Nunavimmiut urged to fight rent hikes

JANE GEORGE
Nunatsiaq News

MONTREAL – A Kangiqsualujjuaq resident wants his fellow Nunavimmiut to launch a protest against planned rent hikes for social housing units in Nunavik.

“We’re not dogs,” says Jean-Guy St. Aubin, a 23-year resident of Kangiqsualujjuaq. “Just because we live in the North, it doesn’t mean that they can doing anything they want.”

Under the new scale proposed by Quebec’s social housing body, the Société d’Habitation du Québec (SHQ), workers in Nunavik will have to pay more rent after July 1, 1998 – up to 25 per cent of their income.

St. Aubin says that so far, there hasn’t been enough public consultation about these changes.

Nunavik-wide petition

That’s why he drew up a petition that he’s sent to all Nunavik communities.

In Kangiqsualujjuaq alone, St. Aubin collected 150 signatures. He says people keep telling him they don’t know how they’ll cover food and higher rent payments.

“People are afraid,” St. Aubin said.

The petition’s text says workers in Nunavik already pay out a big chunk of their salaries in taxes, and to cover the cost of northern living.

If rents for the working poor are raised, St. Aubin’s petition says, social conditions will deteriorate. Young people won’t want to get jobs, but will stay on social assistance.

“If working can’t provide better means of living, then what is the use of working?” it reads.

The petition paints a depressing picture of Nunavik after the SHQ hikes rents for local workers.

The new policy will turn the region into a welfare state, says the petition, and its towns into slums.

“Shacks will be going up all over the place without hygiene facilities, and it will be like it was 30 years ago,” the petition reads.

Petitions off to KRG and SHQ

St. Aubin plans to send Kangiqsualujjuaq’s petition to the Kativik Regional Government and to the SHQ’s president, André Marcil.

And he’s encouraging other communities to do the same thing.

“At least the population should have a word to say,” St. Aubin says.

He says he understands why the government wants to save money, but he says there must be better, and less drastic, ways to cut corners.

“The Quebec government needs to understand,” he says. “I’d like someone from the SHQ to live up here for a couple of years.”