Page - 365 - in VULNERABLE - The Law, Policy and Ethics of COVID-19

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  Strategy  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.