One of the responsibilities of Canada’s National Housing Council is keeping Canada moving along in its commitment to the human right to adequate housing. The Council has made the housing conditions of Indigenous people a priority1. A report made to the Council earlier this summer lays out a way to proceed.
The report, prepared by infocus management consulting, recommends a model that both combines efforts to end homelessness and as well to ensure an adequate housing supply for Indigenous people across the country. This is an interesting contrast with the current system, where the responsibility for housing and homelessness is spread across federal and provincial governments, with services delivered at the local level by governments and community based agencies.
For example, the federal government has steered clear of providing any support to tenants during COVID, taking refuge in the constitutional division of powers to claim that housing is a provincial responsibility. As well, the report notes that federal-provincial agreements, which make provincial governments responsible for managing social housing programs, create different systems of rules for individual indigenous housing providers.
The report also includes a proposal for a new organizational structure that would gather all of the existing indigenous housing and homelessness programs together under one umbrella. It recommends an orderly process to transfer existing funding for homelessness and housing programs to the new structure, focusing first on shifting the money and then turning attention to how the funding is distributed across the country and what it supports.
The proposed structure would combine the resources for housing and homelessness, which are currently spread across two federal ministries as well as provincial and municipal governments. It would also undo the different systems of rules that individual indigenous housing providers currently experience.
infocus also estimates how many new homes are needed and how much it would cost to the build them. It’s a big number, partly because the need has been there for a long time and there has been very little building for Indigenous people.
The National Housing Council is circulating the report to interested parties across the country for comment.
Why does this matter outside Canada?
The proposal offers a novel organizational structure that will be of interest to people in other countries that are considering integrated approaches to delivering housing services.
You can read the full report and the National Housing Council’s decisions about it at CMHC: National Urban, Rural, and Northern Indigenous Housing & Homelessness: A Case for Support and Conceptual Model
Footnotes
- The Canadian Government has pledged an Indigenous housing strategy in 2017, but so far there has been no announcement. For more on this story, try: Waiting For A Canadian Indigenous Housing Strategy . . . And Waiting
