An ‘appalling’ situation

If people are upset about being bumped off a waiting list for a subsidized apartment with a special mandate, they should instead take issue with the general lack of affordable housing across the country, said Tracey Heffernan of the Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario.

Special mandates in subsidized housing, especially in cases of ethnic and religious minorities, allow specific cultural needs to be met for families and children growing up in those buildings, she said.

“What’s relevant is that there is an extraordinarily long wait for accessible housing,” she said regarding Austin Lewis, the man who uses a wheelchair told he wouldn’t get a spot in a building with a mandate to house members of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Jama’at (see full story at left).

“We had one family with two disabled children and father who were told that it would be a 12-year wait. The child, who was in a wheelchair and being carried from room to room because his chair did not fit, would be 20.”

The Ontario Human Rights Code, by allowing such mandates, has progressed “from the notion that everyone should be treated the same — and that that’s what equality means — to the notion that one should have different treatment for different groups depending on the degree of discrimination within their community,” she said.

Heffernan called the situation “appalling,” but believed it demonstrates an abject failure on the part of governments to ensure access to affordable housing for the most marginalized populations.