Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak with you today. Pivot Legal Society is a non-profit legal advocacy organization doing work in Vancouver's downtown eastside, which is often referred to as the poorest postal code in Canada.
Homelessness and affordable housing are major concerns for the community we serve at Pivot, but in addition, of course, these issues are felt across the country. I'm here today to speak to what I hope you've heard many, many times already in your travels across the country, about the need for a national housing strategy for Canada. Ensuring passage of the bill that is currently before the House, an act to ensure secure, adequate, accessible and affordable housing for Canadians, is a first step the federal government must take towards solving the crisis of homelessness and underhousing in Canada and addressing the issue of poverty across the country.
There are an estimated 150,000 to 300,000 homeless individuals currently in Canada. In the current global economic slowdown, these numbers are only climbing. With the onset of the recession, 500,000 jobs have been lost and more than 150,000 Canadian households have been evicted from their homes because they couldn't afford to pay their rent. Canada's supply deficit, the gap between the number of new households and the amount of new housing, is growing at a rate of 220,000 households annually. Millions of Canadians live in housing that is overcrowded or otherwise substandard, and disturbingly, single women and lone-parent families headed by women are particularly impacted. A national housing strategy is necessary to stem the devastating impact that homelessness has on those afflicted, to relieve the costly financial strain that Canada's homelessness crisis puts on our health and social services, and to allow Canada to live up to its international obligations.
Canada's previous national housing strategy, which was dismantled in the early 1980s, worked. Following amendments to the National Housing Act in 1973, more than 20,000 social housing units were created each year until the early 1980s. Unfortunately, cutbacks at the federal level and transfer of responsibility to the provinces since have led to the homelessness crisis that we see across the country today.
Annual spending on affordable housing at all levels of government has steadily declined since the early 1990s. A study by Steve Pomeroy, a senior research fellow at the University of Ottawa, found that although provinces have technically complied with federal requirements to reinvest savings from federal subsidy transfers related to social housing programs, most provincial governments have simply reduced their own direct costs and compensated with federal dollars.
Homelessness today is at the worst levels Canada has ever seen. Housing affordability is also hitting a low, with more than four in ten renter households and more than two in ten owner households spending more than 30% of their income on housing. Despite this crisis, federal housing investments are $618.5 million behind what they were back in 1989 after adjustments for population and inflation.
Canada is one of only a few countries in the world without a national housing strategy. This has subjected Canada to considerable negative international scrutiny. In 2006 the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights denounced Canada's homelessness crisis as a national emergency and specifically called on Canada to implement a national strategy for the reduction of our homelessness problem. In 2009 the report of the UN special rapporteur on housing found that Canada is failing its housing obligations and recommended that Canada adopt a comprehensive and coordinated national housing policy based on indivisibility of human rights and the protection of the most vulnerable.
Although allocations in the 2009 federal budget plan to stimulate housing construction were necessary and commendable, little money was spent on actually increasing the affordable housing stock. Construction of new housing is fundamentally necessary to house the over 150,000 people currently homeless in Canada. Furthermore, without a national strategy, Canadians don't know whether the money the federal government is investing in affordable housing is being spent in the most effective way.
Earlier this year the Auditor General of British Columbia released a comprehensive review of the province's homelessness programs. He concluded, “Clear goals and objectives for homelessness and adequate accountability for results remain outstanding.”
The government has not yet established appropriate indicators of success to improve public accountability for results. We found significant activity and resources being applied to homelessness issues, but there is no provincial homelessness plan with clear goals and objectives. When there are no clear goals or performance targets, accountability for results is missing. How will we know we are successful if we have not identified success?
Homelessness is clearly a social problem in Canada that needs to be resolved, and the current economic downturn is an optimal time to address this problem. New affordable housing constructed through a national housing strategy will directly inject money into Canada's construction sector. Moreover, investment into supportive housing for homeless individuals will actually save money on support services and over the long term help many of these individuals gain the stability they need to find permanent employment.
In my print submissions I've gone through a number of research studies that show that investing in affordable housing actually saves money over the long term. The study I'm most familiar with comes out of British Columbia, which showed that addressing homelessness the way we do now, through the courts, jails, police, hospitals, ambulances, costs about $55,000 per homeless person per year. Providing people with the supportive housing that they need would reduce those costs to approximately $37,000 per homeless person per year, for an annual savings for this province of about $33 million. So clearly we cannot afford not to invest in supportive affordable housing.
Finally, a national housing strategy is necessary to enable Canada to meet its international human rights obligations, particularly article 11(1) of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which explicitly obligates Canada to take appropriate steps to realize everyone's right to adequate housing. We've been repeatedly criticized internationally for not living up to our housing obligations. In the special rapporteur study I've mentioned already, the rapporteur has raised numerous concerns about the negative impact of ongoing federal funding cuts since the 1990s, and in particular the impacts of those cuts on aboriginal people.
The report comments that the practical effect is that very little new aboriginal housing off-reserve has been funded in recent years, even though local studies in cities as diverse as Toronto and Edmonton show that a significant number of people who are homeless are of aboriginal ancestry. Just this year the United Nations Human Rights Council conducted its first universal periodic review of Canada's compliance with its international obligations, including the right to housing. During the periodic review a number of countries raised specific concerns about housing insecurity and homelessness in Canada. The federal government's response to the UPR accepted the UN's recommendations on housing and stated:
Canada acknowledges that there are challenges and the Government of Canada commits to continuing to explore ways to enhance efforts to address poverty and housing issues, in collaboration with provinces and territories.
The federal government's offer here to collaborate with the provinces and territories on affordable housing can be realized through the establishment of a national housing strategy like the one proposed in Bill C-304. The provincial and territorial governments have been asking the federal government to partner with them in a national housing strategy for more than four years. At a meeting of provincial and territorial housing ministers in 2005, the group made the following statement:
We all share responsibility for good housing outcomes. Federal, provincial, and territorial governments have a shared commitment in ensuring that their citizens have a decent and secure place to live, and, thereby, can access and contribute to the social and economic life of communities.
The federal government has a responsibility to live up to its housing obligations. Canada must allocate sufficient resources in the 2010 budget and implement a national housing strategy for the reduction of homelessness as called for by the UN Committee on Social, Economic and Cultural Rights with the special rapporteur and is desperately needed by Canada's homeless population.
Thank you for your consideration.