A commentary by the co-leads of the Housing Justice Project. Today, Nov. 22 is National Housing Day. To mark the occasion we call on the federal government to lead an industrial social housing strategy that puts the lowest-income residents of Canada at the front of the line. From the 1960s through the 1980s, the federal government led construction of social housing with 50/50 cost sharing with provinces.
In the mid-1980s, Canada started to cut back funding, and by the mid-1990s construction of social housing across Canada fell off a cliff. In 1995, Ottawa passed the Canada Health and Social Transfer Act, which many point to as the nail in the coffin of Canada’s social housing legacy. The Canadian Observatory of Homelessness marks this era as the beginning of mass homelessness in this nation. In 1972, 20 per cent of all housing built in Canada was social housing. Since the late 1990s, social housing has hovered between one and two per cent of all housing buil