Watchdog alleges fed housing flip-flop
OTTAWA — A United Nations housing watchdog is taking the federal Liberals to task over what she sees as the government’s about-face 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 rightsbased 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 JeanYves 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.