Thank you for inviting me and my colleague Magda Barrera to be part of this important discussion.
The Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario, or ACTO, is a community legal clinic funded by Legal Aid Ontario. We provide legal advice and representation to low-income Ontarians. We also work for the advancement of human rights and social justice in housing through law reform, community organizing, and education initiatives. Our focus is on homelessness prevention and bettering the housing conditions for low-income tenants.
Housing costs are the largest expenditure for low-income households. Any federal strategy to reduce poverty must be fully coordinated with a robust and effective national housing strategy, which we believe should be rights-based, adequately funded, and enshrined in legislation. Tenants and people who are homeless are disproportionately among those living in poverty. In renter households across Canada, nearly one in five are paying more than 50% of their income on rent, and they're at serious risk of becoming homeless. Among this group are a disproportionate number of women, especially single parents, indigenous households, seniors, recent immigrants, and people with disabilities, as you just heard.
Crucial to the success of the strategy to reduce poverty among these vulnerable communities is a bold commitment to address, one, the shortfall in supply of new affordable rental housing; two, the retention of existing affordable housing; three, the growing gap between low household incomes and market rents; and four, legal protections for tenants.