The office of the Minister of Housing, France-Élaine Duranceau, prefers to ignore questions from journalists, according to an email obtained by The Canadian Press.
The minister’s office was asked about recognizing the right to housing as a fundamental human right, a question posed to each of Canada’s provinces.
Asked to respond a week after an initial request was made, the minister’s press secretary sent The Canadian Press an email that was probably intended for another staff member: “Do I ghost her again? Otherwise, a general response which does not respond to say that housing is a priority for our government?”
Asked to explain, a government communications official finally gave her version of the facts on Friday evening.
The spokesperson confirmed that it was sent in error and that staff were not sure how to handle the question from The Canadian Press. The spokesperson said the office has been overwhelmed by budgetary appropriations study this week.
The spokesperson said Duranceau wasn’t involved in the handling of the journalist’s request.
Opposition reaction
The opposition didn’t take long to react.
“This is what France-Élaine Duranceau thinks about the right to housing in Quebec,” said MP Joël Arseneau on the X network, formerly known as Twitter.
“We suspected it a little, the reality is even more tragic,” he said.
Duranceau has faced her share of controversies since being tasked with reforming tenant protection rules and the construction of social housing. Coming from the world of real estate brokers, the minister, with her stance against lease transfers and her statements on the issue, has been accused of being insensitive to the needs of tenants.
Right to housing
The Canadian Press asked each province whether it agreed with Canada’s housing advocate, Marie-Josée Houle, that housing is a human right, and whether it intended to pass legislation guaranteeing that right.
By Friday afternoon, Duranceau’s office still hadn’t responded to The Canadian Press.
As more and more Canadians struggle to find affordable housing, only the country’s smallest province expressed it might benefit from recognizing housing as a human right.
Prince Edward Island answered with a link to its Residential Tenancies Act, the first line of which acknowledges that Canada has signed a United Nations treaty affirming that housing is a human right — although critics point out that there is nothing that follows in the provincial law that supports this right.
Most provinces did not respond directly to the questions, listing a long list of initiatives launched to address the brewing housing crisis.
Manitoba said it recognized “Canada’s rights-based approach to housing,” while Newfoundland and Labrador indicated that it agreed with federal and international laws recognizing housing as a human right.
In her report on homeless encampments released on Feb. 13, Houle urged each province to recognize in law “the human right to adequate housing as defined by international law.”
Houle has raised the question about whether or not the provinces understand what it would mean to explicitly state that they consider housing a human right.
Houle said that under the bilateral agreement they all signed as part of the National Housing Strategy in 2018, the provinces would have to adopt “a human rights-based approach to housing.”
For the housing advocate, this means meeting and listening to unhoused people and trying to find them housing adequate to their needs rather than deciding what is best for them without their input and leaving them to settle with temporary measures like shelters.
This also includes providing heat, electricity and toilets to people living in homeless encampments if adequate housing is not available, Houle has said.
“Essentially, it’s a commitment based on the recognition that homelessness is a systemic problem and that people are homeless because governments at all levels have failed them,” she said.
As for the provinces, she said: “We need all the players at the table.”