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365The
Front Line Defence: Housing and Human Rights in the Time of COVID-19
Without significant state investment and strong regulation of
financial actors, COVID-19 will result in a deepening of the housing
crisis the country was in prior to the pandemic. This will likely hit
low-income renters the hardest, and for many the Canada Emergency
Response Benefit will be inaccessible, insufficient, or too short-term to
prevent eviction or the worsening of housing need.
Realizing the Right to Housing in a Post-Pandemic Canada
COVID-19 has exposed the way governments in Canada have failed
to effectively implement the right to housing. As such, the pandemic
has provided governments with an opportunity to correct the struc-
tural weaknesses of the Canadian housing system by breathing life
into the National Housing Strategy and the National Housing StrategyÂ
Act. Opportunities of this nature do not often arise. Governments
must act before it passes them by, otherwise they will find that though
the pandemic itself is over, housing inequality has only worsened.
The Canadian government therefore must:
• Ensure access to safe and long-term adequate housing for
people experiencing homelessness, including through the
acquisition of hotels/motels, office spaces, or other properties.
In the short term, these might act as emergency respite cen-
tres. These should be repurposed as expeditiously as possible
into social, deeply affordable housing.
• Adopt a nationwide prohibition on all evictions (except in
cases where a resident is harming others) and foreclosures
during the pandemic and for a reasonable time thereafter,
ensuring renters have adequate legislative protections and
resources to prevent mass evictions post-pandemic.
• Establish an independent national human rights body responsi-
ble for providing oversight on federal expenditures in response
to COVID-19, to ensure government investments advance all
human rights. This national body should seek to advance the
right to housing across Canada, in concert with the Department
of Justice and the Canadian Human Rights Commission.
• Adopt a rights-based approach to homeless encampments,34
upholding the human rights and dignity of encampment
34. Farha & Schwan, supra note 15.
VULNERABLE
The Law, Policy and Ethics of COVID-19
- Title
- VULNERABLE
- Subtitle
- The Law, Policy and Ethics of COVID-19
- Authors
- Vanessa MacDonnell
- Jane Philpott
- Sophie Thériault
- Sridhar Venkatapuram
- Publisher
- Ottawa Press
- Date
- 2020
- Language
- English
- License
- CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
- ISBN
- 9780776636429
- Size
- 15.2 x 22.8 cm
- Pages
- 648
- Categories
- Coronavirus
- International