N.S. argues subsidized housing ‘not a right’

HALIFAX• Nobody has the unfettered right to live in government- assisted housing of their own choosing, a lawyer for the Nova Scotia government told a human rights board of inquiry Monday.

“It is not a right guaranteed by the government,” said Kevin Kindred, the counsel for the Attorney General, during opening arguments in a case advocates say could help people with disabilities move into supported housing in the community.

The inquiry is considering the case of two people seeking to move out of locked-door, hospital- like settings and a third complainant who has died since the case started.

Vince Calderhead, the lawyer for the three complainants, told the inquiry that Nova Scotians with disabilities who are kept in institutions are the “last vestiges of the … county asylum” where impoverished citizens were once housed.

Calderhead said it contravenes the Human Rights Act to keep people with intellectual and physical disabilities in facilities where they lack control over their own lives, can seldom go out, and may be hundreds of kilometres from their family.

He cites sections that prohibit discrimination in the provision of government services on the basis of physical or mental disability.

“When the government provides social assistance to people in Nova Scotia, the way it provides it to people with disabilities cannot be worse than people without disabilities. That is the essence here,” he told reporters.

However, Kindred argued before i nquiry chairman J. Walter Thompson that while the province supports the principle of communitybased care, it’s not a human right as defined in the legislation.

Housing programs offered to people on social assistance also have limits and waiting lists, said Kindred: “When the government does provide housing solutions it can only do so in a way that involves limited choices and a system of limited capacity.”

Two nieces of Sheila Livingstone, the complainant who died, were on hand as Calderhead told her story.

The lawyer said Livingstone had lived in institutions for much of her life, but for 18 years did well in a small options home.

When she was temporarily hospitalized, she lost her place in the community and remained in a locked- door facility for a decade.

“After a series of assaults on her, and complaints about those assaults, she was offered a placement not in the Halifax area but in Yarmouth. Why Yarmouth? Because there was a bed,” said Calderhead.

The location was 300 kilometres from her friends and family.

The other complainants in the case are 45- year- old Joseph Delaney and 46-yearold Beth MacLean.