Opinion: The housing market isn’t racist. Blame elusive home ownership on your parents
By Peter Shawn Taylor
There’s no shortage of bad ideas about how to fix Canada’s housing crisis. But what if time is short and you need to access the bad ideas in one convenient location? Then make haste for the Office of the Federal Housing Advocate (FHA).
Over the past two years, Marie-Josée Houle, Canada’s first (and hopefully only) FHA, has established her office as Ottawa’s one-stop-shop for the worst possible advice on housing issues.
Houle’s main obsession is with removing profit-making — or what she calls “financialization”— from Canada’s housing market. Beyond forbidding anyone from making a living supplying accommodation to people who demand it, she also wants to make it impossible for landlords to evict tenants for almost any reason, impose nationwide rent control and grant homeless squatters virtual property rights over public parks.
But perhaps the most alarming of Houle’s many outrageous assertions and demands is that Canada’s housing market is rife with racism that can only be eliminated by deliberate federal action. A 2022 report released by her office claims, “The violence of evictions and forced displacements stemming from the ongoing housing crisis in Black, Indigenous and other racialized communities exemplifies the severe consequences of the financialization of housing.” To correct this, the report calls for a public takeover of privately-owned apartment buildings and a ban on chartered banks and pension funds lending to “financialized” housing providers.
Another more recent FHA study reports that “racial discrimination in housing is widespread in Canada” and calls for the payment of “reparations” for past housing injustices. The impact of any of Houle’s policy recommendations would be catastrophic
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