Feds housing plan derided by UN
UN HOUSING WATCHDOG CHIDES LIBERALS FOR WATERING DOWN RIGHTS
A United Nations housing watchdog is taking the federal Liberals to task over what she sees as the government’s aboutface on a promise to put a human rights lens on its housing strategy.
In a scathing letter, Leilani Farha, the UN special rapporteur on the right to housing, says her support for the strategy is waning, based on indications that the Liberals “may not recognize the right to housing” in forthcoming legislation to enshrine the 10-year, $40-billion program into law.
A Liberal point man on the housing file told the Commons last week that the government didn’t want to declare a right that creates a belief that people can “prosecute their way into housing” and that they need landlords, not lawyers.
Farha’s letter called the government’s position “discriminatory and patronizing.”
In an interview, Farha said Ottawa can’t create a rights-based housing strategy without formally and legally enshrining housing as a human right.
“At a time when human rights are so fragile around the world, with populist governments reacting against the multilateral human rights system, I would think the government of Canada — which stands apart — would do everything it could to embrace human rights,” said Farha, who also heads the group Canada Without Poverty.
“Instead of embracing the recommendation and the right to housing, the government seems to be recoiling from it.”
A spokesman for Social Development Minister Jean-Yves Duclos, the minister in charge of the strategy, said the Liberals plan to “recognize and progressively implement every Canadian’s right to access adequate housing” in the coming legislation to ensure “Canadians have an adequate and affordable home.”
The Liberals have promised to introduce legislation to make it difficult for any successive government to back out of the plan to help provinces and territories set long-term goals, instead of wondering how much they might receive year by year.
Farha’s letter is aimed at putting pressure on the government as it spends the summer working on a bill that would also create a federal watchdog to track progress and identify systemic issues in the housing system.