After some discussion with our friends at Accessible Housing Network, I was encouraged to take some of our positions around housing and articulate them to the National Housing Council’s Neha Review Panel. You can read our submission below, but first some details on Neha.
Neha will examine the right to safe, adequate and affordable housing for women, Two Spirit, Trans, and gender-diverse people, and the government's duty to uphold this right. Neha is a Kanien'kéha-Mohawk word meaning "our ways". It describes a way of life that is open, peaceful, supportive and healing. Seen as an ever-expanding circle, Neha will be a space where people can share their experiences and work together towards solutions.
The impact of the failure to uphold the right to safe, adequate and affordable housing for women, Two Spirit, Trans, and gender-diverse people, including the impact that this issue has on the progressive realization of the right to adequate housing in Canada;
The actions and inactions of the Government of Canada (e.g., laws, policies, programs, regulations, recommendations, commitments, action plans, strategies, etc.) that have led to the failure to uphold the right of women, Two Spirit, Trans, and gender-diverse people to safe, adequate and affordable housing, including the impact that these actions and inactions have on the Government of Canada's national and international commitments to housing and human rights.
Solutions within the jurisdiction of Parliament to address the issue and progressively realize the right to adequate housing in Canada.
In turn, we would strongly encourage you to write to Neha and learn more at:
My name is Brad Evoy, I am a member of the Qalipu Mi’kmaq Nation and a long-term renter currently living in Toronto, previously having lived in my home community in the Bay of Islands in Western Newfoundland, in Gatineau, Quebec, and in Guelph, Ontario. I write to you in my role as the Executive Director at Disability Justice Network of Ontario and a steering committee member of Accessible Housing Network. Founded in 2018, DJNO is an organization devoted to building a world where disabled people are free to be and can hold power to account. Our organization was founded by racialized women and gender diverse disabled people—as such, I have the honour and responsibility to carry forward their vision and ideals into this submission. We have spent much of the last number of years supporting grassroots organizing around encampments, furthering accessible housing regulations on the municipal level, and pushing for accessible housing wherever we can.
We all want to live in a world where measures like encampment protocols and inaccessible emergency shelters are no longer necessary. To me, this is a world where all people in these territories can reach affordable, accessible housing as they and their families need. However, we haven't reached this moment yet.
As we've previously said in many other forums: we know that the vast majority of unhoused folks in this province are themselves disabled. In turn, unhoused disabled folks are part of our community that has been consistently failed by all levels of government. This is especially true across Ontario in cities like Toronto, Hamilton, Guelph, Ottawa, and many more.
As the Canadian Human Rights Commission and the Office of the Federal Housing Advocate have stated disabled people are more likely to experience homelessness because of violence or abuse, and that these figures were even higher for women with disabilities. That's 63% of disabled women who've experienced homelessness in their lifetime because of violence. As well, disabled people are more likely to miss a rent or mortgage payment because of financial issues than people without disabilities.
We are more likely to be forced to move for economic reasons, including financial hardships related to the long shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic and that financial hardship is the main reason that disabled people are forced into homelessness, including missed housing payments. Overall, 45% of disabled people across the country noted that this was the main reason for homelessness. Simply an issue of money.
And we know that the number of unhoused ODSP and OW recipients that are unhoused has doubled since the Pandemic began and that many more of our unhoused neighbors are kept from these systems due to barriers arising from being unhoused. And, as we also know, these realities are even harsher upon Black, Indigenous, Afro-Indigenous, and other racialized disabled folks due to their clear intersections between colonial, racist policy regimes and that of the restrictive and coercive parts of the housing sector.
In one such instance of coercive housing from our experience in Ontario: we know that when disabled women and gender diverse people experience housing insecurity, they are often coerced into institutional housing through processes like Ontario’s Alternate Levels of Care System following hospitalization. In other instances, disabled women and gender diverse people discharge themselves onto the street to avoid institutionalization practices and the violence experienced through those settings. In reality, disabled women and gender diverse people are placed in a vice and have to make impossible choices—between the cruelty of unhoused precarity and the violences of colonial, faux-’care’ institutions.
Now, as the Association of Municipalities Ontario have discussed in its recent research, the solution for these issues is not policing or reverting to cruelties upon our neighbors—and our unhoused neighbors are our neighbors—but instead clear, viable mass reinvestment back into the housing system. But this investment does not stop with housing, but must be part of a wider strategy to revitalize the social systems across these territories and in every Province—housing investment can only go so far alone and must be supported by:
strong social assistance rates that keep up with the increased costs to survive and thrive for disabled people compared to the rest of the population;
firm, common rent controls across Provinces that close gaps and do not allow for vacancy decontrol (ie. unlimited rent increases between tenancies);
enforceable changes to the Federal and Provincial Building Codes to reflect the best practices of universal and inclusive design, making accessibility a living part of planning and urban design;
common aims between the Federal Government and Provinces to close loopholes and prevent clawbacks from supports and regulations focused on disabled and low-income people, especially Black, Indigenous, and racialized women and gender-diverse people;
barrier-free access to the public, well-funded, culturally-appropriate home care services that disabled and older people need to live in place and in their communities; and,
wider commitments to improve additional systems, like accessible transportation, across these territories to ensure a fully barrier-free and accessible world.
We strongly believe that it is only through a combination of measures and a multi-sector, multi-department, multi-level of government approach that focuses on reinvesting and rebuilding can we make real achievements to safe, adequate and affordable housing for women, Two Spirit, Trans, and gender-diverse people.
However, the current reality is different from the aims we set out above. While the Federal Government has abdicated its role in developing social housing over these past thirty years, many of the Provinces have taken reactionary positions vilifying unhoused disabled people, particularly impacting disabled women, Two Spirit, Trans, and gender-diverse people. Meanwhile, Municipalities in Ontario continue to underfund all of the aforementioned areas needed to rebuild our social systems and attack unhoused disabled people, with particular impact towards disabled women, Two Spirit, Trans, and gender-diverse people.
Instead of challenging colonial housing regimes based on building barriers and exacting punishment, we remain with a system where policing and bylaw enforcement are the main tools for working with unhoused disabled peoples across these territories which, ultimately, doesn't get us where we need to be.
We need those in power to pivot their focus from handing more power to private, colonial wealth and instead focus on improving the lived realities of all disabled people, but particularly disabled women, Two Spirit, Trans, and gender-diverse people.
In what we have presented here, I have related things that folks who are unhoused have told us they need. We don't need to keep debating this again and again or wonder how we can solve the current crises.
Rather than half-measures and the status quo, we need long term vision and solutions that ensure that everyone has an affordable and accessible home across these territories.
I know this panel and the National Housing Council will help in furthering these ideals, but it will be for all of us to keep the pressure up until material change is felt by all. There are no rights given by the colonial state, only those honoured. It is up to those in power in Municipalities, Provinces, and the Federal Government to do so.
Brad Evoy, Executive Director
on behalf of Disability Justice Network of Ontario
423 King Street East, Hamilton ON, L8N 1C5
Phone: 289-780-3566 (DJNO)
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