Household finance corporation of canada

In 1990, Paul Martin crossed the country to study the Canadian housing crisis as part of his work with the National Liberal Task Force on Housing, and he coauthored the report "Finding Room: Housing Solutions for the Future" as a part of this effort. The Liberals were not in power at the time. As part of the report, some of the thoughts Martin co-authored were expressed in the following words:

* The federal government has abandoned its responsibilities with regards to housing problems.

* The housing crisis is growing at an alarming rate and the government sits there and does nothing; it refuses to apply the urgent measures that are required to reverse this deteriorating situation.

* The federal government's role would be that of a partner working with other levels of government, and private and public housing groups. But leadership must come from one source; and a national vision requires some national direction.

* Homelessness is only the most visible manifestation of Canada's housing crisis. Though homelessness affects a relatively small percentage of Canadians, it is a reality which is symptomatic of a broader crisis in the supply of affordable housing.

* The Task Force was told that though affordable housing is in desperately short supply across the country, the major contributing factor to the current crisis is poverty.

Wow! That's actually pretty accurate in terms of linking homelessness, unaffordable housing, and poverty! So what actions have those words led to? Hmm ... apparently, plenty of inconsistency.

Once Martin became the finance minister, after the Liberals came to power in 1993, we really got to see how his "cent-sible" mind works. He began to swing his golden axe at all social programs in sight; the goal was balancing books, not alleviating poverty or any other inequalities. The results?

Between 1994 and 1998, only 4,450 social housing units were completed in comparison to over 20,000 built annually during the mid-1980s, a reduction of epic proportions. What else do you expect when all federal funds for social housing are taken away? That's what Martin orchestrated as finance minister.

Interlinked with the cuts to affordable housing, homelessness has been skyrocketing since Martin's high-principled words back in 1990. In 2001, a study by Libby Davies, housing spokesperson for the NDP at that time, revealed that in seven Canadian cities, the number of beds occupied in shelters over the year increased from 1.4 million in 1987 to a staggering 2.4 million in 1999--an increase of almost 75 percent.

More of the same sick trend, that escalated while Paul Martin was finance minister, is revealed in the most recent National Housing and Homelessness Network (NHHN) report card, released in November of 2003. Approximately $4 billion annually ($2 billion federal and $2 billion matched by the provinces as proposed by the NHHN) is the minimum required to meet the nation-wide affordable housing crisis and homelessness disaster.

Despite this, the federal government has committed a relatively scant $1 billion over the past five years--only 10 percent of the minimum requirement. The NHHN also identified that 13,000 affordable housing units should have been built in the first two years of the five-year Affordable Housing Framework Agreement (signed by housing ministers across the country in November 2001), but currently, two years later, only half that number has been committed.

One of the most strikingly ironic results of the Affordable Housing Framework Agreement is that much of the housing that has been constructed has not been affordable! To justify this, the definition of "affordable" has been changed. Affordable rent for housing is now defined as the average market rent, as determined in an annual survey by Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC). This is a completely idiotic formulation. The average market rent in Ontarioin 2002, as determined by the CMHC, was $836--which would require an annual household income of $34,000 to be affordable. Does that seem a bit high? It is. Less than half of all renter households in Ontario have this level of income, so what are they supposed to do in the meantime? Maybe they're told that they should just wait outside.

It should not be said, however, that affordable housing has been completely excluded from the Liberal government agenda. Martin has created a new position, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Finance, with special emphasis on Public Private Partnerships (P3s). P3s involve taking responsibilities away from government and handing much of them to private bidders. P3 critics have found these deals to be more expensive in the long-term, one reason being that more government funds end up destined primarily for the private sector rather than heading straight to the public--with the expectation that profit-motivated institutions will somehow distribute the services fairly, regardless of the fact that there's no accountability mechanism.

Hmm ... the above examples sure don't agree with the messages that Martin was sending in 1990. Considering his seemingly passionate stance against poverty and homelessness of 1990, should he not have--if he was sincere--been screaming about the crisis of poverty while he was finance minister, and also while he was waiting in the wings to become PM, and especially now that he is the captain of (steamship) Canada? Of course not! Paul Martin was part of the opposition Liberals when he spoke his socially-conscious words in 1990; the Conservatives were in power at the time. Part of the task of opposition (and campaigning) politicians in our political system is to criticize the party in power in order to portray the "others" as somehow (comparatively) socially destructive, with the hopeful result of swaying voters with empty promises. Keeping track of the eventual end results of these high-principled words gives plenty of evidence of this process--"Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!" was Jean Chretien's unfulfilled promise; and recent NDP governments in Ontario and BC promised significant boosts in social spending, which turned out to be unfulfilled. The examples can go on and on.

In the midst of all these ironies, at least one thing remains consistent. We can be sure that Martin is a hard worker, always finding ways to save money ... and we can be guaranteed that the rich won't be poor (yes, that's poverty talk in Martinspeak). He's made sure to avoid that danger by announcing another freeze on the public sector and a $4.4 billion reduction in corporate taxes--incidentally, that's more than twice what the NHHN is asking for from the federal government ($2 billion) for an annual affordable housing fund.

So what might we expect from Martin in the long-run? Perhaps an effective strategy for deciphering Martinspeak is to take what he says and convert it into its opposite intent.

"Though affordable housing is in desperately short supply across the country, the major contributing factor to the current crisis is poverty"--Paul Martin, 1990. Paul becomes Finance Minister in 1993 until the end of the decade, and ...

"The number of families living on less than half the poverty line increased from 143,000 families in 1989 to 233,000 families in 1998"--Libby Davies, 2001.

Asaf Rashid is a PhD student in the sociology of forestry, and an independent writer and radio journalist in Fredericton, NB, focusing on issues of poverty, radical activism and on general deconstruction of state ... policies.