The Canadian Centre for Housing Rights (CCHR) is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2023 Canadian Right to Housing Research Fellowships:
Brittany Cormier and Monika Imeri
The Canadian Right to Housing Fellowship program aims to foster and promote research that advances understanding of the housing landscape in Canada and of housing as a human right.
Brittany is a master’s student at Saint Mary’s University, a qualitative researcher and an abstract painter based in Charlottetown, PEI. She holds a first-class standing bachelor’s degree in psychology with a minor in sociology from the University of Prince Edward Island. Brittany studies hidden and at-risk forms of homelessness in her community, as well as evictions and housing discrimination experienced by tenants. Her recent work includes research and administration, provincial-level policy work, and program delivery in the non-profit sector.
As a research fellow with CCHR, her project will examine discriminatory practices in the rental housing sector, examining the impacts of housing discrimination on communities and how it undermines the right to housing.
Monika is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Geography at Carleton University. She holds a bachelor’s and a master’s degree from Middle East Technical University in Turkey, where she graduated summa cum laude in city planning. She is actively engaged with local community organizations and advocates for urban justice in Ottawa, where she is based.
As a research fellow with CCHR, her project will examine the multidimensional impacts of development-led displacement in Ottawa. She will take an ethnographic case study approach to document the lived experiences of tenants from equity-deserving communities who have been affected by dispossession, housing insecurity, and discrimination in Ottawa. The project will uncover and shed light on the lived realities of displacement and its impacts on equity-deserving populations.
Following a comprehensive national search, the Board has selected Annie to continue her trajectory with the organization in this leadership capacity, a role she has held in an acting position since July 2022.
Annie is a seasoned non-profit leader with expertise in housing law and policy, fund development, operations and strategic management, knowledge mobilization, capacity-building, public engagement, and advocacy. Over nearly a decade, she has served the organization in several roles including in executive leadership, operations, tenant services and public legal education. Most recently, Annie worked alongside the previous Executive Director to expand the organization’s work across Canada, to respond to the growing housing challenges facing people and communities. As a result, the organization is working to advance systemic change on a larger scale than ever before, with expanded services, a renewed focus on community-relevant and evidence-based policy advocacy, a new research department, and a thriving law reform practice.
Outside of her role at CCHR, Annie serves as the co-chair of the City of Toronto’s Housing and Homelessness Services Network, as a member of Toronto City Council’s Tenant Advisory Committee, and as a board member at All Saints Church and Community Centre.
“Annie is a passionate and dedicated leader, with a strong commitment to advancing the right to housing for all Canadians. The Board congratulates Annie on this appointment, and thanks her for her years of service to the organization. Through Annie’s leadership, we know the organization will continue rising to meet the challenges that lay ahead and to drive the important work of the organization until everyone has a safe and secure place to call home.”
CCHR Board Co-Chairs
Annie has worked with communities, advocates and governments to advance the right to housing in Canada for a decade. In her time at CCHR she has held various roles including Deputy Executive Director, Manager of Operations and Strategic Initiatives, and Manager of CCHR’s Tenant Services Program. Annie is a skilled writer and public speaker with expertise in housing law and policy, fund development, operations, strategic management, knowledge mobilization and capacity building. Before joining CCHR in 2013, she worked in fund development and as a Researcher and Office Manager for the Institute on Governance, supporting the work of Vice President of the Toronto office. Annie has a Bachelor’s degree in History and English from the University of Toronto and a Master’s degree in History from York University. She also holds certificates in Strategy and Competitive Advantage from the Rotman School of Management, and Non-Profit Leadership from the University of Toronto. She is involved in several committees and boards, including as the co-chair of the City of Toronto’s Housing and Homelessness Services Network, as a member of Toronto City Council’s Tenant Advisory Committee, and as a board member at All Saints Church and Community Centre.
Across Canada, renters are increasingly at risk of housing insecurity. Many are facing “economic eviction” due to excessive rent increases, others are forced to live in over-crowded, poorly-maintained, or inaccessible homes because it is the only housing they can afford, and some also face discrimination and other illegal behaviour from landlords.
This winter, through our Secure Homes for Renters campaign, CCHR is calling on the federal government to ensure that there are basic legal standards to protect renters across Canada, and hundreds of Canadians have joined us in this call.
We know there is a great need for this work, because renters across the country tell us so every day. Every year, we hear from hundreds of renters about the struggles they are facing in their housing, and these challenges only continue to grow. Our team is working to respond to these challenges by advancing change at a systemic level, and also by helping renters assert their rights and avoid eviction on the ground.
“A group of four tenants reached out to us back in August. Their landlord was insisting they had to be out because of the sale of the property. He was trying to shame them and squeeze them into leaving,” recounts Tim Heneghan, one of CCHR’s staff lawyers. “Any time the landlord is trying to apply pressure, our job is to minimize that pressure.”
This past year, nearly 1,700 renters contacted CCHR’s services program for assistance, which is almost 20% higher than last year, and last month, demand for our services reached an all-time high. Our team provides legal information, guided referrals, connections to pro bono legal help, and legal advice and representation to people during what is often a frightening time in their lives.
CCHR lawyer Ademofe Oye-Adeniran recounts working with a renter who was facing eviction for reasons beyond his control. If this renter were evicted, not only would he lose his home, the city would likely also lose another affordable unit. “Their rent was $700 for a bachelor unit, which was quite affordable for Toronto, and I was able to take that on,” says Oye-Adeniran. She represented the renter in front of the Landlord and Tenant Board, and ultimately helped to prevent him from being evicted.
In addition to our services, CCHR works to empower communities by delivering training and building leadership and advocacy skills among renters in communities across Ontario, and in cities like Halifax, Winnipeg and Calgary. This year, our training programs reached over 1,100 renters, service providers and housing providers.
“Last week, tenants who were having an argument with their landlord asked us to come into their building to present a training on housing rights basics,” says Jessica Long, CCHR Senior Program Lawyer. “We provide about two trainings per week, including public presentations at libraries, to students at universities, and to shelter residents.”
Meaningful engagement is key to realizing the right to housing and advancing secure homes for renters, and it is foundational to our approach. “Any time you are going through something like evictions or issues in your housing situation, and you feel like David and your landlord feels like Goliath, you just have to talk to people,” says Heneghan, reflecting on his experience supporting renters. “The ones who succeed are the ones who look to community, and we’ve got a big part to play there, but just one part of a larger whole.”
As we continue working toward ensuring that all renters have secure homes, please consider supporting our work by making a donation this holiday season. Your support helps us continue to provide direct and practical help to renters facing eviction and housing insecurity right now, as we continue to push for better legal protections for renters across Canada over the longer term.
Canada’s growing housing crisis has prevented many households, particularly those living on lower incomes, from finding and keeping an adequate, accessible and affordable place to call home. As rents continue to soar and affordable housing options dwindle, it’s crucial to protect the few affordable housing options that are available.
Rent subsidies are a much-needed tool that governments use to help ensure lower-income households can afford a home. However, in Ontario, social housing landlords have the power to revoke a tenant’s subsidy in some circumstances – for example if a person has not provided the correct paperwork. This power held by these landlords is discretionary – meaning that, even if there are grounds to do so, they can choose not to revoke a subsidy. This is an important choice which can have tremendous consequences for households who are living in poverty and who likely do not have the means to secure an affordable home without a subsidy. A household that cannot afford an unsubsidized rent could face eviction due to the inability to pay a higher rent, and their eviction could also lead to homelessness.
Given the potentially catastrophic consequences when a person loses their rent subsidy, the Canadian Centre for Housing Rights (CCHR) is deeply concerned about an Ottawa Community Housing (OCH) tenant, Charlas Mackenzie, who lost his rent subsidy. In 2019, OCH chose to revoke Mr. Mackenzie’s subsidy because of minor reporting errors. In making its decision, OCH chose not to consider Mr. Mackenzie’s circumstances when deciding whether revoking his subsidy was reasonable or fair, nor whether losing his subsidy would likely render him homeless or separate him from his young children.
Since losing his subsidy, Mr. Mackenzie has appealed OCH’s decision, with no luck in reversing it to date. On September 20, 2022, the Ontario Court of Appeal will hear Mr. MacKenzie’s appeal, and the Court has granted CCHR intervenor status because of our expertise in human rights in housing. This status will allow CCHR to present arguments during the appeal hearing to promote Mr. MacKenzie’s right to housing and the rights of his children. We will assist the Court by arguing that OCH should have exercised its discretion in a way that was consistent with the right to housing and the rights of the child.
Since OCH’s decision to revoke a subsidy will effectively evict Mr. MacKenzie, CCHR will argue that, under the requirements of the right to housing – which Canada recognizes in the National Housing Strategy Act (NHSA) and various international human rights treaties – OCH should have considered whether eviction was a necessary and proportionate response to a minor issue, and whether the issue could have been resolved without resorting to eviction. CCHR will also argue that, under the rights of the child, OCH should have considered the impacts of its decision on Mr. Mackenzie’s children.
The Court’s decision will set an important precedent for households living in social housing across Ontario. We hope that CCHR’s intervention will help establish that social housing must be managed in a way that respects tenants’ human rights.
CCHR’s factum is available here.
CCHR extends many thanks to Jackie Esmond, Aminah Hanif, and Danielle Bisnar of Cavalluzzo LLP for their pro bono representation on this case.
If you are facing a loss of subsidy issue in Ontario, visit Legal Aid Ontario to find a clinic near you that may be able to help.
If you are facing eviction anywhere in Canada, these resources may be able to help you:
Although our name has changed, our mission has not wavered. Since 1987, our organization has been working to transform lives by advancing the right to housing for all. Over the last 35 years, we have passionately advocated for the people and communities that we serve, guided by our vision of a world where everyone has an adequate, affordable and accessible place to call home. In recent years, we have expanded the work we do to advance systemic change through policy advocacy, research, education and training across Canada.
As we mark this 35-year milestone and look toward the future, we are taking the opportunity to embrace this moment by transitioning our organization’s name so that it better reflects who we are and what we do today. The need for adequate, accessible and affordable housing has never been greater in Canada, and we remain as dedicated as ever to advancing the right to housing of Canadians.
The Canadian Centre for Housing Rights will continue to advocate and work tirelessly for those in greatest housing need across Canada in collaboration with housing advocates, nonprofit organizations, and people with lived experience of housing precarity. As we enter this new era for our organization, we will strive to accomplish our goals in new and expanding ways while staying true to our vision and values. Although our name has changed, our mission will always be to advance the right to housing for all.
It is a privilege to continue serving communities across Canada as we go forward under a new name.
With appreciation,
Annie Hodgins, Executive Director, on behalf of the whole CCHR team.
The Canadian Centre for Housing Rights is proud to offer an innovative model that delivers rights-based educational training to supportive housing providers, frontline workers, peer supporters, and renters.
When renters who live in supportive housing know their legal rights, and supportive housing providers have the legal know-how to uphold those rights, together they build healthier and more resilient communities.
We offer the following two training and capacity-building models to introduce renters and supportive housing providers to the right to housing framework and rental housing laws:
Read about the human rights impact of this project.
Stories of discrimination in rental housing are far too common in Canada. Many advocates have long pointed to discrimination in housing as a systemic issue caused by patterns of behavior, policies or practices that are a part of the structures of our society which put certain groups at a disadvantage.
What does systemic discrimination in housing look like in practice? From passive aggressive comments to discriminatory housing posts, three women share their stories about their challenges finding and maintaining safe and accessible housing in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA).
Dorrett White is a wife, mother, and working actor who has had roles on several shows, including The Boys, What We Do in the Shadows, and Self Made: Inspired by the Life of Madam C.J. Walker.
White remembers first experiencing discrimination in housing when her and her now-husband were looking for a place to rent in the Beaches neighbourhood where they could grow into as a family. White is Black and her husband is Latino. Though they looked good on paper – her credit was great and his job paid more than minimum wage – they endured what seemed like endless rejection.
“Every landlord that we went to, they would tell us, ‘alright we’ll take your information and we will give you a call back’ and we never heard from any of them,” White said. “Even when we offered personal references, a number of employment letters, and people who could vouch for us, we would still never hear back. And we would always get told and reminded that ‘parties can’t happen here’ or not to invite too many people over. I’m not sure what that was about but that was a common thread in every single landlord we met on that journey.”
After a long search, White and her husband were accepted for a one-bedroom apartment, but they would soon find themselves on a difficult rental search again.
For Jasmine Jennings, a 24-year-old former youth in care and crown ward about to embark a Bachelor of Social Work, the challenge of finding suitable housing began when she turned 18.
“For a lot of youth in care, turning 18 is nothing to be excited about and the only gift you are guaranteed on this day is abandonment,” Jennings shared. “While other 17-year-olds around me were focused on finding the perfect prom dress or walking across the stage, I was thinking about homelessness.”
Jennings said that time spent in care often leads to a belief “that putting up with abuse, mistreatment, or just generally being uncomfortable is something that I have to do.” The belief that she did not deserve safe and stable housing was with her when she started to look for a place to rent after being released from foster care.
There were other challenges facing her, as well.
“I am disabled and Black, and I am a woman of low income, so it feels like all of the odds are stacked against me,” she said.
“Because I am disabled, my income is ODSP. And a lot of times, landlords do not want to accept someone who is disabled. In fact, in a lot of housing postings, you’ll see ‘job letter or recent paystubs required’ and this usually leaves me living in spaces that aren’t safe and don’t meet my accommodations,” Jennings shared. “I have had knives pulled on me, I have had inappropriate sexual advances. I’ve been locked out. I have been told that I have to be home at 10:00 p.m. I have paid money in cash then been told that I haven’t paid, so I had to pay double. So, being left to live in spaces that aren’t safe has been really challenging.
White also found herself renting an apartment that she did not feel comfortable with due to discrimination in her rental search.
After enjoying their apartment in the Beaches neighbourhood for a couple of years, White and her husband sought to find a bigger place after having a daughter. Realizing that the Beaches would be too expensive for their budget, they decided to try looking in Scarborough. While Scarborough had more apartments in their budget, it was still difficult for them to find a landlord willing to rent to them.
“We thought it would be easier to look for an apartment as a family, but funnily enough, it felt like it was much harder,” White said. Instead of being told, ‘Oh, we don’t know if you can afford this place,’ we would be told things like ‘Oh, this one-bedroom or this two-bedroom might not actually work for your family’ or ‘no children allowed here.’ ”
After “months and months” of searching, they eventually found someone that would rent to them. Though there were some red flags, such as the landlord only accepting cash as rent payment, they took the place.
“Out of desperation, we decided okay, this guy said we could come in, so let’s go. That ended up being one of the biggest mistakes we ever made,” White said.
Sheila Warner is Gitxsan, a member of the wolf clan, and her spirit name is May-may-zey May-ga-zay, Eagle from all Directions. She is a licensed paralegal with Aboriginal Legal Services, working primarily in eviction prevention.
One major housing issue that Warner sees with the community she serves – low-income Indigenous people in Toronto – is related to Rent-Geared-to-Income (RGI) and the idea of being incorrectly identified as overhoused.
“If a family has a two-bedroom apartment or a three-bedroom apartment and CAS [Children’s Aid Society] apprehends one or two children then that tenant is suddenly overhoused and they try and evict them for that,” Warner explained. “However, in order to get their child back, CAS requires that they have a bedroom for each child that are of the opposite sex or if it’s the same sex there is only so many years they can be apart to share a bedroom. So, then your housing is at risk, your children are gone, and now you have no way to get them back because they are not going to give them back unless you have that housing.”
While she advocates for her clients regularly, Warner said that she finds it challenging to advocate for herself as she also faces discrimination in her housing.
“I am experiencing it this week with my own landlord,” she said. “I have lived in this place for almost 10 years, so my rent is significantly lower than what market rent is right now. The upstairs tenants have just moved out, so he has in turn started harassing me and yelling at me. He doesn’t talk to me, he screams at me, and he seems to think that this is okay.”
Recently, while her landlord was yelling at her for letting a neighbour park in her parking space, Warner told him and his wife that instead of being concerned about a minor parking issue, they should look at the mould in her bathroom that she has been asking them to take care of for years. Warner says that the landlord’s wife turned to her and told her that if she had a problem with the mould, she could move out.
“I know my rights and I can professionally defend myself, but it is so stressful that I can’t,” Warner said. “I am dealing with other people’s housing stuff all day that when it comes to dealing with my own, I end up putting up with it. And also, it is cheap rent, so I let them push me around.”
White, the actor and mother, also reports being treated poorly by one landlord.
After leaving the apartment in Scarborough, her and her family ended up renting an apartment from White’s old college professor. They loved the apartment, but the landlord of the building made it difficult for them to enjoy their stay.
“He would make rude comments to us under his breath. He wouldn’t greet us like he would greet all the other tenants…And if he did talk to us, it was in a really stern, angry, aggressive voice,” White said.
While the three women felt frustrated and disappointed by their experiences trying to rent an apartment in the GTA, they expressed optimism that things can get better for racialized and low-income renters.
White hopes that discussions like the one at the workshop “can lead to changes and reforms and maybe a bit more ruling for private landlords in terms of how they choose who they are renting to.”
The Aboriginal Legal Services, where Warner works, has recently begun offering an Indigenous circle where people from all backgrounds can go to engage in alternative dispute resolution.
“I think when people sit down and they discuss with their landlord what is happening and they can tell their side of the story, the landlord is forced to see them as a person and not a name and number on a file in their office, and that is really beneficial,” Warner said.
For Jennings, as a former youth in care who is now immersed in social justice work, “it is important to me that a worker understands the systemic nature of homelessness and implements anti-oppression practices whenever possible. It is important that a supporter understands the child welfare system, the realities of youth from care.…And finally, it is important that a supporter is culturally competent and how my race impacts the likelihood of securing safe housing,” she said.
“I don’t think that stable housing is a want. I think it is a need and is a social determinant of health,” she added. “It is my hope that youth who age out of the system can experience safety and what it feels like to be home.”
These stories from Dorrett, Jasmine and Sheila were first shared during a workshop on systemic discrimination in housing that took place on July 6, 2021. The workshop was organized by CCHR and the Right to Housing Toronto as part of a virtual workshop series that addresses the critical challenges in advancing the right to housing.
As an immigrant, a survivor of domestic abuse, and a formerly unhoused person, Dankwa’s journey has neither been easy nor linear. She wants to share her lived experience because “there are so many other people that nobody will ever know their story, but they are dying on the street. A lot of voices are not being heard and I’ve been through so much that keeping it to myself is not going to help.”
Dankwa came to Canada to escape an abusive relationship in New York where she felt her pleas for help were not being taken seriously enough.
“I felt like I wasn’t getting the support that I needed,” she says. “My children and I were not safe at all, so I did what I had to do to protect me and my children.”
After arriving in Ontario, Dankwa ended up at a shelter. She describes her time there as challenging, with a lack of trust between the women staying there and the shelter staff.
“The shelter is a good place in an emergency. It should be just emergency services,” she says. “I should be staying in that shelter not more than two to three weeks and then should be put in a house or apartment. We need homes. We don’t need to put so much money in the shelters. No abused women with children should stay in a shelter for more than a month because then it becomes another mental health issue to deal with in that place.”
At her shelter, Danka says she did not receive the appropriate transitional support and was instead kicked out for overstaying.
“A shelter is where you’re supposed to get the legal services, where you get all the support that you are supposed to get, but in my case, that was not there. In my case, I had to leave because I had overstayed and when I said no, I was literally kicked out and my stuff was thrown out in a plastic bag.”
After leaving the shelter, Dankwa bounced around different places.
“I was couch surfing. I will go to this person’s place for a week [then] that person’s place for a week and sleep on their couch. I’ll go take a shower here then I will go somewhere else the next day and stay there for a little bit until I get my work money then I can stay in a motel. When that money runs out, I go back on the street and try to figure out what friend will take me in for the night.”
After bouncing around for months, she finally found a one-bedroom basement apartment that she could afford.
However, her joy at finding housing for the first time since fleeing her abusive relationship was short-lived.
“What I didn’t know was that it was another nightmare that I was going to face,” she says.
Dankwa’s new landlord lived above her and had strict rules around what Dankwa could or could not do.
“She told me that when I go out, I have to come home at a certain time or I shouldn’t come in. I should stay outside,” Dankwa says. “So, when I go out and it’s past 10:00 o’clock, I have to sleep on somebody’s couch again.”
Dankwa was also not allowed to have friends over in her apartment. If someone wanted to visit her, they had to sit in her landlord’s living room while the landlord was there.
After a friend came over one day at a pre-planned time and the landlord asked her to reschedule because she wanted to go out, Dankwa had had enough.
“I didn’t know where I was gonna go, but I said to myself ‘If I have left that man in the United States and have come all the way and stayed in the shelter where I’ve been kicked out of, there is nothing else that I can’t deal with.”
And with that, Dankwa was homeless again.
“I remember Thanksgiving. It was the saddest Thanksgiving ever,” Dankwa recalls. “I was always the person cooking Thanksgiving, everybody coming to my home. I had a huge house, it was beautiful. I worked so hard for that place. And Thanksgiving came and I was homeless.”
After a couple of months, Dankwa found another basement apartment that she could afford in Peel Region; this one without a kitchen, fridge, or microwave.
The first night, she slept on the floor with no comforter. The second day, while a friend drove her to find some supplies, they were hit by another vehicle.
Being an immigrant with no permanent resident card at the time, Dankwa was too scared to go to the hospital.
“I started having anxiety attacks and depression,” she says. “When a woman is running from abuse, we should not look at the nationality or the country that they are coming from in order to provide them [with support], we should look at them as a human being. As a woman who needs help, that is it.”
Dankwa stayed in the basement apartment “hoping that the kitchen would be done,” she says. “That did not happen.”
Dankwa says she explored different avenues for help with finding suitable and stable housing, but was rebuffed at every turn, in part due to her immigration status.
“After a while, I started moving again,” Dankwa says.
“The road to finding a place has not been easy. Throughout, I encountered landlords that would like to take advantage of me in every way they can knowing my situation. But one thing that I said to myself after what I experienced with my ex-husband and what I experienced in the shelter, is that there’s things I won’t entertain anymore. I would rather be on the street and be happy than giving money to somebody to abuse me.”
While Dankwa has now found more stable housing, she still fears that it could all be taken away.
“When it comes to women’s homelessness, we need more special attention,” she says.
“I’m not saying other people don’t need special attention, but most of the time, it is women leaving abusers and a lot of them will take their children with them, so it is not as easy for women to stay in the shelter or on the streets,” she explains.
“We live in a world where we are always trying to help other people from different places, but we have women here going through abuse who don’t even have a home to stay. And sometimes people think that we have the systems in place…but the programs and the systems are not set up to actually provide adequate housing, and so the woman ends up back with the abuser or on the street.”
For Dankwa, a large part of the issue with women’s homelessness is that there is a lack of understanding by the vast majority of the population. “People get judgmental because they have not been in our shoes,” she says.
“If I can use that energy that I have, that anger, that strength, to let people know [what homeless people] are going through then somebody might listen. Somebody might read the story somewhere. Somebody might have the passion to even advocate. And this is the way that I can help somebody else.”
Janine Harvey lives in Ulukhaktok, a community of less than 450 people in the Beaufort Delta Region of the Northwest Territories.
At the time of this interview, her community has no internet service and so we speak over the phone instead of the now ubiquitous Zoom.
Harvey is a mother, wife, an advocate, and a supporter of Inuit culture. She describes Ulukhaktok as a “very cultural community; lots of hunting and fishing, craft making and artists.”
That culture is part of what led her back there after decades away.
“I wanted to be part of my culture again,” she says.
Harvey grew up in Ulukhaktok, but moved to Yellowknife when she was 19.
In Yellowknife, she began her career as a support worker with the YWCA, working at a women’s shelter called the Alison McAteer House.
“I worked there for five and a half years and during my time there, I would say maybe 90 percent of the women and children that were fleeing family violence were Indigenous or Inuit,” she says. “And I thought there was a need for more workers that are Indigenous because we have this connection. I thought I could bring a lot of different things to the table because I am helping my own people and they trust me.”
Harvey says she was drawn to the work at the shelter because of her own lived experience.
“I am a victim of sexual assault, and I am a victim of a kidnapping. With the trauma that I’ve endured myself, I decided I wanted to help other people,” she says. “I decided I wanted to make sure that women had a safe place to go…I wanted to be an advocate for a lot of women that were facing family violence or that didn’t have a home. Then it just became bigger.”
After the YWCA, Harvey started working at the Women’s Society in Yellowknife.
“With the help of the Women’s Society, me and my colleague Lauren started the Housing First program from the ground up,” she says. “That program opened my eyes to another area of vulnerable people: people who were homeless and had nowhere to go, who were sleeping outside in -30 weather.
“I thought ‘this is not right’ then ‘there’s more that I could do’, so I started working with the people that were experiencing homelessness. I started asking what they wanted to do and what they needed to do instead of me telling them.”
What she heard from a lot of people in the program, Harvey says, was that they simply needed non-judgmental support.
“There’s a lot of stigma towards homelessness. So, a lot of the people that I worked with asked ‘can you come with me to a meeting?’ or ‘can you come with me to Walmart because they’re not gonna let me in?’” Harvey says. “So, I found a lot of what we did was just to help empower the participants and to help reconnect them to society by going with them to meetings, to buy groceries, making sure they weren’t getting bad treatment from service workers or the public and just really helping them build their confidence.”
Harvey believes that “housing is a right and everyone deserves a home, no matter who you are, or where you are from” and says that the government is not doing enough to address the housing crisis and poverty in the North.
“I advocate because I see how my people are living in the poorest housing for the highest rent. They are living in these units, where some of them have no doors or there’s mould in the kitchen or their floors need to be replaced, and there’s no renovation because they don’t have the materials and there are not enough workers to do maintenance and repairs. A lot of people in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut live in really poor conditions for a really high cost of living.”
To push for change, Harvey sits on her local council, the Pan-Canadian Voice for Women’s Housing and the Steering Committee of the National Right to Housing Network.
“The government hasn’t taken action on ending poverty as much as I would like to see, and they haven’t moved forward on housing for years and years,” she says.
Because her community is under-resourced, Harvey’s work is currently unpaid.
“Everything I am doing now is as a volunteer,” she says. “My drive comes from hearing the really horrible stories that people have had to go through. The money doesn’t even matter, I am just going to keep fighting for you because what is happening is not right.”
Harvey’s return to Ulukhaktok has also been about healing.
“I went to Yellowknife for school, but I left my community due to family violence. I didn’t want to go back home because I felt judged and labelled and that I did wrong,” she explains. “The guy who had assaulted me when I was a teenager, I was one of the first people in my community to charge them for sexual assault. And the guy that kidnapped me got five years in jail, but it was really hard for me to move past all that.
“After some time in Yellowknife, after my kidnapping, I was an alcoholic. For a couple years. I drank my pain away. And everybody would say that I should go to a treatment centre, but I knew in my heart and in my head that I didn’t want to go to treatment because I couldn’t face being locked up, which a lot of people face up here. I now advocate for culturally appropriate treatment for our people, and for me, I knew I wanted to do my healing on the land in my own cultural ways.”
In Ulukhaktok, Harvey says she has gotten to “learn my Inuit way and reconnect with the land, my ancestors, and God, and have found forgiveness.”
She says she is hopeful that things will change and get better for her community.
“I believe that if I keep doing the work that I am doing, somebody might listen. Somebody in government might take action and give us more money for housing, for free lunches for children,” she says.
“I try and speak up and if someone hears me and has the passion that I have, they, too, can help end homelessness.”
Janine Harvey was one of the panelists at CCHR and the National Right to Housing’s workshop, “Claiming the Right to Housing in the North through the National Housing Strategy Act”, held in September 2021. The workshop is part of an ongoing series of regional workshops with local partners across Canada.
Being evicted from one’s home can irrevocably change their life. It can mean not just losing housing, but losing stability, losing community, and in some cases, losing one’s sense of self-worth.
CCHR and Right to Housing Toronto (R2HTO) recently held a workshop to discuss evictions and the right to housing. To understand the impact of evictions during the pandemic from the ground up, we spoke with three lawyers who assist tenants facing evictions about the cases they see most often, the pandemic’s effect on tenants, and some of the client stories that have stayed with them.
Melissa Bramson and Ryan Hardy are both with the Tenant Duty Counsel Program (TDCP), a program of the Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario funded by Legal Aid Ontario. TDCP are a group of lawyers and community legal workers who help tenants facing a hearing at the Landlord and Tenant Board (LTB) by providing basic legal advice, helping to work out settlements with landlords, and reviewing and helping fill out some forms and documents, especially those related to eviction.
Bramson is the full-time tenant duty counsel in Ottawa based out of Community Legal Services of Ottawa, and Hardy is the supervisor for the Tenant Duty Counsel in Toronto and the Peel region. Both Bramson and Hardy say that most of the requests they get for help from tenants facing eviction are related to rent arrears, where the tenant was unable to pay their rent in full.
“I think a lot of my team would tell you it feels like we’re getting a narrower range of issues that we talk to people about,” Hardy says. “People in the pre-pandemic era would come in with all kinds of situations, just a wider range of things and problems that they were dealing with. It definitely feels like it’s narrowed a bit, and so arrears are first and foremost and it really kind of dominates.”
While rent arrears have always made up a large percentage of reasons that landlords file for eviction, the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in many people losing their income and therefore unable to pay all their rent.
“Recently, a large majority of people who are in arrears are people who lost their job because of COVID. You know CERB came through for a little bit, but maybe didn’t cover the same amount that they were used to. So, there’s a whole new group of people that are now in arrears,” Bramson says. This situation is especially true for those living in some of Canada’s most unaffordable cities to live as a renter, such as Toronto or Ottawa.
Yodit Edemariam is the director of legal services at Rexdale Community Legal Clinic, a non-profit legal clinic that serves people who are living on low incomes in the northwest of Toronto.
Edemariam says she has also seen the pandemic’s impact on people’s ability to pay their rent.
“People have had to make impossible choices about going to unsafe work versus trying to keep up with their rent and we have seen arrears across the province at levels that I have never seen in my career.”
The large number of arrears cases currently at the LTB may not just be due to people’s inability to pay their rent in full, but also due to the kinds of applications that the LTB seem to be prioritizing.
“There’s a huge volume of non-payment of rent cases that are being heard at the Board. I can see that based on the file numbers,” says Bramson. “For example, you have a number like EAL-12345-21, meaning that the landlord filed that application in 2021. So, I can see that all of the L1 non-payment of rent cases are from 2021, and I would say in comparison, the tenant applications for things like maintenance and repair, the majority of those that are on our docket are from 2019 and 2020, so it’s very clear what the LTB‘s priority is.”
Hardy says he has seen a similar trend.
“The tenant applications are a small fraction of what the Board is doing,” he says. “It’s a lot more work for most tenants to do their applications successfully, so it’s always been skewed, but it feels more dramatic now, and some of that is the Board scheduling.”
Tenant applications at the LTB can be related to a landlord who is neglecting the rental unit and not doing repairs, it can be related to a major appliance that is not working like a fridge, or harassment issues that tenants are facing by their landlord or representatives, just to name a few.
“I spoke to a gentleman just last week who had filed a pair of tenant applications in November. He was still waiting for his hearing, but his landlord’s hearing for eviction for arrears had been scheduled just in a couple of months,” Hardy says. “So, even though he had filed first, he was waiting much longer to get heard.”
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and public health guidelines, the LTB moved hearings online in March 2020. This has created challenges for some tenants, such as those who do not have access to a computer or reliable connection, those who are not comfortable with technology or those with language barriers.
“I have to do a lot of explaining to people on how to sign in [to the hearing]. People saying ‘I got this link but what does it mean?’” Bramson says. “Over the weekend, I got an email from a tenant who I had sent a PDF document to fill in and she said she didn’t know how to fill it in. This is something that we wouldn’t have dealt with before because we would tell her to go get a physical copy at the counter, but the counters are closed. “
Hardy says having hearings online also makes it challenging to provide the best advice to tenants.
“We provide legal advice and the advice will focus on different ways of trying to defend against the arrears application,” Hardy says. “If there’s technical defects in the landlord’s application, we’re going to try to talk about that. That’s something that’s a lot harder to do these days than it was because before usually people would be sitting there with their documents that you could look over. It’s much more difficult to do that now.”
With the online hearings “tenants and tenant duty counsel are at a huge disadvantage by not having that paperwork,” Bramson says. “And then the landlord’s the person who filed it, so they would have that paperwork and already have the products that they need, which makes it an unfair disadvantage right at the beginning.”
The cases that go in front of the LTB all have a letter and a number attached to them; Bramson referred to a hypothetical EAL-12345-21, which could be an application to evict a tenant for non-payment of rent and to collect rent that the tenant owes. Behind these application numbers lie real individuals with their own stories and journeys.
Hardy, who came back to working at the Tenant Duty Counsel in November 2020 after some time off, says the scale of arrears that people were dealing with made an impact on him.
“Seeing what people were up against was really shocking. There were so many people who had fallen victim to the pandemic/lockdown in different ways. People whose entire industries had ceased to function,” he says. “I spoke to a guy who was a tattoo artist, working independently, making good money and getting to do something creative, and then it was just done.”
Bramson thinks of tenants who are disadvantaged by eviction hearings moving online.
“I had a tenant who didn’t know how to submit her evidence in one email. I tried to talk her through it with my tech hat on and I said instead of sending one document at a time, you can attach six attachments to one email, but she didn’t know how to do it,” Bramson recalls.
“At the hearing, [the tenant] apologized to the [LTB] member, and for one reason or another, the matter was adjourned, and the member said to her, ‘at the next hearing, organize yourself because if I get multiple emails like this again, we might be talking about costs.’ So, costs are not to be confused with an administrative fine, but it’s something where if someone’s conduct was unreasonable, then the Board can award costs as a penalty. [The member] was saying it was unreasonable that the tenant didn’t know how to attach documents which is something that stuck out to me because she just didn’t understand the process.”
Edemariam, with the Rexdale Community Legal Clinic, says she thinks a lot about poverty and choice when it comes to her clients.
“I think from the Landlord and Tenant Board or the powers that be that there is a real misunderstanding of how people are living. I’ve seen clients’ bank statements, and that’s been one of the most profound experiences I’ve had in my career,” she says. “I think a lot about what poverty does in terms of where people live. I think sometimes people might ask our clients, ‘so why do you stay if there’s like a horrible mouse infestation and the landlord isn’t doing anything.’ And then they’re like ‘where am I gonna go? Where am I going to find a three-bedroom for this amount? So, the things people tolerate because of a lack of choice really sticks with me.”
Edemariam says she also thinks about the pride that her clients have about their communities and the importance of maintaining that community.
“I think there’s a lot of discourse here in social housing like ‘we’ve given you this extraordinary thing for cheap so you just basically take whatever it’s given’, but we see people building their own communities even when they’re told so many distressing narratives about the communities in which they live.”
The importance of community and helping people stay in their homes is also something that Bramson thinks about.
“No one is ever evicted into a more beneficial situation than they were in,” she says.
For Edemariam, something that her colleague once said has stuck with her.
“My colleague said that everything she’s been able to do in her life is because she had a safe place to live. And I think that’s a common theme throughout our work: how does anyone deal with anything in their lives unless there is an affordable and safe place to do so?”
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