Spacing Magazine raises red flag in election debates

This is posting below is by John Lorinc, Elections Columnist, Spacing Magazine (Photo by: Geoffrey Wiseman)
Posted on September 27th here: http://spacing.ca/votes/?p=458



I got an email press release from the NDP yesterday morning itemizing all the myriad benefits a Howard Hampton-led government would bestow on cities, if elected. Strangely enough, for a party that claims to be progressive, affordable housing didn’t make the cut. When I emailed back and asked for the NDP’s position on affordable housing, the war room sent me a 264-word policy sheet, which lays out in highly general terms a $350 million program that includes funds for co-op housing, rent supplements, and social housing construction, as well as landlord licensing. A few hours later, a second press release arrived over the electronic transom, about how the NDP intends to make life easier for working families. This time, the author didn’t forgot to include affordable housing.

Is it just me, or does Ontario’s NDP sound less than convincing on the urban file? Let’s face it: Jack Layton would have never relegated affordable housing to the status of afterthought.

For Torontonians mulling over the possibility of a Liberal-NDP government, this kind of political obtuseness should be a red flag. Affordable housing has received virtually no attention in this election. It’s…The Amazing Disappearing Issue! The anti-poverty groups have certainly taken note, if not the voters or the media. “Very strange,” muses Campaign 2000 national coordinator Laurel Rothman. “I don’t get it.”

True, the NDP on occassion mole-whacks Dalton McGuinty for breaking his promise to build 20,000 new social housing units, but that’s about the extent of it.

The dearth of debate is shameful. Here’s a pressing Toronto issue that richly deserves far more play than it’s gotten. The Liberal record on the affordable housing file is unimpressive at best. According to city sources, Queen’s Park relied on federal cash to finance 35,000 housing supplements in 2003. But despite provincial budget surpluses since then, there’s been no money to renovate Toronto’s decaying social housing stock (Toronto Community Housing’s repair backlog is in the $300 million range), and Queen’s Park contributed almost nothing to the reconstruction of Regent’s Park. What’s needed, says my source, is a program that includes long-term rent supplements, grants to rehabilitate TCHC’s 90,000 apartments, and, most of all, an upload of the $220 million the City of Toronto spends each year to provide subsidized housing to a low-income tenant population larger than Prince Edward Island.

Howard Hampton, who likes to talk about uploading social service costs from municipalities, has stated that the NDP believes the province also needs to take back financial responsibility for social housing. But not until 2015….

It all adds up to one unavoidable conclusion: that when the NDP and the Liberals sit down to work out the agenda of a coalition government, affordable housing probably won’t be on either side’s to-do list.

photo by Geoffrey Wisemanhttp://spacing.ca/votes/?p=458