His name is Claude Paradis. He is a priest. For decades, this former homeless person and drug addict has taken care of society’s most forgotten people. We really want him as Minister of Housing. He, at least, would know what he was talking about and in doing so, he would act accordingly.
Father Paradis is struck by the brutality of the housing crisis. Exacerbated all the more by the pandemic and the inaction of political decision-makers with life perhaps a little too cozy.
In The newspaper on Wednesday, we learned that he was camping in a tent and fasting in the open air in downtown Montreal.
Its mission: to try to “awaken the conscience of governments and the mayor [Valérie Plante]» facing the new faces of the housing crisis. Including the growing numbers of older women and men who have worked hard all their lives.
Let’s be clear. Those who are called “homeless” are in fact homeless people (SDF). More and more often the victims of wild evictions are unable to find rehousing at a livable price.
Faced with the scandalous scarcity of social or affordable housing and the sharpest increase in rents in the last thirty years, they find themselves either on the street, in a shelter or an unsanitary room, or are forced to sleep on someone else’s couch. .
On this March 8, International Women’s Rights Day, let us remember that in Quebec, women now make up more than 30% of homeless people. Which, in addition, makes them prey for financial and/or sexual exploiters.
Elderly and homeless
Then, there are more and more mothers who can no longer arrive. “There are so many families in need,” said Father Paradis, “who are one foot away from falling into the street. When I hear children crying from hunger because their mothers have to choose between rent and food, it touches me so much.”
Saturday, a report from The Press gave a worrying portrait of a growing number of women and men who, aged over 60, find themselves homeless even after a life of work.
It is noted that “36% of people experiencing homelessness in Quebec were over 50 years old in 2022. They were 32% in 2018”. Phew…
However, although stories of human tragedies are multiplying in the media, who, at the top of power, at all levels combined, is moved by them to the point of taking action?
Where is the sheriff?
In the cruel Wild West that the rental market has become, we are still looking for where the sheriff is hiding. In Quebec, it is certainly not the Minister of Housing, France-Élaine Duranceau.
Until we build a little more one day, what are we waiting for to really act? To regulate rent prices more tightly. To impose a moratorium on evictions until the crisis subsides.
To create a pan-Quebec rent register. To accelerate the renovation of existing social housing and the construction of new ones. To concretely support the creation of housing cooperatives. Etc.
These and other measures are neither right nor left. In the current context, they would be responsible and humanist. Point.
But all this would require three vital elements which, unfortunately, are missing. First, the ability of elected officials in power, wherever they are, to meet the victims of the housing crisis.
Second, the intellectual and emotional ability to then put oneself in their place. Third, given the scale of the crisis, the desire to act on all fronts.
However, the urgency of having a real plan is obvious. A real plan to offer a real roof to all those who no longer have one. Without forgetting all those who, for lack of being able to afford better, are forced to stay in unsanitary housing or are faced with a landlord refusing to repair it.
The urgency is to ensure that all citizens of this territory can live with dignity. Housing is not a common commodity. It is a right. Who will have enough sense of the State and the common good to see to it?