Anti-poverty groups, municipal leaders gather in Ottawa on eve of national housing strategy

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This article was published 21/11/2017 (2888 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OTTAWA — Cities and anti-poverty advocates are watching closely as Ottawa lays out a massive spending plan today aimed at getting more Canadians into adequate housing.

“The waiting lists are tremendous in places across the country,” said Winnipeg deputy mayor Jenny Gerbasi, speaking as head of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities.

“In Winnipeg, it’s not different than anywhere else,” she said. “We have social housing that’s failing, we have existing (funding) agreements that are expiring.”

Sources say Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will reveal his government’s national housing strategy this afternoon in Toronto.

Ottawa largely abandoned the housing file a generation ago, leaving it to the provinces in the 1990s. But a month ago, the Liberals announced in Winnipeg that they’d allocate around $40 billion to housing over the coming decade.

Among the main questions Ottawa faces is how much funding should go to buildings, and to individual people.

Manitoba still funds physical buildings, but it’s also one of the few places in North America with a “portable” housing benefit program. Rent Assist, as it’s called, subsidizes low-income people’s rent, even when they move to another building. The program doesn’t tie Manitobans to a specific social-housing building, but instead lets them relocate for family or work reasons.

At the same time, Ottawa faces a ticking time-bomb of hundreds of rental units and co-operatives whose mortgages were tied to federal funding agreements but will expire within the next 20 years, meaning 24,000 units depend on renewed federal funds.

Another closely watched decision will be how Ottawa works with other levels of government.

The Liberals have tied most of their infrastructure funding to “tripartite” agreements, where the city and province have to pony up funds to get federal help for a new bridge or upgraded transit. But Winnipeg has shelved some projects after the cash-strapped province restricted its funding.

Gerbasi wouldn’t say whether she feels that Manitoba would thwart Winnipeg housing projects if Ottawa tied them to such agreements. “This is a key area for the provinces. They need to come to the table and be a partner in this, for this to work,” she said.

Manitoba is set to release its own poverty-reduction strategy before the end of the year.

In a recent interview, Welfare Minister Jean-Yves Duclos said the looming strategy will be wide-ranging.

“Vulnerable Canadians will be a key priority,” Duclos said. “Affordability is key issue in many communities, but it’s also other characteristics, such as being handicapped, living with mental health, being a homeless person, being a senior and needing extra help. Or being a single mother and needing to access early learning and childcare.”

He added that urban Indigenous homelessness and housing crises on reserves would be addressed through a separate Indigenous strategy.

dylan.robertson@freepress.mb.ca