Canada Without Poverty is happy to announce that we now have a regular blog on the Huffington Post Canada website. Executive Director Rob Rainer, and Director of Education & Outreach, Megan Yarema, will offer insight on, and responses to, poverty related issues and current news. The first blog was posted last week on the housing crisis in Canada. Here is a sample:
Recent images of the northern Ontario First Nation community in Attawapiskat illustrated the shocking reality that there are Canadians living in decrepit housing. However, while ramshackle housing is common in many Aboriginal communities, the crisis embodied by Attawapiskat is not isolated to the Aboriginal demographic, nor to remote communities.
From coast to coast to coast, from our biggest cities to the smallest hamlets, millions of Canadians struggle with inadequate and unaffordable housing. While hundreds of thousands more are homeless — twin crises that warrant much greater attention from the federal government beyond an emergency response such as that being given to Attawapiskat.
In the early 1990s, the federal government abandoned a national approach to housing, replacing it with various housing agreements and programs subject to periodic renewal. In the absence of a national approach — and a concrete, multi-stakeholder strategy founded around the human right to housing (per Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) — it is timely to ask whether the current system is working.
To read the full blog on the Huffington Post website click here. Blogs will be posted frequently, so make sure to stay connected!
