial governments to simply allocate an additional 1 per cent of their budget to kick-start a new national, affordable housing program. That's the amount they used to spend on new affordable housing construction when the federal program, which had created more than half a million homes starting in 1973, was eliminated in 1993.

Cities responded quickly to the disaster declaration. Toronto voted 53 to 1 that homelessness was a national disaster. The municipalities of Ottawa-Carleton, Vancouver, Victoria, Durham Region, Nepean and Peel all passed resolutions that echoed the same sentiment. The United Nations described the situation in Canada as a "national housing emergency."

These criticisms resulted in the appointment of a federal minister responsible for homelessness and more than $1 billion allocated to homelessness relief over the next nine years through a new federal program. Yet, a succession of federal housing ministers had their hands tied, their government ignoring the need for a new national housing strategy and the money to go with it. Instead, the mantra has become polished and corporate, emphasizing privatization and home ownership, a diminished role for government and an increased charitable solution, and deeper cuts to social spending. 

The results have been painfully predictable. Today, our streets are filled with homeless people and our shelters are overcrowded. The statistics are revolting: 1.8 million Canadians in core housing need, an estimated 300,000 are homeless in any given year, 60,000 are youth, 10,000 children. Aboriginal people have suffered the most, facing housing conditions both on and off-reserve that include overcrowding, inadequate sanitation, no potable water and gross levels of homelessness. 

Homelessness is the worst since the Great Depression. It is now widely accepted that without a fully funded national housing program there will be persistent mass homelessness.

In the past, the chief remedy to the housing crisis was the creation of a national housing program. It was developed in response to protests led by World War II veterans who faced an acute housing shortage and campaigned for their basic human right to housing.

So, it was with some relief that many of us welcomed the words of Miloon Kothari, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing, in his preliminary observations at the end of his two-week fact-finding mission to Canada last month:

"Everywhere that I visited in Canada, I met people who are homeless and living in inadequate and insecure housing conditions. On this mission I heard of hundreds of people who have died as a direct result of Canada's nationwide housing crisis. In its most recent periodic review of Canada's compliance with the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the United Nations used strong language to label housing and homelessness and inadequate housing as a `national emergency.' 

"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 added: "The federal government needs to commit funding and programs to realize a comprehensive national housing strategy, and to co-ordinate actions among the provinces and territories to meet Canada's housing rights obligations. Canada needs to once again embark on a large-scale building of social housing units across the country."

Nine years ago, as a somewhat naive nurse horrified by the trauma around me, I expected the federal government to act responsibly to the disaster declaration. It didn't. 

Today, I see the travesty as the most blatant expenditures of federal dollars are diverted from valued social programs such as housing and child care and instead allocated to war. 

While funds have not been made available to launch a new affordable housing program, the federal government has once again announced a surplus. This time it's $13.8 billion. In addition, the Rideau Institute has reported that the Department of National Defence estimates that Canada's military spending will reach $18.2 billion in 2007-8, the highest amount since World War II. 

Housing will never come while we invest in war. We need a housing strategy, not a war strategy.

-30-

Tuitio ad servitium pauperum -- Breath & Shadow: 

"La noblesse est soutenue au coeur -- Faire l'amour à la vie et le revel dans son esprit." ~François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire. 

"Revolution is not something fixed in ideology, nor is it something fashioned to a particular decade. It is a perpetual process embedded in the human spirit." ~Abbie Hoffman.

"I worked my way up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty." ~Groucho Marx.   

The Hunting of the Snark: "Oh, beamish nephew, beware of the day, If your Snark be a Boojum! For then You will softly and suddenly vanish away, And never be met with again! We should all of us grieve, as you well may believe, If you never were met with again -- For, although common Snarks do no manner of harm, yet, I feel it my duty to say, Some are Boojums." ~Lewis Carroll.

"I sit on a person's back, choking them and making them carry me, and yet I assure myself and others that I am very sorry for them and wish to ease their lot by all possible means -- except by getting off their back." ~Leo Tolstoy.

"Those who do not feel pain much, seldom think that it is felt. And yes, to wipe all tears from all faces is a task too hard for mortals; but to alleviate misfortunes is often within the most limited power: yet the opportunities which every day affords of relieving the most wretched of human beings are overlooked and neglected with equal disregard of policy and goodness." 
~ Samuel Johnson.

Live to make civil society every day -- Ne lache pas!

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