Are you hopeless yet?

By NUNATSIAQ NEWS

On March 23, Nunavut residents will find out if the Paul Martin government’s throne speech last month was really as deceptive and cynical as it sounded. On that day, Ralph Goodale, the federal minister of finance, will stand up in the House of Commons to deliver Ottawa’s 2004-20005 budget.

Remember this little gem?

“While some progress has been made, the conditions in far too many aboriginal communities can only be described as shameful. This offends our values.”

That quotation is from the Feb. 2 throne speech.

But don’t expect much action in the federal budget next week. At a meeting with three national aboriginal leaders in Ottawa on March 11 Martin pledged no new money. For their part, the three leaders — Jose Kusugak of the Inuit Tapiriit, Phil Fontaine of the First Nations, and Clément Chartier of the Métis – spent their time talking to Martin about ways of getting themselves invited to cabinet committee meetings and first ministers’ conferences. And they came away with nothing.

So in Nunavut, where conditions are about as “shameful” as they can get in a G-8 economy like Canada’s, hopelessness will continue as the operative state of mind.

That’s especially true in the one policy area where the federal government is most directly responsible for Nunavut’s misery — housing.

Nearly half of all Nunavut residents — 45.9 per cent — live in public housing units maintained by the Nunavut Housing Corporation through its system of local housing associations and authorities.

They’re crammed into 3,854 units, many of them badly overcrowded. Numbers gathered by the Aboriginal Peoples Survey and released last year show that overcrowding is worse among Inuit than among any other aboriginal people in the country.

The evidence shows that almost all of Nunavut’s social housing tenants are cash-poor, under-employed or unemployed. So are most of the people whose names languish on social housing waiting lists around Nunavut. The housing corporation estimates Nunavut needs 3,000 new units just to meet the current short-fall.

For the most part, these tenants are people who don’t, and likely never will, earn enough money to build, buy or rent housing units on the open market. Neither are many of them likely to get housing-supplied jobs with government or other large employers any time soon, especially in the have-not communities where even government jobs are scarce.

All the evidence, not to mention common sense, points to one simple conclusion: Nunavut will need a large, well-funded social housing program for generations to come.

Of Nunavut’s 3,854 social housing households, only 26 had been assessed “full rent,” according to information that the minister responsible for housing at the time, Kelvin Ng, tabled in the legislative assembly last October. That means only 26 likely earn enough money to think about becoming homeowners.

In contrast, 2,041 households were assessed “minimum rent.” That means they’re either very low income families, or they’re on income support. Indeed, 1,722 households were on income support, as of last fall.

We hear a lot of talk about homeownership these days. But where are all these new homeowners going to come from? Certainly not from the ranks of Nunavut’s social housing tenants.

We all know that Ottawa withdrew from the construction of new social housing in 1993, and that every year since, Nunavut’s social housing needs have mushroomed. The average cost of building a new social housing unit now stands at around $250,000 a unit. This means that it would take a whopping $750 million — more than it costs to run the entire Nunavut government in a single year — just to meet that need. And that’s not including future population growth.

However, Nunavut still gets money from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. to operate and maintain its existing social housing stock. But there’s a poison pill built into even that agreement — by 2037, Ottawa’s O&M contribution will shrunk to zero. The gradual phase-out starts this fiscal year.

Feeling hopeless yet? When it comes to Nunavut’s social housing crisis, you should be. JB

Share This Story

(0) Comments