Toronto / October 2023
“End renovictions! Bring back rent controls”! “What do we want”? “Rent controls”! “When do we want it”? “Now”!
The chants - the call and response of rallies and demonstrations of years past and current moments of protests, echoed faintly along University Avenue as a scraggly group of just over one hundred concerned residents walked from Toronto City Hall to Queen’s Park.
The rally had ended a few minutes earlier. It was covered by local media and our national broadcaster, CBC. The youngish journalists sent to cover the story jockeyed for good angles, along with at least a couple of independents documenting this rally and march for deeply affordable housing. Earlier that day local news reported that rent strikes were continuing to expand across the city, with two new buildings in the west end of Toronto joining the campaign against landlords doing the bare minimum of repairs while jacking up rents to levels beyond what the tenants can pay.
As I listened to the speakers at the rally- mostly white women, many from the labour movement, community legal clinics and other tenant rights organizations, I couldn’t help but recall the images of the people I saw earlier on the news speaking of falling concrete from bathroom ceilings, infestations of mice and cockroaches, and the unresponsiveness of landlords. Many spoke of being priced out of homes. They were primarily racialized. And immigrant.
The last speaker at the rally, a well-known community activist and a Black man got the crowd going as he made the connections between the need for living wages as a minimum, and the lack of deeply affordable rent geared to income (RGI) housing (30 percent of net income). (It’s great that minimum wage in Ontario increased by $1.05 to $16.55 per hour, but the living wage for Toronto is closer to $23 per hour). As he spoke, a chap in front of me had running commentary. At the mention of the need for RGI housing by the speaker, he chimed in with “public ownership”. At the mention of soaring profits by landlords and corporations, he shouted, “capitalism”. I nodded in agreement with him while I wondered to myself, why are we afraid to voice these sentiments publicly. Why as activists and advocates do we couch our words in language that do not get to the heart of the matter?
Private public partnerships have failed us. We see this from the failure – over time and over budget – of transit projects in Ottawa and Toronto. We have witnessed various city councils passing zoning requests that allow developers to tear down rental housing and replace them with condos that are too small for many families and unaffordable for the majority of working people living in our larger municipalities. Too rarely are developers required to incorporate a percentage of deeply affordable housing to their new developments.
Something has to give. Our newscasts are filled with stories of retired seniors having to return to work in order to feed and house themselves. In this space last month, I wrote of refugee claimants (asylum seekers) sleeping outdoors on concrete, with their suitcases and bags as their pillows. And the hundreds lucky enough to find shelter in a church or other makeshift shelter are stuck with little option for more permanent homes.
As a sector, we welcomed the news of the provincial government’s insertion of forty-two million dollars in the Canada-Ontario Housing Benefit programs. Municipalities from Halton to Ottawa would benefit. The city of Hamilton which received just over one million dollars of the funds was reporting that over twenty percent of its shelter space was filled by refugee claimants. We hear similar stories across the province.
For immigrant and refugee serving agencies already funded by the province we welcomed the news of the infusion of an additional thirteen million dollars to support those who have experienced an increase in demand for services from asylum seekers. This is meant to be a one- time infusion, but we know the situation is ongoing. The OCASI Board has made advocating for this new cash to become a permanent addition to the base of the Newcomer Settlement Program (NSP) and Language Training (ESL/FSL), a priority. And even that would not be enough to meet the complex needs of international students, refugee claimants, migrant workers and those who have been here long enough to become citizens but still require settlement services.
Something has to give. The status quo isn’t working. As a sector we cannot afford for our advocacy to be only about the financial health of the organizations that we work for. We must join and walk in solidarity with our clients who are desperately calling out for relief. Our advocacy must necessarily include calls for a living wage; for rent controls; for publicly owned affordable housing built with Co-Ops and other non-profit housing providers; for an increase to the income security programs like OW and ODSP; and federally, Old Age Security and the Guaranteed Income Supplement. Maybe its time to bring back the Basic Income initiative that was prematurely discontinued by our current provincial government when they first took office over five years ago.
We must (re)commit to working to build a province that is economically and socially equitable. As the chant which rang out at the end of the rally said: “All of us or None of us”!
In solidarity
Debbie