Prepping for Real Policy Work
This week was when things started to feel really real. We’ve talked a lot about the affordable housing crisis in Canada throughout our time at Munk, but watching Push highlighted for me just how incredible the scale of this crisis is across the globe. I mentioned to Leilani in class this week that I felt quite overwhelmed at times watching the documentary. I mean, how are a bunch of cities, with extremely limited budgets and abilities to raise revenues, supposed to fight back against these huge multinational corporations snatching up properties all over the world? Pretty daunting stuff.
But at the same time, this week was also very exciting. Even after completing my internship and securing full-time employment post-grad, meeting with Leilani and Julieta from The Shift this week really made me feel like a real policymaker. The work we’re getting the opportunity to produce for The Shift has such real potential to change how Canadian cities approach housing policies, and I believe that many cities are ready to make that change.
It was very heartening to see the enthusiasm from world mayors in the documentary Push to fight back against these multinationals and start buying back properties. However, as we’ve talked about throughout this semester, big cities face very unique problems and possess unique powers to confront them. I’m very interested in exploring what avenues might exist for strengthening the public housing stock in smaller cities, like Yellowknife, that my group will be analyzing. Although nearly half of Canada’s population lives in a few major metropolitan areas, realizing a human rights approach to housing will be equally as relevant to small towns and rural areas where there are larger proportions of low-income households.
Last semester, classmate Emilie and I worked on another project exploring a human rights approach to housing, from a Constitutional perspective. As we argued then, it’s pretty unlikely that Canada will ever modify the Constitution to explicitly protect housing as a human right. However, codifying, in the National Housing Strategy Act, the recognition that housing is respected as a human right in international law is still a pretty big deal. I’m really excited to get to work on this project to see how the four different cities we’re analyzing can make progress toward this realizing recognition.
