Ottawa’s back into housing — but not in Nunavut

It was in 1993 that Ottawa finally stopped spending money on the construction of new social housing across Canada, including the northern territories.

From the perspective of the new Liberal government elected that year, it was a convenient move, for two reasons: it helped Finance Minister Paul Martin’s deficit-cutting efforts, and it won favour from provincial governments who objected to what they have long seen as unconstitutional federal incursions into areas of provincial responsibility.

From the perspective of the people of Nunavut, however, it was an unmitigated disaster.

Consider the effects on public health, for example:

• Since January of this year, at least 80 cases of respiratory synctial virus, or RSV, have been reported in Nunavut. There’s no vaccine or treatment for this disease, which causes severe breathing problems for infants and spreads rapidly among people living in overcrowded housing.

• Thanks to the research work of Dr. Anna Banarji of the B.C. Children’s Hospital, we know that Inuit children are admitted to hospital for serious lung infections at a staggering, frightening rate: 484 admissions for every 1,000 children.

• Tuberculosis, that classic disease of poverty, was thought to be eliminated just 10 years ago. But now, TB rates in Nunavut are 13 times the national average. We’ve seen serious outbreaks in Arviat, Iqaluit and several other communities. In the Baffin region alone, seven per cent of children have tested positive for the TB bacillus.

It is no exaggeration then, to say that when federal officials stopped building social housing in Nunavut, they imposed death sentences on innocent Nunavut children who were yet to be born, and condemned many more to lives of ill-health and permanent incapacity.

And then there’s the effect on the Nunavut government’s operations. During that farcical period between April 1997 and April 1999, when the Office of the Interim Commissioner was “planning” for the creation of Nunavut, they assumed that at least 50 per cent of new government employees could be housed within Nunavut’s existing housing supply, much of which consists of social housing.

The obvious fact that Nunavut’s social housing stock was, and is, desperately overcrowded, never seemed to influence their thinking. The result is, as a recent report on decentralization pointed out, that the Nunavut government’s decentralization efforts have been seriously compromised, and its staffing efforts in Iqaluit have ground to a standstill.

Why are we reminding you of all this? Because Ottawa is returning to the social housing game in a big way — but not in Nunavut.

The Toronto Star reported on May 23 that the federal government will spend $245 million as part of a federal-provincial scheme to build 10,000 new affordable housing units in Ontario — 3,000 of them in Toronto. The provincial government and other partners will contribute an equal amount, to bring total spending on new social, or affordable, housing up to a whopping $490 million.

The money will likely go to municipal corporations, which are now responsible for social housing in Ontario, as well as housing co-operatives and private builders.

The people of Ontario, especially the thousands of homeless who every night pile into overcrowded shelters in Toronto, need the affordable housing that this money will help build. Due to a long list of factors, including a severe shortage of units, rents there are about as high as they are in Iqaluit.

But it still demonstrates that Ottawa’s approach to social housing does next to nothing for Nunavut. It’s worth noting that the Ontario funding announcement was made by a Liberal member of parliament, in a manner calculated to extract maximum political benefit for the Liberal party in vote-rich Ontario.

It’s no mystery that Ottawa ignores Nunavut. The Liberal Party of Canada doesn’t need us to win re-election.

JB