The grassroots effort evolved into a network of volunteers pushing for Permanent, Accessible, Dignified and Safer (PADS) housing options.

“For the past five weeks, PADS Community Network has been calling on the Municipality for a moratorium on evictions of crisis shelters and tents to allow time to find solutions, and to shelter unhoused residents from being forced to make decisions under duress,” says Vicky Levack, a PADS Community Network volunteer.

Through a massive volunteer effort, volunteers have filled the role of government, providing wrap-around services including safety, food and water to a growing community of residents. PADS worked collaboratively with residents, including discussing the alternative options available from service providers and the city as they were made available. This included assisting some residents with relocation to facilities including Gray Memorial Arena in Dartmouth, recently put forward as a temporary option by the city.

On Saturday, Erica Fleck, Assistant Chief of Emergency Management at Halifax Regional Municipality, spent several hours at the park, hearing directly from residents about their history, concerns, and plans.

“While some residents have found what they deem to be a safe short-term option at the arena, it is not appropriate for all residents for a range of reasons related to personal health and wellbeing or due to past trauma.” says Amber Zaza with PADS.

“At one point, everyone at the park was willing to move into hotel accommodations,” explained Drew Moore, another volunteer with PADS. “The alternative housing options currently on offer are a significant downgrade from the initial promises, which never materialized.”

Given the unique needs of individuals, and the limited options currently available, many residents continue to feel that People’s Park is the only safe option. They have been working with volunteers to identify areas that may continue to require off-site support, and taking leadership on areas that do not.

The park will complete its transition to resident-run leadership over the weekend, moving to off-site supports.

PADS and the residents of People’s Park received assurances from Fleck on Saturday that no one would be removed from the park without having a temporary accommodation or housing option that best met the unique needs of each individual. Fleck, who is authorized to speak on behalf of the mayor, said that there would be a press conference by Thursday formally announcing that no one would be evicted from tents anywhere in the city. This adds reassurance to the public statements from members of council and the city in recent weeks that all departures will be voluntary.

For members of PADS, the focus now turns to securing a firm moratorium on evictions from the city, and bringing the provincial and federal government to the table. “Mr. Fillmore, Mr. Houston, your invitations are in the mail—it’s time to find a sustainable solution for your constituents.”

The post Press release: People’s Park transitions to resident-run system appeared first on Nova Scotia Advocate.

(Halifax, NS)  Since our new government has made it clear that they are not interested in protecting tenants from unreasonable rent increases past the state of emergency, the ACORN Tenant Union is rallying to demand the government enact permanent rent control.

WHAT: Keep the Rent Cap!
WHEN: Thursday, September 23rd from 10am – ALL DAY
WHERE: Nova Scotia Legislature – 1726 Hollis St. Halifax, NS

Since the temporary rent cap was put in place, ACORN has been hearing stories and receiving rent increases from tenants whose landlords intend to raise rents after the cap lifts. “What we’re seeing is rent increases where the landlord says ‘Your rent is going up by the legal 2%, unless the state of emergency lifts in which case it will go up $100-$1000,” says Halifax-Peninsula Chair Hannah Wood. “We’ve seen rent increases like these for as much as $2000.”

Even though these rent increases are illegal, they have become common since the government made it clear they don’t intend to prosecute landlords who violate the 2% rent cap. 

Marjike Grijm, Chair of the Dartmouth chapter of ACORN, writes: “This isn’t just an issue with the downtown core, people are even getting priced out of traditionally affordable neighbourhoods like Highfield, where a one bedroom apartment can go for as much as $1200 these days.” She disputes claims that the housing crisis was caused by the pandemic, “We were in a crisis before COVID. Cost of living keeps skyrocketing, rents are skyrocketing, but our wages stay the same. Developments that go up in this city aren’t affordable units, and landlords bring up the rent knowing full well that tenants have no other option but to pay. If we don’t fight to keep a rent cap in place, tenants are going to keep getting priced out of the city and the province.”

– 30 – 

Nova Scotia ACORN is an organization of low- and moderate-income people and the largest tenant union in the province, fighting for affordable housing, a living wage, and better communities across Nova Scotia.

The post Media release: ACORN rallying to keep the rent cap appeared first on Nova Scotia Advocate.

In the morning,
the police came;
although we were outside
rent was due

We were in tents
that’s one thing we had left
we weren’t on the sidewalks
it was a disquieting perspective yet
to have no roof left at all
to be homeless, hopeless.

The Halifax Police,
handed out fines:
$300 to pay, for illegal camping
when they weren’t for kicks
but for survival, these camps
we were refugees without fleeing our motherland
the weapons against us were rising costs
we were out of work, and rents unbound
had, with no foreboding, doubled or tripled.

We who had not
a family as a lifeboat
such good friends nearby
that we could have begged for a couch…
we who knew not where to go
were in the city parks.

In Peace and Friendship park
near where the cruise ships dock
or by the Waegwaltik
where the nice yacht clubs are
or in front of the empty old library
in the heart of downtown.

There, charities had placed shelters
plywood shacks, isolated against the cold
the friends who had been surviving there
for a couple of rough months
and, we too, got two days notice
they were from city hall, and barked “get outta here”
Where to go? God only knows!
We were there, not too joyous
but since we had no other solutions
and no one had any suggestions!
If the city didn’t like our resolution
they could at least give us another option!

If rents had stayed frozen
after hearing about housing crises for four or five years
if the empty buildings, numerous as they are
were turned into bunkhouses…
or if the infamous Shannon Park became
an affordable housing complex
instead of allowing for the city council
to fantasize about a football stadium…

The morning after two days of dread
the police came, told us to break camp
Our people, the more desperate ones
they were arrested
and the rest of us, where do we go?
To cardboard boxes on Spring Garden Road?

The city claims to have “tried to work with us”
we would like to work, but where’s the work at?
The city told us to leave, with no substitute to our misery
(not even a different misery, just as bleak)
no unemployment, no recruitment aid, no lodgings
“tried to work with us”, it’s the city’s way of saying
that it doesn’t stand by its actions.

Let Halifax admit “we don’t like to see bums”
the city could have kept the name “Cornwallis”
if it was all just to deport folk from the park
which is now called Peace and Friendship
pretty words, diplomatic language
Let Halifax admit that the city doesn’t give a damn
about solving social problems,
treating people with dignity
Let Halifax admit that the city’s actions
say “when you’re down, we’ll kick you down”.

In the morning of the 18th of August
Halifax police threw us out
of Peace and Friendship
and proceeded to emptying other parks
of all the “undesirable people”
who during a pandemic of lockdowns
lack of work, bills to pay
sunk
and got washed up
with a tent, and a backpack, on a public lawn
with no water, no showers, no heating, no washing, no toilets
and all that was taken from them
while in their ears they screamed :
“Go be homeless someplace else!”

Thibault Jacquot-Paratte started publishing poetry in 2010, has since published poetry, short stories, essays, and theatre in both English and French, in Canada, Europe and India. See his profile on the Writers Federation of Nova Scotia website.

Originally published in French in : Le courrier de la Nouvelle-Écosse, Aug. 27 2021. Poem translated from French by the author.

The post Thrown out of Peace and Friendship, a poem by Thibault Jacquot-Paratte appeared first on Nova Scotia Advocate.

KJIPUKTUK (Halifax) – Some 200 people gathered in front of Halifax City Hall this morning to demand a moratorium on the evictions of unhoused people all across urban HRM. 

It’s been a month to the day since Halifax police, using pepper spray and often with their name tags removed, evicted unhoused people living in tents and crisis shelters at several locations in Halifax and Dartmouth.

The harassment and evictions haven’t stopped since and promised hotel rooms for all have proved to be a lie. When a hotel room did materialize they were often of short duration.

It is terrifying not to know whether or not you’re actually going to have a place

Malcolm was told to leave the Comfort Inn where he was placed by the city after he was evicted from an encampment. 

“It is terrifying not to know whether or not you’re actually going to have a place,” a soft-spoken Malcolm told the crowd. “On Sunday I was told, yes, you’re good, you’re here until we can get you a place, and then on Monday. I found out we’re going to be out on Tuesday. You don’t know what’s going to happen next,” he said.

Where the government fails, the community must step in

“Where the government fails, the community must step in,” said Campbell McClintock, speaking for Halifax Mutual Aid.

“Over the past year and a half of the housing crisis during the pandemic, we’ve seen that landlords, city councillors and politicians at all levels of government are at best indifferent to the suffering of people living in poverty. At worst, all these powerful people are capable of mobilizing over $100 million per year for armed police officers to harass, target and violate our most vulnerable neighbours,” McClintock said. 

“Why is it that the rich are safe from the police and from homelessness yet commit far more serious crimes than the poor. You can’t avoid harassment from police by being a good person. You can only avoid police harassment by being rich.”

Rights are meaningless unless they are asserted

The evictions were counter to United Nations protocols about the right to housing signed off on by Canada, said Asaf Rashid, a human Rights lawyer. What that means is that forceful evictions are in fact illegal, and the municipality has an obligation to provide a supportive infrastructure for the residents of the encampments. 

The City must ensure that they’re providing adequate facilities for clean drinking water, hygiene and sanitation, waste management, cooking and fire safety and harm reduction measures,” Rashid said.

“Rights are meaningless unless they’re asserted. And that’s the importance of people fighting, fighting back, fighting for dignity, and asserting not only that they have no other place to go, but that the city must provide these resources. That’s an assertion of rights, and that is the only way to win the right to housing,” said Rashid.

When the government needs help, they turn to the nonprofits. Meanwhile they refuse to fund these nonprofits

Sara Tessier is a social justice advocate with lived experience who has been working with the Elizabeth Fry and John Howard Societies, as well as with Coverdale Courtwork.

“It’s funny how when the government needs help, they turn to the nonprofits. Meanwhile they refuse to fund these nonprofits because they claim they don’t have the data to support the need for the funding,” Tessier said.

“ We’ve had countless meetings, but where’s the support you promised? Instead what we have is a cycle of homelessness, criminalization, jail, over and over and over.”

“We the people elect these people to run our governments. What if we say no? Do your job! Start looking at the people you serve.”

You’re the big cheese, Mayor Savage!

“I’m here today, because unfortunately, we live in a racist, sexist, ableist society. I’m also here because of the brutality I witnessed on August 18. The cops were thugs. I have a message for Mayor Savage. You have failed this city. I call for anybody who is a part of those evictions to resign immediately,” said disability advocate Vicky Levack.

“I learned from Google News the other day that you’re unaware that the hotel rooms would only be for two weeks. What the hell are you doing. You’re the boss, you’re the big cheese, you’re supposed to know these things.”

The post Dignity now! Rally calls for moratorium on evictions appeared first on Nova Scotia Advocate.

KJIPUKTUK (Halifax) – My name is Kendall Worth, and as you both probably already know, I am a journalist and a regular contributor to the Nova Scotia Advocate. 

My journalism is all about advocating for a wide range of Nova Scotians who experience living in poverty in some way, shape or form. I find people here in Nova Scotia live in poverty not by choice, but because of things like:

• Experiencing barriers to employment because of invisible and visible disabilities
• Living with mental health and addiction issues
• Income assistance in Nova Scotia not providing enough money for clients who have no choice in life but to depend on that system

Ms. MacFarlane, it is the hope of my community that you will be a better minister for people who have first hand experience in dealing with the Employment Support and Income Assistance program offered through your department. We hope that you will be a better listener than the two previous ministers we dealt with when the Liberals were in power.

Mr. Houston, I have heard you speak about the need to improve mental health in this province. It is important for you to consider how increasing the income assistance rates could play an important role in countering the anxiety that income assistance recipients have to live with because they cannot make ends meet.

As well, you should consider creating social programs that mental health professionals can refer people to. An example of what I am talking about is here: Kendall Worth on friendship, poverty, and feeling discouraged. During an interview I did about a year ago PC MLA Steve Craig agreed with me on this.

I will end this letter by saying that I hope you will have a change of heart on rent control, that you will increase the income assistance rates to an amount people can actually live on, and improve the overall health system as you promised in your platform.

Sincerely, Kendall Worth

Kendall Worth is an award-winning anti-poverty activist who lives with disabilities and tries to make ends meet on income assistance.

The post Kendall Worth: An open letter to Premier Tim Houston and Community Services Minister Karla MacFarlane appeared first on Nova Scotia Advocate.

Halifax/Kjipuktuk. PADS Community Network and housing workers discovered this morning that an entire floor of a hotel that is currently used to shelter unhoused people will be evicted tomorrow morning. The Comfort Inn in Dartmouth says that the city has long known that these rooms were unavailable and booked by other clients, but the city did not warn anyone currently housed there. 

“How can you get somebody’s hope up and then knock them down like this,” implored G. Malcolm Kay, one of the unhoused hotel guests impacted by this decision. “It just destroyed me to get this news.”

Malcolm was previously a resident of PADS People’s Park, and will now return to the park as the hotel room is no longer an option.

This move causes further destabilization and fear amongst unhoused people in this city, as even the intermediate solutions offered by the city are precarious. 

“We expect that the number of residents at People’s Park will continue to expand because of the city’s continued negligence and mismanagement – which is edging on abuse – as an already vulnerable community is left to wonder how much longer they will be left to manage – without word or care,” declared Rachelle Sauve, the site coordinator at People’s Park. “This park exists in response to a crisis that the city created, and is expanding as the city continues to make this crisis worse.”

It is time for the city itself to come clean, apologize and be accountable to its promises to provide intermediary housing options for the city’s unhoused. The city needs to declare a moratorium on all police evictions of tenters across the city until it is prepared to provide intermediary housing, which has not been made available.

The post For immediate release: Houseless residents to be evicted without fault en masse from Dartmouth hotel appeared first on Nova Scotia Advocate.

KJIPUKTUK (Halifax) – The brutal evictions of unhoused people initiated by Halifax police on August 18 are slowly disappearing from the headlines, and from the general public’s minds.  

Not so of course if you are one of the unhoused people affected by the still very real threat of eviction. While the city’s promise of hotel rooms has in many cases proven to be a lie, advocates report that police continue to tell unhoused people to leave their camps. The absence of an eviction moratorium and the overall lack of clarity is wreaking havoc with people’s mental health.   

Thankfully, the push back continues. 

First of all, there is of course People’s Park, which is becoming a refuge for as many as 18 people, living in tents and mutual aid’s crisis shelters, supported by volunteers of the P.A.D.S. Community Network.

Their numbers have grown substantially in the past week after police evicted smaller encampments and told them to head to Meagher Park, the CBC reports this morning.

But more is happening that hasn’t been widely reported.

On August 30th, Leilani Farha, the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to housing, sent a letter to mayor Savage and councillors expressing alarm about the city’s approach.

“I draw to your attention that the City of Halifax and anyone exercising government authority on behalf of the City or the Province have international legal obligations to ensure the implementation of human rights, including the right to housing,” writes the global director of The Shift.

“Inhabitants must not be removed from their homes without their consent, participation, and without adequate safeguards in place, including the provision of alternative housing that is accepted by residents. Where people are removed from their homes in a way which is not in accordance with this, this is known as a ‘forced eviction’ and is a gross violation of human rights and international law,” Farha writes.

As well, immediately after the August 18 debacle the Nova Scotia Policing Policy Working Group (NS PPWG) called on the Board of Police Commissioners to order an independent review.

This same call has assumed the form of a petition initiated by the East Coast Prison Justice Society on the change.org network, calling on councillor Lindell Smith, as chair of the Board, order an independent, civilian review of the Halifax Regional Police’s actions on August 18, 2021, in coordination with any related reviews or investigations that may be ordered by HRM Regional Council.

Smith has argued that the Board’s ability to question police is extremely limited, but NS PPWG refers to the Police Act itself, which under section 55 allows police boards to ask questions and issue directions and set priorities, as long as they don’t directly interfere with operational matters in a narrow sense.

See also: The Board of Police Commissioners has more power than chair Lindell Smith thinks

Interfering with journalists and threatening them with arrest, the use of excessive force and pepper spray, police removing name tags all warrant further scrutiny, the petition states.  

A model to follow would be the 2012 independent Civil Review commissioned by the Toronto Police Services Board to investigate the police response to the G20 Summit protests in Toronto in 2010, the NS PPWG suggested earlier. 

You can sign the petition here. The Halifax Board of Police Commissioners will meet on Monday September 20.

The post News brief: Push back against brute force police evictions continues appeared first on Nova Scotia Advocate.

KJIPUKTUK (HALIFAX, NS) – Child welfare in Nova Scotia is in a state of crisis. The crisis is rooted in the colonial policies that sought to separate Indigenous children from their families, to control and surveil Black families and the legacy of intergenerational trauma and poverty. Anti-black racism, colonialism, trauma and poverty continue to impact children and families today.

The Child Welfare Advocacy Coalition (CWAC) is a new, community-based organization committed to advocating loudly and independently to the public and government for a radical, progressive approach to child welfare.

“It is clear that current fiscal and social policy has failed to address structural inequalities that undermine the well-being of families,” says CWAC spokesperson Haley Heist “We must do much better for children in this province.”

It is CWAC’s position that the scale of this crisis is too great to be addressed merely through internal review or even reform. A radical new model for child welfare services is the only chance to halt the crisis and build a new hope for children and families in our province.

Part of the problem is that Nova Scotia’s policies and programs that directly serve children and youth have continuously lacked their voices. As a result, programs and services have fallen short of their intended outcomes. The changes to the Child and Family Services Act i 2017 have led to a more intrusive system embedded in social control and surveillance rather than a commitment to eradicating child and family poverty, providing culturally relevant trauma focused mental health and substance use services and robust disability supports. This has negatively impacted the well-being of Nova Scotia’s most vulnerable population.

One of CWAC’s first acts will be to formally request a meeting with the newly appointed Minister of Community Services to discuss the urgent need to implement all provincial recommendations involving child welfare from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Calls to Action, to ensure that when a child is brought into care the family doesn’t lose the Canada Child Tax Benefit, and to follow through with the recommendations from the Inquiry into Home for Coloured Children to create a Child and Youth Advocate Office.

“With a government who is focused on health care and mental health, we need to ensure that vulnerable children and youth have the support to lead a quality life. Adverse Childhood Experiences like those experienced by children involved in the child welfare system are as statistically relevant to developing a complex mental health issues as smoking is to cancer ” says CWAC spokesperson Haley Hiest.

CWAC is guided by a Coordinating Committee, which is comprised of stakeholders from various professional disciplines, services and supports that impact child protection.

Members of this committee include but are not limited to:

• Liz Wilson
• Haley Heist
• Jackie Barkley
• Peter Duke

Membership to CWAC’s larger membership group is open to the public and should reflect the intersecting identities, and various professional disciplines, services and supports that impact child welfare. Members may participate in the Coalition as individuals or on behalf of another organization.

To learn more about CWAC, please visit www.childwelfarens.org or follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post Media release: New community-based group advocates for child welfare appeared first on Nova Scotia Advocate.

“For anyone already living there the categories were pre-set and you were born into them. Normal people knew they were normal, poor people knew they were poor, and the stupid people knew they were stupid because they were told. The uppity people didn’t know where they belonged, although everyone else did. If you wanted to change your category you had to leave town. That’s just the way it was.” 

Marla Dominey has dug deep into her small town Cape Breton roots to give us Kat, a keenly observant  girl evolving into a woman. We meet her as a child on her knees among the weeds in front of her house, creating an imaginary world of “landscaped yards around pebble mansions and swimming pools dug with  old spoons … snuck from the cutlery drawer.” When we part with her, she is a mature woman living elsewhere. She reconnects with a man she briefly admired across the town’s class divide when they were  teens and discovers “that old feeling of less-than came back just as if it had never left.” 

Through the fourteen stories in Through the Elephant Ears we become very familiar with Kat’s voice as  we accompany her along her rough road to adulthood. We feel her guilt when a child she is supposed to be watching is seriously injured, resulting in a vicious campaign to run a neighbour out of town. She encounters other puzzling and sometimes frightening neighbours, including the local witch, and has her  first experiences of death – a neighbour drowned at sea, a classmate hit on the road and a seagull  pointlessly shot by her brother at the local dump. She is fascinated by an exotic new girl from away while  she is relentlessly drawn into the disastrous slipstream of her rule-defying friend Stacey. Through Kat, we  feel the terrifying vulnerability of young women navigating their own blossoming sexuality surrounded by predatory males and without access to sex education or birth control. Tension comes, too, from the  precarious livelihood of a family dependent on the income of a father who is repeatedly brought ashore from his trawler for his drinking and a mother descending into mental illness. 

Fiction writers are told “show don’t tell” and Dominey does it brilliantly, building up layer upon layer of  detail until the reader can see, feel and smell the never-finished house or the filthy backseat of the local  drug dealer’s low-slung brown car. The people, too, become vividly real this way. It is impossible not to  keep turning the pages. It is also impossible not to care deeply about Kat, with her keen eye for the comic  and ironic, and the cynicism nurtured by deprivation and despair. If you grew up in a small town, anywhere, but particularly in Cape Breton, and particularly on the wrong  side of the tracks, Through the Elephant Ears will go straight to your heart. If you grew up elsewhere, it will open your heart to the scary and complicated path young women living in poverty must travel on the way to adulthood and how it sticks to them for life.

Through the elephant ears, by MJ Dominey, is available at Amazon.ca as paperback in KIndle format

See also: Anne Bishop about writing Under the Bridge: ‘There is this idea out there that you can’t write fiction about social justice issues’

The post Book review: Through the elephant ears, by MJ Dominey appeared first on Nova Scotia Advocate.

This article was originally published in the Chronicle Herald. It is republished here with the author’s kind permission.

KJIPUKTUK (Halifax) – There is a housing crisis in Nova Scotia and throughout the Atlantic region, and with the ushering in of a new Progressive Conservative government here that doesn’t believe in rent control, the sad reality is that many more folks will likely be without shelter.

Groups like Halifax Mutual Aid and their supporters have worked to provide temporary crisis shelters since the Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM) council refuses to take meaningful action to protect our houseless neighbours. Despite these efforts, the HRM council gave the go ahead for the Halifax Regional Police to destroy crisis shelters that were created by volunteers and paid for with donations from the community. Shelters were destroyed and personal possessions were trashed. Supporters who tried to protect these shelters and their occupants were confronted by and, in some cases, arrested by the police.

With all of this heaviness, I couldn’t help but reflect on my privilege of having stable shelter, but also on past experiences where I could very well have been without shelter.

When I was eight years old, my family experienced a house fire. We managed to escape but lost all of our items, as our house burnt to the ground. We ended up living with my grandparents while we waited for our new house to be built. What if we didn’t have proper insurance or my grandparents? What then?

When I was a bit older, my parents were going through a divorce. My father forced us out of the house and my grandparents took us in. Again, what if we didn’t have my grandparents? Would my brother and I have been forced to the streets with our mother?

What about when I was an undergraduate university student, struggling to make rent? What if I didn’t have my mother and grandparents to help me make rent that one time I just couldn’t?

And what about this past year, when my chronically ill mother almost lost her leg? She was in the hospital for months and had eventually lost her job. My grandparents, who really are the “rocks” of our family, set up an accessible room for my then disabled mother to live in.

Since she’s gotten on her feet (both figuratively and literally), my mother still cannot find a place to live, let alone a place in her price range. Not only is Nova Scotia severely lacking rental units, but the ones that are available are ridiculously overpriced. My mother, who has now returned to work and works full time at a family resource centre, still cannot afford a rental.

This is not sustainable.

Although I do see many folks in support of a rental cap and housing for all, I still see many who are against these actions. Some fellow Nova Scotians are downright uncaring towards the issue of houselessness and those who are in situations of precarity.

However, I am here to remind all you that we are each closer to houselessness than we may think. One accident, one health issue, one missed paycheque, could land many of us out on the streets.

So, before you pass judgment, remember, it can happen to anyone.

We need rent control; we need housing for all.Hailie Tattrie is a sociologist and a PhD student in educational studies at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax. She lives in Pictou County with her partner. She can be reached via Twitter at @HailieTattrie and via email hailie.tattrie2@msvu.ca

See also: News brief: We need rent control and landlord licensing everywhere in Nova Scotia

The post Hailie Tattrie: We’re closer to houselessness than we think appeared first on Nova Scotia Advocate.