Title:  FLSQ - Safer Spaces, Stronger Selves: Gender Justice in Housing and Human Security 

Date: Monday, September 22, 2025

Description: The word “homelessness” seldom comes to mind when thinking of women fleeing violence. But rising housing insecurity and overlapping housing crises are creating gender-specific risks. This talk will share research underway through the interdisciplinary Quebec Homelessness Prevention Policy Collaborative, and its legal reform project that uses a human rights-based approach to law to drive social change.

Speakers:

• Pearl Eliadis - Associate Professor (professional), Max Bell School of Public Policy; Full Member, Centre for Human Rights and legal pluralism, Faculty of Law, McGill University

Podcast: 

Transcript:

00:00:00
Okay, I think we will get started then.
00:00:02
So I'll just with introductions and my name is Bita Amani and I'm co-director of Feminist Legal Studies Queens with my colleague, Professor Deborah Hawk, who I'm delighted to have joined me this year as a co-director.
00:00:18
And we are kicking off our annual Feminist Legal Studies Queens Speaker Series and Workshop for Credit with our first speaker today.
00:00:27
my delight and distinct pleasure to introduce.
00:00:30
That's Professor Pearl Eliadis, Associate Professor of Max Balb School of Public Policy, a full member of the Center for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism, Faculty of Law at MacGill University.
00:00:43
I'll give you a further introduction in a second.
00:00:45
I just want to start off by welcoming you first, both in person and online, and also by providing a land acknowledgement.
00:00:53
Queen's University is situated on the traditional
00:00:57
Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee territory, and of course, to acknowledge this traditional territory is to recognize its longer history, one predating the establishment of the earliest European colonies, and as we head into truth and reconciliation.
00:01:13
day next week, and we should just take a moment to be reminded of the importance of acknowledging the territory's significance for the Indigenous peoples who lived and continue to live upon it every day, and not just on the Truth and Reconciliation National Day.
00:01:32
These are peoples whose practices and spiritualities were tied to the land and continue to develop in relationship to the territory and its other inhabitants today.
00:01:42
The Kingston Indigenous community continues to reflect the area's Anishinaabeg and Haudenosaunee roots.
00:01:48
There's also a significant Metis community, and there are First Peoples from other nations across Turtle Island present here today.
00:01:56
We've been blessed with a nice and balmy summery fall.
00:02:02
I encourage you to take a little bit of time of your day at some point and just walk about and acknowledge the land as you walk on it.
00:02:12
So we're really delighted today to be having Pearl launch us into our first, into our season for our speaker series as our first speaker.
00:02:23
Pearl is a senior human rights lawyer and has taught law and policy at McGill University for 13 years.
00:02:29
A testament of that great work as well as in the background readings that you had of the co-authored piece.
00:02:36
In her international practice, she has worked on human rights issues in eight countries.
00:02:41
and been actively engaged with civil society on a range of gender issues, including the elimination of violence against women.
00:02:48
Current areas of interest are the intersection between the right to adequate housing, the right to be free from violence and gender equality.
00:02:57
Pearl Co-leads the legal reform project on the Quebec Homelessness Prevention Collaborative and has recently published policy analysis on the relationship between second stage housing and human security.
00:03:10
She's here presenting Safer Spaces, Stronger Selves, Gender Justice in Housing and Human Security.
00:03:16
But she's also here modeling what it means to be an exemplary lawyer and policy reform advocate.
00:03:22
Thank you so much for joining us, Pearl.
00:03:24
And without further ado, if you can help me welcome Pearl.
00:03:28
Thanks very much and thank you for coming out in numbers.
00:03:32
It's very much appreciated.
00:03:33
And a warm thanks, of course, to Beat and for Deborah for their warm welcome.
00:03:38
It's always great to be back in Queen's and really great to see all of you.
00:03:42
Can I just get a show of hands of the students who among you are, I'm assuming most of you are law students, but can I get a show of hands of law students?
00:03:51
Is there anybody who is not a law student in the room?
00:03:56
Okay, all right, Okay, my husband, Deborah, and me.
00:04:01
Okay, check.
00:04:02
All right, great.
00:04:04
So, I'm going to be talking about the role of law in creating redress.
00:04:12
for and perhaps preventing violence against women.
00:04:17
And this is a well-established and well-trod territory, particularly in criminal law and family law and adjacent legal areas.
00:04:26
But we don't often hear about the role of law in addressing the housing crisis at the intersection of the right to adequate housing.
00:04:35
particularly as a preventative measure.
00:04:38
And I'm sure I don't need to remind any of you that the right to housing and housing precarity are among the top five domestic policy priorities in this country.
00:04:50
And so I want to start by positioning this in terms of where what I'm going to talk about sits in relation to the housing crisis.
00:05:00
There is not a housing crisis in Canada.
00:05:02
There are multiple housing crises in this country.
00:05:06
We, of course, tend to focus on things like visible and chronic homelessness, the folks in the street, and also, of course, affordability for people trying to find housing.
00:05:18
as well.
00:05:19
But women experiencing violence face a distinct form of homelessness that requires a different policy and a different set of legal responses.
00:05:31
And thinking about the role of law.
00:05:34
in this regard has been something of a challenge because for many working in the community-based sector and in civil society and the folks who I work with, the idea of law as a vehicle for social change is not always well understood.
00:05:51
And it's taken us in the collaborative 2 years
00:05:56
to get a shared language around this and to get people to understand that law is not just the thing that comes out at the end of the social policy sausage machine.
00:06:06
It also provides an orientation and an ethical compass for the type of legal policy that one wants to put into place.
00:06:15
And that requires a shift, a shift in approach and a shift in the way in which we understand the possible role that law can play along with understanding policy and programmatic solutions.
00:06:30
So thinking about the role of law, I'm going to be talking about two examples coming out of this work with the Quebec Homelessness Prevention Policy Collaborative.
00:06:39
I'm going to be talking about a measure, a proposed legal measure that will allow all boats to rise, if you will, including that of women facing the experience of homelessness and some gender-specific measures that we think will support, better support this community.
00:06:57
But before I get into the examples, I want to talk to you a little bit about, let me see if I can do this right.
00:07:03
Yay.
00:07:06
So before I get into this, I want to talk about a little bit about the collaborative that we're working with.
00:07:13
Put a couple of definitions on the table so that we're all talking about the same stuff.
00:07:18
talk a little bit about the legal framework that we think is relevant to this context, and then talk about some of the examples in terms of opportunities for legal reform that we've put forward.
00:07:29
in 2022 and that we're continuing to work on thanks to a SHRC grant as well as some private sector and foundation support.
00:07:39
And the two that I'm going to focus on today are the ones we've worked on the most.
00:07:43
The first one is a quasi-constitutional recognition of the right to housing.
00:07:47
And the second one is
00:07:49
taking one aspect of the right to adequate housing, which is infrastructure and services, and translating that into what we think is an evidence-based recommendation for social housing that's supported by a regulatory framework.
00:08:07
So first, a little bit about the Quebec Homelessness Prevention Collaborative.
00:08:16
The first point to make is that the collaborative itself is new.
00:08:21
It was established in 2021, recognizing that prevention can help to promote more proactive and coordinated strategies to address housing insecurity.
00:08:32
In Quebec, and I haven't lived in Ontario for a while, but certainly in Quebec, it's the case that most homelessness responses focus on frontline services, right?
00:08:42
People in shelters, helping people with food, helping people make sure they're off the streets.
00:08:47
Some of them are day centers, some of them
00:08:50
are more established and more transitional forms of housing.
00:08:56
But the idea of prevention is not well integrated into our legal strikes.
00:09:00
How do we stop this from happening before it happens, right?
00:09:04
And as obvious it might sound, once one says it, banal even, in fact, nobody's actually framed structured policy responses to homelessness in Quebec in this way.
00:09:15
And so we thought,
00:09:16
working with people like the Old Brewery Mission, who are partners in this, along with McGill University, Department of Equity, Ethics and Policy, and the Max Bell School of Public Policy, where I sit as an associate professor professional, which means that I'm half time in the academy and half time in private practice.
00:09:38
We thought it would be a good idea to bring together a core group of academics, community workers, civil society, people with lived experience and expertise across a range of topics.
00:09:50
And those include eviction, gender equality, which is one of the ones I'm involved with, the legal reform
00:10:00
committee, which I founded and co-chair, as well as other ones dealing with, for example, new arrivals to Quebec.
00:10:09
And these topics also span issues of housing, health, justice, and social services to mitigate the risks and create protections for vulnerable communities.
00:10:21
Practice
00:10:22
and procedure are important here.
00:10:25
As lawyers, or at least maybe speaking only for myself, one tends to sit around and think of clever things and write them down on paper and then share them with people, and then hopefully things will move forward.
00:10:35
And sometimes you litigate them and use lawfare as a way to advance social policy, right?
00:10:42
In Quebec, at any rate, this is not a strategy that works very well.
00:10:46
You need to have social solidarity.
00:10:48
You need to bring civil society around the table.
00:10:51
And so we have brought together researchers, community organizations, government representatives, and people with lived experience and expertise to co-develop and promote evidence-based recommendations for policy, programmatic, and legal reforms aimed specifically at preventing homelessness.
00:11:08
And critically, the research is evidence-based.
00:11:13
So we work with statisticians, economists,
00:11:17
people from civil society organizations who are providing us with administrative data so that we understand the impact of what we're proposing and how it plays out on the ground for those who are directly affected.
00:11:32
And for those reasons, we adopt an interdisciplinary and intersectoral approach.
00:11:37
And as I said, getting the language right and understanding shared definitions is not always easy.
00:11:45
And that brings me to definitions.
00:11:48
So when I say women fleeing violence, I'm not only referring to intimate partner violence, but also domestic violence.
00:11:57
I know in a lot of the literature, IPV is used as a sort of shorthand for this.
00:12:02
We've deliberately include domestic violence in the definition because in many instances, patriarchal family models will have an impact on violence against women not perpetrated by
00:12:13
their conjugal partner, but by others in their family, and therefore we include both.
00:12:19
The definition of homelessness that's used by the government of Canada is, and I quote, the living situation of an individual or family who does not have stable, permanent and appropriate housing or the immediate prospect of obtaining one.
00:12:35
The academic definitions are a little wider, and the one we've been using was put forward by Stephen Gates.
00:12:42
and his colleagues in 2012, and it essentially reproduces the one that I just mentioned, but it adds safety.
00:12:50
Okay, so in addition to stable, permanent, and appropriate, the idea of safe accommodation is also critically important.
00:13:03
Some Quebec shelters
00:13:05
I should add, have declined to participate, women's shelters, declined to participate in the last point in time count, which was conducted between 2020 and 2022, because from a feminist perspective, they disagree that they should be considered as homeless.
00:13:23
They didn't want to be the ones who were tagged with the moniker of homelessness, of a person who's experiencing homelessness, because from their perspective, they had a home,
00:13:35
and they should have had access to the home, and that we should all be focusing on the perpetrator and not the woman as the person who needs to be running around and finding solutions.
00:13:44
I'm not going to belabor this point, but I just want to let you know it's an issue, at least in our community, and we have nonetheless tried to focus on the definition, if only to identify the level of supports that we think are needed.
00:13:58
And what do we mean by prevention?
00:14:00
prevention can be proximate, immediate prevention, or it can go all the way up to the way that you experienced your primary school education.
00:14:10
We're looking for something a little more proximate and we're focusing not so much on individual prevention factors, but on structural and systemic factors, hence the focus on law reform.
00:14:22
So why do we even talk about this population given all the other needs that you see around you, including on the streets in this city?
00:14:29
Focusing on the needs of women and children is a policy priority and it intersects in significant ways with insecurity and the risk of homelessness.
00:14:38
In Quebec, and I understand in other provinces it's similar, there are more than 20 ministries who are responsible
00:14:46
and have various commitments to detect, prevent, and or address violence against women and or homelessness.
00:14:52
And this makes communicating with the government and trying to move forward on social change really hard.
00:15:00
And we have an election coming up in Quebec that I'm going to talk about in a minute, but the kind of work that we're doing at a social level is being geared for and to the next election.
00:15:12
So women account for 1/3 of the visible homeless population.
00:15:15
And we know that there is, of course, significant hidden homelessness among women.
00:15:20
So couch surfing, women who are living in their cars, hanging out with friends because they can't go back to their homes.
00:15:27
That's sort of what we refer to as hidden or secondary homelessness.
00:15:33
Quebec's 2018 point in time count reported 21%.
00:15:39
of 947 women respondents who had identified as homeless.
00:15:44
Again, the point in time count is done on the streets, right?
00:15:47
It literally is people going around and on street corners and on places where people know that there are folks experiencing homelessness and counting them.
00:15:57
So it's literally a physical counting procedure that's done across the country.
00:16:03
In contrast to 21% of women respondents identifying as homelessness, as homeless and citing abuse from their partner, only 1% of men reported that partner abuse was a factor in their experience of homelessness.
00:16:17
So the point here being that even though way more men experience visible homelessness, mostly young men, the subcategory of women experiencing homelessness are
00:16:28
overrepresented among women who have abuse cited as the reason for their experience of homelessness.
00:16:35
In the 2022 point in time count, the number went down to 13% from 21%, which would immediately signal cause for happiness, except for that it isn't because the absolute number has gone up significantly.
00:16:51
So
00:16:52
The absolute number in this category has gone up to 1,800 women from 947.
00:16:58
The reason the percentage has gone down, of course, is because the absolute number of people experiencing homelessness writ large has exploded.
00:17:06
And again, you all see this right on the streets, at bus stops, outside food stores, and so on.
00:17:14
So this is an issue.
00:17:16
This is an ongoing issue.
00:17:17
And the data certainly supports
00:17:20
the idea that we are needing to find solutions other than the ones we have used so far.
00:17:26
Right.
00:17:28
So I just want to run through the legal context.
00:17:32
Is everyone here or anyone here taking international law or international human rights law or anything like it?
00:17:39
Okay, so this will be new for most of you.
00:17:42
Question mark.
00:17:44
Okay, you're all staring pixeledly ahead, so I'm assuming the answer is yes.
00:17:47
Okay.
00:17:48
So I'm going to start with an international human rights treaty, which is called the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
00:17:58
It was adopted in 1966 and Canada acceded to it.
00:18:04
which is a way to become a state party to the treaty in 1976.
00:18:10
And the same year, Quebec ratified, and if you want to argue with me about that term later, you can, ratified the treaty in 1976 as well.
00:18:22
Okay, so we have both the federal government and the Quebec government signing on to this commitment.
00:18:29
right?
00:18:29
And this commitment, particularly with regard to Article 11, says, states parties in the present covenant recognize the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living for himself and his family, including adequate food, clothing, and housing, and the continuous improvement of living conditions.
00:18:48
Okay.
00:18:49
So the right to adequate housing is built into
00:18:54
the covenant, which means that it's part of Canada's legal obligations at the international level to respect those standards.
00:19:06
We also have the right to be free from violence under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, another treaty, which Canada has also ratified.
00:19:20
And the general comments coming out of the committee responsible for this have said that the right of women to be free from violence is part of a broader framework of rules that may amount to customary international law.
00:19:37
And customary international law is a peremptory or use Coggins rule, which sort of means, I don't know how many of you drive.
00:19:47
If you've ever gone to a place where there's a parking sign and you park and it says, no stopping.
00:19:54
Don't park.
00:19:55
Don't park here.
00:19:57
Don't ever park here.
00:19:58
Don't even think of parking here.
00:19:59
That's kind of like a peremptory norm.
00:20:01
All right.
00:20:02
So internationally, the rights to be free from slavery, forced labor, torture, atrocity crimes, those sorts of things are atrocity crimes.
00:20:12
And the CEDAW committee's been pushing the position
00:20:15
that the right to be free from violence counts among that list or parade of horribles that we all think are the most important things out there in international human rights law.
00:20:30
The right to adequate housing is very confusing because most people who don't spend a lot of time working in this area, and all the people who do spend a lot of time working in this area, kind of wonder what it means.
00:20:43
Does it mean you have a right to move into my house tomorrow morning?
00:20:46
I mean, you're welcome to come visit, but no.
00:20:51
And vice versa, right?
00:20:54
It does not, generally speaking, grant a right of individual remedy or recourse.
00:20:58
What it does do, it create an obligation on the state to be accountable for meaningful progress over time.
00:21:07
It's called a progressive realization of rights over time.
00:21:10
And what this means is that it places a legal obligation on the state to move forward in a positive direction to the progressive realization of these rights to the maximum available resources that are available.
00:21:25
And when you put the right to adequate housing together with women's rights to be free from violence,
00:21:33
you start to develop a powerful intersection of legal obligations that Canada and therefore Quebec, and I would argue Ontario and Alberta and Saskatchewan and British Columbia and so on, also need to recognize.
00:21:56
The content of the right to adequate housing
00:22:01
has been articulated by the treaty body responsible for this particular treaty.
00:22:07
And there are 7 dimensions.
00:22:10
Accessibility, affordability, availability of services, materials and facilities, infrastructure, cultural adequacy, habitability, legal security of tenure and location.
00:22:22
Our work intersects most strongly with affordability,
00:22:26
availability of services, habitability, and to some extent, location.
00:22:35
Because of the position regarding violence against women being an obligation of the state, General Comment 35 of CEDAW specifically provides that states are required to take measures against stereotypes and inequality in the family that are the underlying causes of gender-based violence,
00:22:54
and that states are liable for acts and omissions perpetrated by those acting under its authority and must ensure remedies for survivors.
00:23:04
So again, putting these provisions together, it becomes clear that there are available strong legal guarantees that should be available and domesticated in the Canadian context.
00:23:19
Does anyone know what I mean by domesticated?
00:23:23
I mean, other than what you do with your pets.
00:23:28
Okay, so Canada is a dualist jurisdiction, which means that it isn't enough to simply ratify a treaty.
00:23:36
Canada has to take an extra step, hence the two steps, right?
00:23:40
It has to actually domesticate those standards into national law in order for them to have an effect, except for customary international law.
00:23:49
When something is so bad, like torture and slavery and
00:23:52
I would argue violence against women, that it forms part of this corpus of norms called customary international law.
00:24:00
It is deemed to be automatically incorporated into or translated into national law.
00:24:06
Okay, which brings us to national law.
00:24:09
So you will all know, because I know you've all done Canadian constitutional law and everybody's going to nod, right?
00:24:16
Okay.
00:24:18
You all know that there is no right to adequate housing in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, right?
00:24:25
There is, are some helpful provisions like the right to life, liberty and security of the person in Section 7 of the Charter.
00:24:33
And of course, the right to equality under Section 15 and maybe Section 28 of the Charter, which creates an interpretive guide to how we understand the way in which equality kind of permeates across the Charter.
00:24:46
And we're hopefully going to be getting some direction on how much there is there under Section 28 in the forthcoming decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in the Bill 21 case.
00:24:59
But I digress.
00:25:01
So there are relevant constitutional protections, but there is no direct incorporation of the right to equitable housing at the constitutional level in Canada.
00:25:13
despite our international obligations to domesticate it.
00:25:18
However, in 2019, the Parliament of Canada enacted the National Housing Strategy Act, which explicitly incorporated the right to adequate housing into federal law in Canada and recognized the international right to adequate housing in Canada at the federal level.
00:25:40
With all that comes with it,
00:25:43
right?
00:25:43
The 7 dimensions I mentioned earlier, the specific obligations that come from the state.
00:25:49
And at a time when housing has become such a fundamental policy issue, of course, the government was strongly pressured from civil society to make this happen.
00:26:03
And although the current Canadian strategy, so not the Strategy Act, but the actual strategy resulting from the Strategy Act, specifically mentions
00:26:13
women fleeing violence as a priority group.
00:26:17
Historically, they have not really been the focus of a lot of the policy work.
00:26:21
And again, that's one of the things that we're looking at addressing.
00:26:26
Okay, so now we have, if you think about this in sort of cascading boxes, we have the international legislative framework, which creates the right to adequate housing.
00:26:39
which is reflected not only in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and not only in the Covenant Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, CEDA, but also in the Convention of the Rights of the Child and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
00:26:57
And there's a specific reference to it in UNDRIP as well.
00:27:03
So
00:27:04
We did not do a lot of our research regarding housing in the context of Indigenous peoples or Aboriginal law or Indigenous law, but I would point out that a lot of the policy structures for these communities are quite distinct and we are working separately with an Indigenous community group in Quebec to develop a separate set of recommendations that they are leading.
00:27:34
So what's law got to do with it?
00:27:36
We've talked about the international framework.
00:27:38
We've talked about the National Housing Strategy Act.
00:27:41
The problem, of course, is that housing as a constitutional matter sits where?
00:27:49
Anybody want to guess?
00:27:51
I think section 91
00:27:54
of the Constitution Act 1867.
00:27:57
Where's housing?
00:28:00
Think about the apartments you're renting.
00:28:02
What jurisdiction would it fall under?
00:28:05
Provincial.
00:28:06
Thank you.
00:28:07
Yeah, absolutely right.
00:28:09
Provincial.
00:28:09
So we have a vertical integration problem, right?
00:28:12
We've got the international obligations that Canada is supposed to have domesticated.
00:28:16
We've got the National Housing Strategy Act, but we don't have a provincial law that actually
00:28:22
creates obligations clearly on the provincial government to be accountable for the progressive realization that I talked about earlier, even if it's slow and steady, even if it's more of a positive right than a negative right.
00:28:40
So unlike the right to be free from torture, which is, you know, state, please stop doing this, a negative right, classic sort of negative rights, positive rights formulation,
00:28:49
the right to housing, the right to education, all those sorts of rights are positive rights, which require the state to do stuff, which is sort of the technical legal term, right?
00:29:00
So the state actually has to engage in programs and policies to move that agenda forward progressively.
00:29:06
And progressively means no regression, by the way.
00:29:11
So if you have the state falling behind, except in dire circumstances like COVID, where the wheels came completely off the bus,
00:29:19
The state is supposed to be making regular progress towards their goals.
00:29:26
So there's no justiciable right to housing per se.
00:29:29
The Quebec Charter has some helpful language in it, but it's not justiciable in its current form for reasons I'll talk about in a minute.
00:29:39
And again, the NHSA is there, but most of the actions provincial actually have this on the stage.
00:29:45
You all could have answered.
00:29:46
Provincial, right?
00:29:48
So, in order to get the Quebec government to actually agree to do things, they have to feel that they have a legal obligation to actually do them.
00:29:58
And that's what we've been working on.
00:30:02
So our first proposal, which will positively affect women who are fleeing violence, but is a general recommendation, which we're hoping would be incorporated into
00:30:16
the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, which is quasi-constitutional legislation, like the Ontario Human Rights Code, right?
00:30:22
You guys have maybe looked at that.
00:30:25
The Ontario Human Rights Code is quasi-constitutional legislation, which means that it applies and prevails over other legislation inconsistent with it, except to the extent that the legislation says otherwise.
00:30:40
So it's kind of like the notwithstanding clause.
00:30:43
except that it doesn't have the five-year sunset period and so on.
00:30:46
But these kinds of clauses significantly predate the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedom Section 33.
00:30:51
They've been around since 1960, if you include the Canadian Bill of Rights.
00:30:57
Anyway, where I'm going with this is that if you think that the right to adequate housing is as important to the residents of your jurisdiction
00:31:11
as legal rights and equality rights.
00:31:14
If you think that Canada and other countries need to be respecting their international obligations, then you also need to reflect this in your human rights legislation.
00:31:25
And it should be a no-brainer.
00:31:28
Except for that in countries like Canada, where we have a strong common law influence, this split between civil and political rights and economic, social and cultural rights has meant that it's been hard to do that.
00:31:40
And there's a bunch of historical reasons for that I'm not going to bore you with.
00:31:46
So our hypothesis is that if we see laws as sort of social determinant of things like the right to housing, of course, and adjacent social issues of like the right to health,
00:32:06
then our hypothesis is that countries with stronger legal frameworks will do better than housing outcomes like how much homelessness you have, how much housing you have, how much social housing you have, and things like cost overburden for rents for lower income quintiles and that sort of thing.
00:32:28
Anyway, I'm not going to get into the specific outcomes, but the general thesis is that
00:32:33
having constitutional or quasi-constitutional rights in this area, which should flow down from that cascading group of obligations I just talked about, will have that permeating effect on all legislation, right, the way that constitutional rights should have.
00:32:53
and will therefore affect the way in which eviction rules happen.
00:32:56
And what happens to rents and leases when a woman has been subjected to violence and wants to stay in her apartment, even though her partner may be the person holding the lease?
00:33:07
What happens then?
00:33:09
If you have a rights-based approach to that, your answer may be different than if you don't.
00:33:15
What happens when people, especially women, need to have access to transitional housing after first step or emergency housing?
00:33:23
And what role can law play in that?
00:33:26
So the idea of having a right to housing isn't simply rhetorical.
00:33:30
It isn't simply, let's have a right, and everybody goes home.
00:33:34
The point of having a right in a constitutional or a quasi-constitutional document is precisely to give it that impact on ordinary laws
00:33:44
that it would not otherwise have.
00:33:47
And to create that normative compass for law reform across all of the ordinary laws of the province.
00:33:59
So the Quebec Charter is a little bit different than the Human Rights Code here because it currently contains a section on economic, social and social rights, which the Ontario Human Rights Code does not contain.
00:34:15
There is no protection for housing in the Ontario Human Rights Code, except, of course, for equality in housing.
00:34:21
So if you're discriminated against as you're renting a house, for example, then of course you're protected under the Human Rights Code.
00:34:28
But you don't have a freestanding right to adequate housing if you're not in an equality situation, right?
00:34:34
And that's what we're pushing for here.
00:34:38
So
00:34:43
You can't focus on everybody at the same time.
00:34:46
There are certain priority groups.
00:34:47
And since 2017 in Canada, women fleeing violence have been designated as priority groups at a strategic level.
00:34:58
So Section 45 of the Quebec Charter guarantees the right of individuals to, quote, measures of financial assistance and social measures provided for bylaw.
00:35:11
susceptible of ensuring such person an adequate standard of living.
00:35:16
Now the term acceptable standard of living is analogous to adequate standard of living, which is the term that was almost directly copied and pasted from the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
00:35:30
But you will hear in what I just said that housing was not specifically mentioned in that.
00:35:38
So
00:35:40
Because the term acceptable or adequate standard of living is included in the Quebec Charter, our argument is that it should subsume adequate standard of living because that subsidiary component of adequate standard of living is included in the international treaty that informed the Quebec Charter.
00:36:02
Now, we did not make this up.
00:36:03
The Quebec Human Rights Commission
00:36:06
and Youth Rights Commission has taken this position for a very long time, that it is implied in the charter itself.
00:36:15
But just adding the words adequate housing to the Quebec charter is not going to help us very much.
00:36:23
And that is because of the Gosselin case.
00:36:27
Right.
00:36:28
The Gosselin case basically made it clear that these are non-justiciable rights.
00:36:32
I mean, they're rights, they're out there, they're aspirational.
00:36:34
It's very nice, but you can't really go to court on them.
00:36:37
So we're proposing that these rights actually be justiciable, and that would require a specific amendment to and a creation of a new article, a new article in, sorry.
00:36:50
a new article in the Quebec Charter that specifically provides for the inclusion of adequate housing in Section 45.1.
00:37:00
So it would be a new provision added into the Quebec Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
00:37:08
Well, that's great.
00:37:09
And, you know, and by the way, the current Quebec government is never going to agree to it, ever, ever.
00:37:14
This is a center-right government.
00:37:15
I don't know if they're further right or not than for its government.
00:37:18
I mean, we can have a poll on that later, but this is a center right government that will never agree to this.
00:37:24
I've already said they hated the idea.
00:37:27
However, we have an election coming up and we do think this is an interesting wedge issue that we're going to be putting forward to all of the parties in Quebec and asking them to adopt it as part of their election strategy with the support of civil society.
00:37:46
In order to make this work, we have to specifically mention the fact that this is going to be understood to be a justiciable right in Quebec.
00:37:58
And we're proposing specific language to deal with that.
00:38:03
The second area I want to talk about, how much longer do I have, Peter?
00:38:08
15 minutes.
00:38:09
15?
00:38:09
And then time for questions is after that?
00:38:11
All right, great.
00:38:11
Thank you.
00:38:16
Sorry?
00:38:17
Okay, great.
00:38:18
So the first area, as I say, is this sort of all boats rise, the idea of creating quasi-constitutional legislation, understanding that the Quebec legislation is a little bit different than the rest of Canada.
00:38:31
But nonetheless, we think there are relevant and scalable opportunities for other provinces to recognize the right to housing, given essential importance to Canadians today.
00:38:44
The second one that I want to talk about is our second recommendation.
00:38:49
So in the documentation that was circulated to you, I included the 2022 report that we had produced.
00:38:56
It included 12 recommendations, the first one of which was the one we just went through together on the right to adequate housing and including an explicitly in provincial legislation.
00:39:08
And the, I can't remember if it was the second one or the 7th one, but anyway, one of the other ones was the right to social housing.
00:39:17
Now, social housing is housing that is built by the government, regulated by the government, and generally speaking, is available to people who have low incomes.
00:39:27
So for example, subsidized rent or some sort of rent supplement or rent allowance.
00:39:34
making it affordable or deeply affordable for tenants.
00:39:39
Okay, so why are we talking about social housing and what does it have to do with women fleeing violence?
00:39:47
You all know that first step, first stage or emergency housing has been talked about a lot.
00:39:54
There was an extensive network of first stage emergency shelters in the Canadian context.
00:40:01
And a great deal of attention has rightly been placed on first stage or emergency housing for victims of violence.
00:40:08
Studies have consistently shown that women face a high risk of homelessness after leaving their abusers, and women escaping violence often face an extended and exacerbated risk of homelessness, and second stage housing offers a crucial policy tool to reduce the risk.
00:40:26
So we did a literature review on what we know about second stage housing and what the literature has been saying about it.
00:40:32
And shockingly, we only found since kind of the 1990s, maybe mid 80s, only 22 studies that focused on housing outcomes for this category of women that looked at the impacts of second stage housing.
00:40:49
So there is not a lot of data or literature out there.
00:40:53
We used
00:40:55
particular methodology for rapid reviews called the Cochrane method that helped us identify the types of literature that we were looking at.
00:41:05
I won't get into all the inclusion and exclusion criteria, but at the end of the day, the result was very surprising, very little literature, especially qualitative longitudinal data on these impact of these shelters.
00:41:19
So why does this matter?
00:41:20
Because when women go into the emergency or first stage shelters,
00:41:25
What happens after that, after the two days, the two weeks, possibly even six weeks?
00:41:32
Which, especially if you've got kids, is nothing.
00:41:37
Right?
00:41:37
You need to find a place to live.
00:41:39
You need to find a place that is secure.
00:41:42
And not all women who leave first stage housing need to have secure and confidential housing.
00:41:48
Many of them are perfectly happy to go out and get rehoused elsewhere.
00:41:52
But for a subset of women coming out of first stage housing, second stage housing is critical.
00:41:58
And regular social housing, as previously defined, doesn't cut it because it is not confidential, it is not at an unknown address, and it does not have security measures the way that second stage housing for this population does.
00:42:16
And we know from the data
00:42:18
that the often lethal danger to women after leaving their partner can extend for a relatively long period of time, and that need for safety and confidentiality is critical.
00:42:34
We also know that after women leave first stage housing and attempt to access the limited network of second stage housing in Canada, and particularly in Quebec, more than 1/3 of them are turned away.
00:42:47
And most of those are turned away because there's no space in the second stage housing.
00:42:54
And by the way, because the first stage or emergency housing is so crowded in Quebec, a lot of women can't even access that.
00:43:04
And if you can't access your first stage housing because the first stage housing is too crowded, then you're never going to get access to the second stage housing because second stage housing has to be accessed through the first stage housing.
00:43:19
Now, it may feel to you like we're a little bit in the weeds, but the weeds is kind of where it happens, right?
00:43:25
And the system and the structures are not responding to the needs of these women.
00:43:29
The Quebec government has placed second stage housing as part of the social housing infrastructure, which is regulated by the Societe Debitations Quebec legislation, which manages all of these processes.
00:43:42
And we've been arguing that this kind of legislation, second stage housing, requires dedicated regulatory frameworks because of the confidentiality, because of the importance of safety for these women, that they have different kinds of construction costs.
00:44:00
And I'll give you an example.
00:44:02
The average social housing door, like you build a unit, right?
00:44:05
The social housing in Quebec, it costs roughly 1/4 of $1,000,000 to build it.
00:44:12
The cost of social housing is, in second stage housing for this category of women is at least 50% more.
00:44:20
And the reason for that is because of the cost of building the common areas, the cost of building the common kitchen areas, the cost of ensuring security, the cost of making sure that the building meets the architectural standards that are appropriate for women and children.
00:44:37
Social housing does not allow for certain categories of units a second person to be living with the woman.
00:44:45
What happens when the women have young children?
00:44:48
So the women's shelters are constantly fighting with the regulatory body because they're not allowing the children to be in the rooms with the women.
00:44:58
What do you do when you have a six-month-old?
00:45:01
Right?
00:45:03
So
00:45:04
We discovered through the literature review and a series of reference groups that we set up that these forms of housing offer better support in the transition to permanent housing, and they significantly have an impact in avoiding a return to the abuser.
00:45:28
I'm not going to show you all the data.
00:45:30
This is just one of them.
00:45:31
But you see with regard to comparing outcomes in accessing independent housing, on the left, on your left is first stage and the studies looking at first stage housing or the shelter reports looking at first stage housing and the shelter reports looking at second stage housing.
00:45:50
And although the data shows significant variations,
00:45:55
you'll see that there is a consistently better outcome for second stage housing in this regard.
00:46:02
And this is part of the reason why we are working to try to encourage the government to create a separate regulatory framework for this form of housing.
00:46:10
Going all the way down from these weeds and this level of detail all the way up to the requirements at the international level for the right to adequate housing and the right of women to be free from violence.
00:46:21
Because the other graph, which I didn't put up,
00:46:24
shows a comparable set of data with regard to the impact of women returning to their abusers, i.e., second stage housing produces better outcomes than first stage housing.
00:46:36
And that is not a criticism of first stage housing, right?
00:46:40
It's because they do different things.
00:46:42
And the longer stays associated
00:46:45
with second stage housing mean that the danger to women, especially with regard to attacks from their abuser, decrease over time.
00:46:55
And so we're recommending, based on the reference groups that included the Quebec network for second stage housing, a two-year period, a minimum two-year period for women to be able to stay.
00:47:08
And this requires more resources and it requires more housing.
00:47:14
So I'm going to close with two ideas from other jurisdictions, and we're looking at other jurisdictions as part of our ways of trying to be creative and thinking about what else we can do to try to move these things along.
00:47:33
We discovered that France has introduced 2 separate legislative schemes.
00:47:42
the SRU law in 2000 and the Allure law, LALUR is the acronym, in 2017.
00:47:57
And these laws require municipalities to build a minimum level of social housing in the 20 to 25% range.
00:48:07
Now, what do we do in Canada and Quebec, at least?
00:48:11
We
00:48:12
The Societe de Vitations Quebec and its equivalent across the country allows municipalities, which are of course creatures of the province, allows them to build social housing.
00:48:24
But there are no requirements.
00:48:27
Now this comes back to the idea that the right to adequate housing imposes obligations on the government.
00:48:33
to move forward progressively on its goals for especially the most vulnerable communities.
00:48:39
Well, one way of doing that is to create obligations on the government to actually build social housing.
00:48:45
The SRU and the Allure laws in France mandate in all the commune or municipalities in France, a 20 to 25% minimum level of social housing
00:49:02
in France.
00:49:05
Now, these numbers won't mean anything to you.
00:49:08
They didn't mean anything to me when I started.
00:49:11
What they mean broadly, if I could put this in perspective, is that Canada's current level of social housing is 3.6%.
00:49:22
France's current level of social housing is around 13 to 16%, depending on how you count it.
00:49:32
and the OECD average is around 6 or 7%.
00:49:36
So that means that Canada is significantly underperforming with regard to the OECD levels of social housing and really underperforming with regard to the French model.
00:49:47
And although the French, you know, if you talk to French lawyers as we have about the French system, they complain.
00:49:55
It's terrible, it's awful, the system doesn't work, it's completely broken.
00:50:01
And that may be true, I don't work in France.
00:50:04
But it's impossible not to note that their levels of social housing are five times better than ours.
00:50:10
And that has implications, even though homelessness has gone up and there are migration issues, and I'm not going to get into all of that here.
00:50:17
But it's impossible not to notice that the mandatory rules with regard to the creation of social housing, especially for those who are vulnerable, makes a difference.
00:50:29
And it makes a difference
00:50:31
for accessibility, and it makes a difference to affordability, and it makes a difference to the availability of services and infrastructure, which again are three of the key factors of the right to adequate housing, of the characteristics of the right to adequate housing that we see in the international definition coming from the committee.
00:50:55
One of those services
00:50:59
is navigation services.
00:51:03
In the UK, Wales has one of the most interesting and muscular forms of obligations on the state flowing from the duty to provide adequate housing, creating a legislative obligation on public officials for a selected group of priority clients,
00:51:28
or residents to engage in a series of administrative acts that are sine qua non for them to proceed with housing.
00:51:40
So public officials must provide assistance.
00:51:44
There is a formal duty to assist people who are experiencing homelessness and those who are at risk of it, and that includes the population of women who are fleeing violence.
00:51:58
And we're proposing that we bring those two together, the social housing recommendation and the duty to assist to really leverage state support for ensuring that women stay safe.
00:52:11
The duty to assist is controversial.
00:52:15
In some parts of the UK, so, you know, the United Kingdom is made-up of constituent countries and some of them have different levels of devolved power.
00:52:22
Anyway, make a long story long.
00:52:24
In Wales,
00:52:25
The nature of the duty is much more muscular than it is in the other jurisdictions, certainly more than in Northern Ireland and more than in England.
00:52:32
And part of that is because of a really interesting dynamic with property rights.
00:52:40
You know, if you make a lot more social housing available, affordable housing available, housing prices may go down.
00:52:48
That's what economists say.
00:52:49
I have no idea if that's true.
00:52:50
But supply apparently affects demand.
00:52:52
So
00:52:53
So at the end of the day, in England, this is pushed back against a little more strongly than it is, for example, in Wales and in Scotland, actually, where they're more progressive on this as well.
00:53:04
But the recognition of the fact that social housing isn't...
00:53:10
out of market, if you will, a non-market response to a specific need that it actually flows down from specific responsibilities the government has, again, this knock down kind of effect from the international obligations down to the municipal and local levels.
00:53:28
Having that duty to assist is part of, I would argue, the government's obligation and the statutory requirements in Wales, for example, are a really interesting
00:53:39
obligation.
00:53:40
And we've been working with Peter Mackie, who teaches at the University of Cardiff, who's one of the architects of this in the UK to try to build this idea into the Canadian framework.
00:53:53
So in closing, a couple of things to say.
00:53:56
The first one is that law provides a series of normative
00:54:09
pressures and protections that can have an effect on social policy and move the needle forward for priority groups like vulnerable women, women fleeing violence.
00:54:22
We don't think with the QHPC in Quebec, we don't think we can achieve that simply by bringing a bunch of lawyers together and being
00:54:31
geeky together, right?
00:54:33
you need to have the community groups in the room.
00:54:37
You need to have the women who are actually going through these processes together in the room.
00:54:41
You need to understand how what you're proposing actually affects the people, as I said earlier, who need it most.
00:54:47
And we think this process that we're using, which is highly collaborative, highly inefficient in terms of how to move forward, but we think nonetheless pressure
00:54:59
at a public level that I think a government cannot completely ignore.
00:55:04
When we came out with our first round of recommendations in 2022, we had outreach from every political party in the province.
00:55:10
And even if they met us to tell us they hated it, they met with us, right?
00:55:16
Recommendations, I think, are going to be much stronger.
00:55:19
And I think the process is scalable for the rest of Canada.
00:55:24
And I think it's important in all of these opportunities, not just to see, as I said, policy as this thing that comes out of a generic policy process, but to recognize the important role that we law and all of you as lawyers and prospective lawyers can have in achieving that kind of social change.