CUPE Ontario and OMW Join AMO’s, Municipalities’ Calls to Deal With Human and Financial Costs of Ontario’s Homelessness Crisis

TORONTO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--In response to the report “Municipalities under pressure: The human and financial cost of Ontario’s homelessness crisis,” released by the Association of Municipalities of Ontario, CUPE Ontario and its Ontario Municipal Workers committee (OMW) issued the following statement:

With both a federal and provincial election in the offing, CUPE Ontario and OMW recognize the importance of AMO and municipalities having added their voices to underscore the crisis of homelessness and propose solutions to help end the crisis in homelessness.

However, our members know all too well how we arrived at this crisis: for decades, successive governments have treated housing only as a for-profit commodity, instead of actively investing to help guarantee housing as a necessity and a human right.

As a result, large corporate landlords treat housing as their own cash cow, and housing costs have spiralled. At the same time, the Ford Conservatives slashed protections like rent controls that kept housing affordable and allowed greedy corporate investors to dominate the rental market.

Meanwhile, federal and provincial governments have abandoned the construction of affordable social housing. They have focused on helping developers – an approach that has failed to deliver the deeply affordable housing Ontarians need, and that may even have deepened the crisis. All the while, governments continue to scapegoat immigrants, refugees, and the unhoused themselves for a crisis in homelessness that these groups played no part in creating.

With the right kind of investment, we could stop the financialization of housing and take it out of the hands of profiteers. We need to take back control of housing in Ontario. As part of a suite of direct government action to deal with homelessness, we must invest and build not-for-profit, affordable, public housing and reinstitute strong rent controls.

We’ve learned the hard way that a vote for Doug Ford and the Conservatives won’t achieve these much-needed measures. A vote for Conservatives will only yield more homelessness and more poverty.

To protect housing, CUPE members will work to put NDP governments in Queen’s Park and Ottawa.

MU:cj/cope491