More housing problems for people ‘chained to their poverty,’ says lawyer

A prominent legal activist for the unhoused slammed the “mass eviction” of Housing First clients by their private landlords in certain blocks, just as the city prepares for an influx of well-paid project planners and construction workers.

Criminal defence and civil rights lawyer Peter Adourian told a conference on Sunday that current territorial law makes it too easy for landlords, “to put Indigenous women on the streets,’ an example being the entire Housing First client list being at risk of losing their homes.

“What we need are businesses and landlords that are making decisions with the moral implications of their decisions in mind,” Adourian said, speaking at the annual Voices for Peace Conference.

“It is discriminatory. It should be totally unacceptable in our society. And unfortunately, I have not heard either the City of Yellowknife or the GNWT really stand up and say … that it is unacceptable in our city for landlords to be making new homeless people.”

He continued: “These people are not going to be homeless because they have drug addiction. They’re not going to be homeless because they’re traumatized. They’re not going to be homeless because they burn bridges. They’re going to be homeless because they were evicted, they were de-housed. These are people who were housed that have no place to go. It’s totally unacceptable.”

On September 1st, the Yellowknife Women’s Society made a public plea, calling on landlords, housing providers, community partners, and the GNWT to keep 26 Housing First residents from being tossed onto the streets as their leases are being terminated.

The non-profit Society explained that two separate housing changes are putting residents at risk:

• The sale of six downtown Northview Residential REIT apartment buildings, affecting 12 Housing First units, and
• A separate eviction from Northview affecting 11 additional Housing First units.

Together, these changes end 23 housing units in buildings that are being renovated and place 26 residents at real risk of losing a place to live.

The Housing First program is a low-barrier initiative operated by the Women’s Society that provides permanent housing and wraparound support to chronically homeless adults — this without requiring sobriety or proof of traditional ‘housing readiness.’

Northview characterized it as a sale of “under-performing” properties, while CBC North reported the new owners with local ties, Balto Capital, said having Housing First clients didn’t align with its “long-term business objectives.”

A July 30 letter to the Women’s Society seen by CBC states Housing First has until October 31st to vacate the units, and both parties need to determine outstanding costs from damage by tenants to the buildings.

Adourian said unless governments meet the actual demand for public housing, or else we will have to live with encampments.

Gesturing through a window at the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre auditorium, Adourian noted the large encampment where many of his clients call home.

It’s the largest multi-year encampment in the city and has been tolerated by the GNWT — and supported, with toilets, garbage removal and welfare checks — which has a law permitting the pitching of a tent on Commissioner’s land for 100 days.

Adourian said the GNWT needs to “build, buy, or rent” more public housing — and fast.

“My clients … need to be adequately housed, and a failure to pursue a policy that gets the waitlist to zero means encampment becomes the policy. Nobody wants that to happen,” he said.

Adourian said there are somewhere between 300 and 400 people in Yellowknife on that public housing wait list — “closer to 800 as we as we speak about the entire territory” — everyone who lives in a tent in Yellowknife is on that wait list, “but none of them are holding their breath.”

He continued: “It’s imperative that the government act quickly to get people housed. Otherwise, encampments become the norm, and that’s in nobody’s best interest. To have an official encampment is not a policy that anybody wants, but it becomes a policy if you don’t get people housed quickly.”

City Councillor Garett Cochrane, who was emceeing the conference, said: “The one thing I think I can say, as the chair of the Community Advisory Board on Homelessness, is that yes, it is completely unacceptable to evict Indigenous women, as it is completely unacceptable to be as easy to evict Indigenous men, and that we are going to work to be able to address this situation.”

Peter Adourian on “Christianity of the oppressor and the Christianity of the oppressed”:

“In my observation of history, there have always only had ever been two types of Christianity. There has been the Christianity of the oppressor and the Christianity of the oppressed. Maybe the best example is American slavery.

“Now, in the NWT, we know exactly how Christianity has been used as a bludgeon in the hand of the oppressor. Residential schools stand out as the worst example of religious oppression in the history of this country.

“And the mystery to me here is that just like in the context of American slavery, the people who were oppressed, some of them did adopt Christianity as their religion, and have found in it a source of their own liberation, a source of their own liberation from drinking or drug abuse or even childhood trauma.

“I have to say that the only type of religious involvement in the encampment or in this area of policy must be to mimic the outcomes that are consistent with the religion of the oppressed, and that is liberation, liberation from the shackles of poverty.

“Every one of those people who is living there, even the ones who are sometimes committing criminal offences, or who are wrapped up in the wrong crowd or in the wrong substances, each one of them is chained to their poverty, and it is something that we need to liberate them from.

“And we are only interested in policy outcomes that pursue that project of liberation.

“What we need are businesses and landlords that are making decisions with the moral implications of their decisions in mind.

“And I am imploring everyone here. Many of you work in this sector. I see a lot of familiar faces here. Who will be responsible for those who die in the cold? When one of them burns himself on a ramshackle wood stove?”

NOTE: More coverage of the annual Voices for Peace Conference to come.