Housing and Human Rights (original) (raw)
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Canada's National Housing Strategy (NHS) commits the government to eliminating chronic homelessness and promises that realizing the right to housing is a key objective. In this article, we explore how the Canadian government could realize the right to housing in the context of eliminating chronic homelessness. We argue that it is helpful to look at how other jurisdictions have successfully reduced homelessness. In this article we examine Finland and Scotland's approaches because they offer certain similarities in how homelessness is addressed, yet they also differ, most crucially in how they understand the right to housing. We argue that both of these jurisdictions offer important lessons for Canada to draw on as it seeks to reduce long-term homelessness.
Housing First in Canada: Supporting Communities to End Homelessness
2013
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2016
Housing insecurity and homelessness is a complex phenomenon. Its causes are found in processes at the micro, meso, and macro-levels. In Canada, the rise of economic globalization and neoliberalism contributed to the decline of the welfare state with retraction of the national housing program and the transfer of housing responsibility from the federal to provincial and territorial governments, all of which contributed to the rise of Canadian housing insecurity and homelessness. The state of housing insecurity and homelessness in Canada is a national crisis. It is well established that housing insecure and homeless people have a higher prevalence of mortality and morbidity than the general population. Yet, Canada remains without national anti-poverty, affordable housing, and homelessness strategies, thus, the crisis persists. The current federal government housing and homelessness strategies may not be the best solutions to prevent and end housing insecurity and homelessness. What is required is the adoption of "A Critical Approach to Canadian Housing Insecurity and Homelessness as Informed by Political Economy and Social Determinants Of Health" that takes into account the broader economic, political, social, and cultural factors that shape housing insecurity, homelessness and health inequities. In the long term, this should prove to be a more promising policy approach to the housing insecurity and homelessness issue. iv CHAPTER I
Home Spaces and Rights to the City: Thinking Social Justice for Chronically Homeless Women
The central argument of this paper is that current Canadian discussions about the relative merits of Housing First and Continuum of Care raise both theoretical and substantive questions about neoliberalization as an orientation that, following Graefe (2006), promotes certain types of social rule at the expense of other considerations. The possibility is raised that a wholesale shift to Housing First might well become a vehicle for further excluding marginalized people, not only in terms of their rights to public space but also their visible presence in any spaces in the city, including the specialized congregate spaces of emergency, transition, and supportive housing associated with Continuum of Care. Through a focus on the particular situations and challenges faced by chronically homeless women, using a gendered and race-sensitive analysis, an alternative policy framework is offered that is informed by the social justice perspectives of Fraser (2003) and Purcell (2008). [Key words: homeless women, housing policy, social justice, Canada.]
Homelessness, Human Rights, Litigation and Law Reform: A View from Canada
Australian Journal for Human Rights, 2004
At the international level, Canada has in the past played an important role as an advocate for the recognition of access to adequate housing as a fundamental human right. Canada ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) in 1976 and played a leading role in promoting the adoption and ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) in 1989, both of which contain explicit recognition of the right to adequate housing. In 2000 and 2001, Canada co-sponsored the resolution entitled Women's Equal Ownership of, Access to and Control over Land and the Equal Rights to Own Property and to Adequate Housing, subsequently approved by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (United Nations Commission on Human Rights 2001). Canada has generally resisted US opposition to recognition of the right to adequate housing in international fora (Hulchanski 1996). Unfortunately, Canada's position in support of the human right to housing on the international stage is increasingly at odds with domestic policy and legislation. The consistent policy direction in Canada at various levels of government since the early 1990s has been toward unprecedented withdrawal of commitments to many of the most critical components of a strategy to ensure access to adequate housing and meaningful security of tenure. * This article is a revised and updated version of 'The Right to Adequate Housing in Canada' in Leckie (2003).
Homelessness by Choice and by Force
Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, 2021
The concept "homelessness" is interpreted in terms of the purpose, value, ideology, and political agenda. Homelessness cannot be clearly understood in isolation of the meaning of the concept "home." In order to define homelessness, an understanding of the concept "home" is crucial. A "home" is a place where one lives whereas "homelessness" refers to having no home (Hornby 2015: 730). A "home" refers to a decent dwelling, which meets the needs of the family, where they can maintain privacy and enjoy social relations. It also refers to security of occupation and entitlement (Busch-Geertsema et al. 2010: 21). Somerville (1992: 532) presents seven key signifiers of home, namely-"shelter, hearth, heart, privacy, roots, abode and paradise." Homelessness is seen as a global concept affecting the poor in both the developed and developing countries, both in urban and rural context. The global definition of homelessness is "living in severely inadequate housing due to a lacking access to minimally adequate housing" (Busch-Geertsema et al. 2016: 131).