Cenovus teams with First Nations to build northern Alberta homes amid housing crisis

CHARD, Alta.

Raoul Montgrand, president of the Chard Métis

Nation in northern Alberta, called a 200-square-foot camper trailer home for close to two years.

The community leader and his wife were among the many residents affected by an ongoing housing crisis in the isolated hamlet, located about an hour-and-a-half drive southeast of Fort McMurray.

But Montgrand, who now lives in a beautiful new prefabricated home situated just a stone’s throw from his old trailer, says what bothered him most about the dire housing conditions in Chard was what it meant for the community’s children.

“Before, we would see five or six families in one house,” Montgrand said in a recent interview. “Without a house, there’s no education. How are the kids going to go to school without a house to live in?”

The Chard Métis Nation is one of six Indigenous communities in northern Alberta that are part of Cenovus Energy Inc.’s Indigenous Housing Initiative. Announced by the company in January 2020, the program pledged $50 million to build homes in the First Nations and Métis communities closest to its oilsands operations in northern Alberta.

Four years later, more than 120 homes have been funded by the program, with the goal of getting to 200. In Chard alone, close to half of the 650 residents in the community will have received new homes by the end of the program’s five-year lifespan.

Alex Pourbaix, former CEO and current executive chair of Cenovus, said the housing initiative represents the largest community investment in the company’s history. He said it was his own visit to northern Alberta Indigenous communities — many of whom provide services and contract workers to the oilsands sector — that inspired the program.

“I was frankly shocked at the state of the housing situation in many, if not all, of these communities,” Pourbaix said in an interview.

“They didn’t have the resources to maintain their existing houses. And as a result, they had so many people in the line for housing with no real reasonable expectation of getting good housing. And this was everything from, you know, elderly widows and widowers to young mothers with young children.”

The situation on the Chard Métis Nation — where prior to the partnership with Cenovus, many residents lived in dwellings with damaged roofs, broken windows, even black mold infestations — is a microcosm of Canada’s broader Indigenous housing crisis.

According to Statistics Canada, in 2021, more than one in six Indigenous people in this country lived in crowded housing that was considered not suitable for the number of people who lived there. Indigenous people were almost twice as likely to live in crowded housing, compared with the non-Indigenous population.

More than 16 per cent of Indigenous Canadians in 2021 lived in housing that was in need of major repairs, Statistics Canada data shows.