Ontario reserve chief says housing shortage worse than ever as PM visits

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is promising a remote northwestern Ontario reserve help with a housing shortage that the chief says is worse than ever.

Trudeau said during a visit Friday to Pikangikum First Nation that Ottawa is serious about working with the community to improve its housing. He said more and better housing in Indigenous communities is one of his government’s priorities.

Pikangikum Chief Dean Owen said the backlog of homes needing to be built on the reserve is almost twice as much as it was when he became chief. Some new houses and a new school have been built, but the chief added that construction on the reserve is hampered by a lack of electrical capacity.

The community called on Trudeau to come visit after a fatal fire in 2016 that killed six adults and three children under five in one home.

Trudeau told students during a question-and-answer session at the school that the government wants to make investments that are going to make a real difference.

“We know that unless you can start with safe, secure, adequate housing, it becomes difficult to succeed in anything else in life,” he said Friday. “It is difficult to go to school, difficult to work, difficult to raise a family right. “It needs to start with housing.” Owen said there were 1,800 band members in 2005 when he became chief of the reserve, about 500 kilometres northwest of Thunder Bay.

“We had a shortfall, backlog of homes back then close to 300 homes. Thirteen years later, we’re at 3,100 people on reserve and the backlog has since almost doubled,” Owen said in an interview before Trudeau’s arrival.

Owen said nine or 10 members of an extended family often share one of the reserve’s existing homes and people are forced to sleep in shifts.

He said construction on the reserve is hampered by a lack of electrical capacity.

“The problem actually has to do with the size of the electrification that we have running diesel generators,” he said. “We maxed that out pretty much two years ago.”

The federal government last summer announced up to $60 million in funding to connect Pikangikum to Ontario’s power grid. Owen said that should help.