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In 2017, the Government of Canada launched its 10-year National Housing Strategy (NHS): A Place to Call Home. The strategy “sets out a long-term vision for housing and focuses on improving housing outcomes for those in greatest need.” Central to the NHS and the National Housing Strategy Act, which followed in 2019, was the recognition that “housing rights are human rights”. The Strategy aims to “progressively implement the right of every Canadian to access adequate housing.” It includes a variety of programs to achieve its commitment to ensuring more people living in Canada have access to safe, affordable and inclusive housing.
Since launched in 2017, the NHS has received mixed reviews. While it is true that the federal government is investing more in housing than it has in decades, the emphasis is on incentivizing private for-profit developers, which is mostly creating housing that is not affordable for low and moderate-income renter households.
Advocates for these renter households maintain that there needs to be a shift in priority toward non-market housing development including both public and non-profit owned if we are to achieve the baseline
goal of 500,000 additional deeply affordable Counteracting the increasing commodification of housing requires public investment in the development and maintenance of social housing supply, which has been shown to be more cost-effective in the long-term, and essential to ensuring adequate rental housing is accessible to low-income households in tight, poorly regulated and discriminatory rental markets. As described in this analysis, advocates believe that if the NHS is to meet its goals it needs to shift its focus to the expansion of non-market supply.
Grant: Community-Driven Solutions to Poverty: Challenges and Possibilities - 2020-2027
Category: Housing and Neighbourhood Revitalization