Housing Advocates Demand Homes at BC Legislature

The Housing Justice Project called a press conference at the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia to deliver a report on the homelessness crisis in the city of Victoria and demand ready access to permanent housing.

The conference, whose announcement spread by invitation only, nevertheless attracted about fifty advocates and people with lived experience of homelessness. Bruce Livingstone, affiliated with organisations ranging from the Existence Project to the Green Party of Canada, assumed the role of media spokesperson for the event.

I recognised Victoria-Beacon Hill MLA Grace Lore among the attendance, a bit of a relief since her riding is one of the hot spots for homelessness in the province. In contrast, Minister of Housing Ravi Kahlon declined an invitation to attend for being too busy to meet with advocates who come to deliver a housing report at the government’s doorstep. CORRECTION 2024/05/09: I was just informed by housing advocate Nicole Chaland that she and Bruce actually did meet with Minister of Housing Ravi Kahlon in the morning, although the emcee declared otherwise at the event. Apparently the meeting went smoothly.

The report reasserts previously published figures on homelessness in Victoria, such as the latest Point-in-Time count of over 1600 people without adequate shelter as of last year, and stresses that housing is a human right. It calls for shelters to be relegated to temporary solutions instead of imposing years-long waiting lists on supportive housing applicants, for living conditions in shelters to be improved, for easing access to affordable housing, and to stop sweeping homeless encampments when occupants have nowhere else to go.

Multiple people with lived experience spoke before the cameras of their harrowing experiences in shelters, which are often unsafe and unsanitary, in addition to being terrible environments for recovering drug users. I myself spent four and a half years in a transitional shelter, and while I advocate for more of them to get people off the streets, I concur that nobody should spend years languishing in them wondering whether their turn to move up the ladder will ever come.

It was repeatedly stated that the homelessness crisis is indissociable from colonialism as far as indigenous populations are concerned, especially since uprooting children from their communities to send them to residential schools largely contributed to this crisis. Indigenous advocates like to assert, in one from or another, that homelessness didn’t exist on these lands until the colonial invader introduced it.

More information at ahomeforall.ca. The full report has yet to be made available online at the time of this writing.