Housing activists in Canada have long decried the hypocrisy in their nation's rhetorical commitment to housing as a human right while its affordable housing supply has shrunk and fallen into disrepair. Canada, like most other countries in the world, ratified an international covenant that guarantees the right to housing. But over the past few years, powerful moves by housing activists, a worsening housing crisis in big cities and small towns alike, and a series of negative reviews by the UN’s Special Rapporteur on adequate housing have made the problem too big to ignore.
In response, the ruling Liberal government released a new National Housing Strategy, which commits $40 billion CAD to a broad menu of housing interventions over the next decade. The plan is notable not only for the significant amount of resources committed, but also for overtly declaring that it will approach housing as a human right—or at least point its policy in that direction.
The Housing Strategy is described as a first step in a larger effort to "progressively implement the right of every Canadian to access adequate housing," in accordance with the U.N. Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and other international treaties.
[For more on this story by BENJAMIN SCHNEIDER, go to https://www.citylab.com/equity...-human-right/547319/]
Photo: Houses in Tuktoyaktuk, a small, predominantly Inuit town on the Arctic Ocean in Northwest Territories, Canda. The housing needs of Canada's indigenous populations are "much higher than the general population," one of the author's of Canada's National Housing Strategy said. Rick Bowmer/AP
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