Thank you very much.
I'd like to begin by thanking members of the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities for inviting me to contribute to this very important topic of urban, rural and northern indigenous housing.
I'd like to give a massive shout-out to Adam Vaughan and Michael McLeod, who are champions of housing for the north; I appreciate their efforts, as a woman who has experienced homelessness.
I position myself as a settler and as a person with lived expertise of homelessness who came north as a young woman fleeing violence. Internally, the traumatic responses to childhood violence that I experienced revealed themselves in clinical depression, constant suicidal ideation and a sense of helplessness and hopelessness. Externally, they revealed themselves in a lifestyle of chaos, instability and risk that limited my ability to form and keep healthy relationships and to enter into and succeed in the workplace.
It was in this context that I met and connected with first nations, Inuit and Métis women and families who were similarly impacted by trauma, but at the genocidal level aptly described in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada report.
As a first-hand witness for more than 45 years to the ongoing policies and practices that had been instituted by governments and housing service providers, I can attest to the dehumanizing, disempowering and destructive ways both systems have contributed to the current condition of epidemic rates of poverty, homelessness, addictions and violence in the north.
It was those colonial frameworks, portrayed in gaslighting ways as helping indigenous people who lacked all capacity to function without support, that drove me into the sphere of advocacy and into establishing a low-barrier, peer-led shelter, which I led for 25 years.
I can confidently say that I myself and other women I know with lived expertise of homelessness—and within an indigenous context, indigenous women and families—know specifically what the problems are and know specifically what the solutions are. We can provide concrete examples of both of those things.
I'm conscious of my time, but I would like to list a few of the challenges and a few of the solutions.
The challenges are that money and resources are held by governments and service-provider organizations that operate from a colonial framework today; that the voices of indigenous people and indigenous women are excluded from decision-making and solution designs; that there is hidden homelessness, and therefore it's hard to put a number on exactly what kind of housing you need and how many housing dollars you need; that there are housing monopolies, particularly in the north, and the housing monopoly includes the housing corporation that en masse evicts people into the street and into the bush without options for other types of housing; that there are punishing policies across government departments, a lack of housing stock and the divide between the “violence against women” sector and the “women's homelessness” sector.
The solutions include a national housing strategy. We have one, and I really appreciate that national housing strategy; it just has gaps. One gap it has is an indigenous-specific stream that is controlled by the indigenous community.
We need an urban indigenous housing strategy. We need the ability to access federal dollars outside of provincial and territorial governments, simply because, at least in our area and from my perspective, they are totally immobilized and don't know how to get money out the door.
Another solution is to ensure that indigenous programs are controlled by indigenous communities and organizations. Of course, I really support the Recovery for All campaign that was initiated by the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness and the recommendations from the Women's National Housing and Homelessness Network.
Another needed solution needed is to ensure that there is a gender-specific approach. It's not that women are more important than men at all; it's simply that they experience homelessness differently, and the contributors to homelessness for them are different.
Finally, what I could give you is two or three examples of clear indicators of what the problems are and what the solutions are, if I may. I don't know how much time I have left.
I'll just begin with one, and that is that an indigenous woman from a small community in the north won the first UN judgment under CEDAW against Canada and against the NWT Housing Corporation for racism and discrimination after she lost her housing due to partner violence. The UN recommended that the Government of Canada hire and train indigenous women to provide legal advice to other indigenous women around their rights and the right to housing.
That United Nations recommendation has not been fulfilled to this day, in spite of the calls for justice of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, and the woman who won that case remains homeless today.
The other example I'll give you is that the YWCA transition house in Yellowknife that was burned to the ground one night, and overnight, 33 indigenous families were homeless. All of those families were housed overnight in private market housing that sat empty, and they were able to get into private market housing through the use of a rental supplement.
The reason they couldn't get into it before is that the landlord who holds a monopoly in the north actually has an illegally stated policy that they don't rent to people on welfare. The Government of the Northwest Territories, which is their primary tenant, refuses to challenge that policy under human rights legislation or in court.
