Status of Women Committee on Oct. 22nd, 2018

[Bonnie Brayton]

I don't know the provincial data, but I can tell you without question that the Atlantic region needs much more in the way of resources. A lower populations means they just don't get the right slice of the pie. The north, for sure.... We've been talking a lot about the north, and the north is so important.

[Darren Fisher, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

The populated provinces do better.

[Bonnie Brayton]

Yes, they do, no question.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Excellent. Thank you so much.

This has been a great panel. I would really like to thank Bonnie Brayton and Arlene Hache for coming and filling us in. We're going to take a short break and finish up with our next panel.

We're suspended for about two minutes.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

We're about to reconvene for the second half of today's panel. We're continuing with our study on the system of shelters and transition houses serving women and children affected by violence against women and intimate partner violence.

On our second panel I am very happy to welcome Martina Jileckova and Lisa Litz from Horizon Housing Society. We also have, from the Canadian Housing and Renewal Association, Jeff Morrison, executive director, and Dominika Krzeminska, who is the director of programs and strategic initiatives.

We're going to begin with seven minutes. We're going to begin with Martina. You have the floor.

[Martina Jileckova, Chief Executive Officer, Horizon Housing Society]

Thank you very much.

Good afternoon everybody, and thank you for the opportunity to participate in this important conversation.

My name is Martina Jileckova, and I am here today in my capacity as CEO of Horizon Housing Society. We are an affordable housing charity in Calgary. We provide affordable, supportive housing for vulnerable families, individuals and seniors with special needs, including those who are fleeing family violence. I'm here today with Lisa Litz, who is the director of stakeholder relations.

I want to say at the outset that while I have more than 20 years of experience developing and managing affordable housing for vulnerable populations, I am by no means an expert on domestic violence alone. My remarks today will focus largely on the part of the equation that we know the most about in our organization, which is affordable housing with supports.

To prepare for today's conversation, we reached out to Calgary's leading providers of services for survivors of family violence, including the smart and caring teams of YWCA Calgary, Discovery House, Calgary Women's Emergency Shelter and others. I would like to acknowledge them and thank them for the insights that they shared.

I'd like to turn this over to Lisa to continue with our remarks.

[Lisa Litz, Director of Stakeholder Relations, Horizon Housing Society]

Two consistent themes emerged from our consultations, and I think the first was that we really can't hope to address demand in shelter beds if we don't first start to have a bit of a conversation about prevention and long-term solutions. That rang through loud and clear.

I would say the second piece was that affordable supportive housing, ideally in community, is probably a very important part of that solution.

What we heard over and over again is that preventing family violence is a powerful upstream mechanism. It's a way of decreasing the demand, but it is a longer-term solution. I have to say, as Martina said, we are not experts on this topic. There are other folks with deeper expertise who can talk to you about prevention. What we can tell you is that we absolutely believe we need to focus on reducing demand, because the number of women seeking help is just heartbreaking and it really demands our action.

In Calgary, which is a city of about 1.2 million, more than 800 women and children are turned away from secondary shelters every year due to lack of space. Across our province, that number climbs to 22,000, and that's according to statistics from the Alberta Council of Women's Shelters. That number, 22,000, is more than double the women accommodated, so it demands our action.

Worrying as well is that we know that these numbers are too low. As many of you on the panel will understand, we know that women's homelessness tends to be hidden. We know that women will often resort to couch surfing, to staying with an abusive partner and to trading sex for shelter in order to remain off the streets and to keep their children housed.

How do we address the lack of space? I think in the long term we do it by reducing the demand by addressing family violence. In the much nearer term, we believe we can free up shelter beds by investing in affordable housing with social supports, and I'll turn back to Martina to elaborate on that.

[Martina Jileckova]

Again, we are from Calgary, so take our city as an example. We know that we need to add more than 15,000 affordable rental housing just to meet the average in other large cities. That's how much we are behind the rest of Canada.

The lack of access to supported affordable housing is, for women fleeing violence, double-barrelled. Women leaving a violent partner often face a reduction in income, and we see that when they come to stay with us. Then, the lack of access to affordable housing can force them into homelessness. Once they are there, the lack of housing options keeps them in homelessness.

Our partners, Discovery House and others, tell us that the average second-stage shelter stay for a woman and her children is nine months in Calgary. It's not necessarily because they need to be in the shelter for nine months but because there is a lack of affordable housing for these women to move into.

Increasing the stock of affordable supported housing can help keep some women out of shelters in the first place. For those who enter the shelter system, an increase in affordable supportive housing means that the option to leave the shelter comes to them sooner, and they are still able to retain the social supports to address the trauma.

I want to, again, draw on the example of the community housing program at Discovery House. Discovery House is a Calgary-based domestic violence charity and is one of our partner agencies. This program quickly diverts families from shelters into affordable housing with supports in the community. In doing so, funds are freed to increase counselling and other supports that are needed by the women. They are provided for women and their children and thereby increase their rate of success.

Before I close my remarks, I want to draw your attention to women to whom we must pay urgent attention, and those are indigenous women. We know that indigenous women are disproportionately affected by domestic violence, and they're overrepresented in shelters. Again, drawing on the Alberta Council of Women's Shelters' data, in 2015-16, indigenous women were 60% of those admitted to shelters, yet they make up only 6% of Albertans, children and adults.

This statistic is shocking and demands immediate and purposeful action. In our journey of truth and reconciliation, we must act. We must prioritize our thinking and our resources to address this horrendous situation. A holistic approach that addresses these complex needs with culturally appropriate social supports, while providing affordable housing, offers us some of the most promising paths forward.

While continued support of shelters and shelter beds remains critical and more work on prevention is necessary, we encourage this committee to support community housing models that pair affordable, decent community housing with appropriate social supports.

We want to thank you for the invitation to address the committee and for all the work you do on this important topic.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Excellent. Thank you very much.

We're going to pass it over to the Canadian Housing and Renewal Association.

Jeff Morrison, you have seven minutes.

[Jeff Morrison, Executive Director, Canadian Housing and Renewal Association]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you for this invitation to appear before you.

We are very pleased to be here with our colleagues from the Horizon Housing Society, and we are going to restate many of the points raised by Ms. Jileckova and Ms. Litz.

We are here today on behalf of the Canadian Housing and Renewal Association, which represents the interests of the affordable and non-profit social housing sector in Canada.

Today we will be discussing a number of the problems facing housing for women and conclude with several key recommendations.

The first problem is clearly supply. With demand for social, supportive and non-profit housing increasingly outstripping supply, secure and affordable housing is often outside of the reach of low-income earners and vulnerable populations, including women fleeing violence. Years of underfunding has resulted in a lack of new supply to meet growing demand, and with an aging building stock, even the current stock of safe and affordable housing is at risk.

Why is this such a problem for women? Shelters and transitional housing are important, but they are and should be temporary. They are interim solutions for survivors of domestic violence. The next step for women is to find, secure and maintain safe and affordable housing. However, this gap between need and supply is exacerbated by long wait-lists for social and non-profit housing, particularly for families with children, which far outpaces the availability of units. As an example, in Montreal, there are currently over 25,000 individuals on the wait-list. In Toronto, the wait-list is well over 82,000. We anticipate that these numbers are very conservative. The real demand we believe is much, much higher.

Women who have experienced violence face unique housing needs and challenges. While housing is one of women's main concerns, the violence they suffer is one of the most significant causes of homelessness among Canadian families. In addition to the need to find adequate housing, victims of violence must deal with authorities responsible for child protection, welfare and the income supplement, family court and the justice system.

Women leaving violent situations require various long-term services and supports, particularly longer-term assistance in overcoming the emotional and psychological impact of domestic violence and social supports related to economic security and child care. The research is clear on the importance of providing critical resources for women in this post-separation period, with secure and stable housing as one of the most important of these critical resources.

I will now turn it over to my colleague, Ms. Krzeminska.

[Dominika Krzeminska, Director, Programs and Strategic Initiatives, Canadian Housing and Renewal Association]

Thank you.

Lack of communication and contradictions between various social support systems, such as social assistance, social housing and child welfare, may also prevent women from accessing and maintaining social housing. This, in addition to the long wait times for subsidized housing, result in shelters often needing to violate their policies or rules to extend women's stays at the shelter if housing is not yet made available to them.

This plays into the overcapacity and lack of available beds, thereby limiting the number of new women that shelters can accept. Unable to accommodate new residents due to overcapacity and resources, shelters must often turn away women and children.

There is no system in place to track these women to determine whether they have accessed safe housing. There is concern that women will either return to their domestic violence partners, head into invisible homelessness, enter street homelessness, or be forced by circumstance into other precarious situations, such as survival sex work or unsafe housing tenure.

There is a need to recognize that indigenous women are approximately 3.5 times more likely to experience some form of spousal violence than non-indigenous women. Indigenous women often migrate to urban centres to escape violence and poverty, often finding themselves in precarious housing situations either due to the lack of available housing options or systemic discrimination. Precarious housing not only increases indigenous women's risk of experiencing violence, it also contributes to the risk of being trafficked and the high number of missing and murdered indigenous women.

As was written by the Ontario Human Rights Commission in their “Right at home” report:

For Aboriginal women, who experience higher rates of violence compared to non-Aboriginal women, the situation is particularly bleak. The lack of adequate and affordable housing, financial assistance and social supports—coupled with other intersecting grounds—leaves many Aboriginal women with no choice but to return to their abusers.

I will pass it back to Jeff.

[Jeff Morrison]

In the midst of all this, we should of course point out that in November 2017 the federal government unveiled the 10-year, $40-billion national housing strategy that includes a suite of policies and programs designed to support the existing social and affordable housing stock and increase the supply of affordable housing, including some specific measures for women and children.

Now, while these measures of course are a welcome step forward in reinvesting in Canada's social and affordable housing sector, there do remain several concerns, including the ability of the affordable housing sector to adequately increase necessary supply; the lack of an urban, rural and northern indigenous housing strategy; and the lack of measures to address the social supports that are still required, particularly for women and children, for social housing.

What do we recommend?

First, given the circumstances facing indigenous women as described by my colleague, we have called for the development and funding of an urban indigenous housing strategy. When the NHS was introduced in November 2017, it did commit to developing three distinctions-based indigenous housing strategies for the first nations, Métis and Inuit, and of course these are welcome. Although these strategies are welcome, they do not address the housing needs of the 87% of indigenous peoples, including women, living in urban, rural and northern settings.

The 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission report outlines calls to action and recommendations to address the harms perpetuated against indigenous people, particularly women. An urban, rural and northern indigenous housing strategy would build on the recommendations contained in the TRC report and assist in the overall reconciliation process.

Second, the national housing strategy should be expanded to establish new ways to increase the supply of safe and affordable housing. Several policy tools can be used for that purpose.

We presented various options—

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Excuse me for one moment. Could you slow it down just a bit for the interpreters? I don't know how close you are to the end, but we have about 30 seconds left.

[Jeff Morrison]

We're almost there.

We presented various options in our brief to the Standing Committee on Finance, and we would be pleased to discuss them today it

Third, the federal government must invest in the social supports that women fleeing violence require in combination with safe and affordable housing. As we've discussed, social supports and early intervention are key to helping women fleeing violence make a successful transition. Increasing the Canada social transfer with proper accountabilities, for example, would be one tool the federal government could use to achieve this.

Finally, Madam Chair, front-line staff and those women with lived experience absolutely need to be included in policy and program design and direction. Their voices need to be heard. Without question, women with lived experience can provide the strongest policy expertise in this area.

Thank you. We look forward to the conversation.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Thank you very much.

We're going to start our seven-minute round with Marc Serré.

You have the floor, Marc.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thanks to the witnesses for presenting the work they do in this field. Their recommendations will really help us in our study.

First, Mr. Morrison, I would ask you to send the clerk or the analyst the document you submitted to the Standing Committee on Finance.

Second, I would like to ask the two witnesses a question. We're discussing the national housing strategy that we've announced, and I'm going to question Mr. Morrison about the national aboriginal housing strategy advanced by his organization.

Before that, however, I would like to hear your recommendations on the partnerships that the federal government should establish and on the role the provinces and municipalities should play in that regard. This is the first time a national housing strategy has been advanced, and I would like you to tell us how we can work more closely with the provinces and municipalities.

[Jeff Morrison]

If you don't mind, I will answer in English.

It's absolutely essential that provincial strategies are aligned with the federal strategy, and that the federal strategy can provide tools for funding and for other purposes to the provinces and territories.

The municipalities are also key, especially when it comes to women fleeing violence because of, among the various reasons, the social supports provided by those municipalities. There is not a direct relationship per se, as there is with the provinces and territories, for example. However, we're hearing on an individual case—and I'll let Martina talk more about Calgary—a number of municipalities are starting to develop their own municipal housing strategies aligned with the federal, and in some cases, aligned with the province. That's the way it should be. There should be an alignment, a complementarity of strategies, particularly facing vulnerable groups such as women, where the need for social supports is just as important as the need for increasing supply.

I think Martina and Lisa can speak more about Calgary in that regard.

One of the key features of the national housing strategy is the very close relationship that it has with provincial and territorial governments. As you probably know, earlier this year, the federal government signed a multilateral agreement with all provinces and territories to implement essentially the key principles contained in the strategy. To date, three bilateral agreements have also been signed—with Ontario, British Columbia and New Brunswick—and we await the remaining bilateral agreements to be signed.

[Martina Jileckova]

Thank you.

I would echo Jeff's comments around the need to sign the bilateral agreements. Three have been signed. I come from Calgary, Alberta, and they are still working with the federal government on that agreement. We need to do whatever we can, both from the provincial side as well as from the federal side, to make sure that agreement gets signed.

The other piece I'd like to highlight is—again, Jeff is correct—there is less of a direct relationship between the federal government and the municipalities, but how we design the federal programs does then impact how well we can work together on the municipal level as well. An example would be the housing benefit. That hasn't rolled out in the national housing strategy, but as the policy is being developed at the federal level we must make sure it works with municipal and provincial programs.

Lastly, on the issue of working with municipalities. I come with the Alberta perspective so one point I want to make is that it's really important to consider regional differences. In Alberta we know that Calgary is a fairly significant landowner. Would there be a mechanism in the federal strategy? The national housing strategy speaks to the land transfer program. If there is not enough federal land in the federal strategy, could we still use the federal strategy to partner with a municipality and free up that land?

Why? You will hear me say it again: to have access to land is critical for us to be able to deliver new, affordable rental housing.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

With respect to partnerships between the municipalities and the provinces, I would like—

[Brigitte Sansoucy, NDP, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC]

With all due respect to my colleague, I find it hard to understand the connection between violence against women, which is the subject of our study, and his questions. I would like him to clarify that connection.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

Housing has to be created.

[Brigitte Sansoucy, NDP, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC]

I'd like to have a clear understanding of the connection with violence against women.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Okay, thank you very much.

Brigitte, we discussed this the other day as well en anglais. But we're looking at the housing continuum also, and I don't want to put in any partisan things but we're talking about social, affordable shelters. We can start with shelters but we have to look at how the entire continuum is impacted, and if there are any gaps.

Although I recognize it may not be specific to shelters, we need to look at housing as an entire link, and whether we're looking at markets or whether we're looking at shelters, they are all part of the same package.

I will allow the continuation of these questions.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

I'd like to talk about statistics in the time I have left.

With respect to housing, we've talked about families and children. However, do you have any statistics on seniors and women? Do you have any housing-related data and recommendations on seniors?

[Jeff Morrison]

Our association has no specific recommendations on seniors.

With seniors, women fleeing violence, LGBT or veterans, for us, the link that we find that runs through all of this is the need for greater supply. As we said in our opening statement, shelters are a band-aid solution. They play a role, but they should not be seen as a permanent solution. For housing affecting seniors, as it is for women fleeing violence, the common thread is that we need greater supply and we need to use all those tools that impact that. If seniors benefit from that, then all the better.