Illustration by Dave Donald

A call for co-operative housing reform

After spending the first 23 years of my life living in co-operative housing, I worry “co-operative” has become nothing more than a platitude used to paint a picture of true democracy. Even at the most local of levels, a functioning democracy needs supervision.

Over a quarter of a million Canadians are housed in over 2,000 co-operative housing projects across the country. Whether apartments, townhouses, or a combination of both, co-operatives are established as non-profit corporations, complete with committees and a board of directors, and are—theoretically, at least—run by residents. Residents become members by purchasing a small share in the co-operative and continue to pay monthly “housing charges,” a term used to differentiate the arrangement from “rent” in a typical landlord-tenant relationship.

Many co-ops were created as mixed-income communities in an attempt to avoid the ghettoization of the poor, and rely on individuals assuming a degree of personal responsibility. Members commit to putting in a small number of volunteer hours a month for the upkeep of their co-op, anything from mowing common grounds to conducting unit inspections. Every now and again, members get together and have meetings to elect a board, vote on an eviction, change the bylaws, or sort out any issues that arise, in a one-member-one-vote system.

But these defining features are by no means universal. Some co-ops hire a property manager or co-op co-ordinator and, in rare cases, co-ops are run by board members who do not actually live there. In others, rather than buying shares, members make loans, and some don’t require members to put in volunteer hours.

Crucially, there is no single regulatory body that oversees all housing co-ops. The sector is a muddle of acts, bylaws, and government and non-profit agencies.

The only national, umbrella co-op housing organization is the Co-operative Housing Federation of Canada. CHF Canada, itself a co-operative corporation, is primarily a lobbying group, focused on policy changes and acquiring funds from government on behalf of housing co-ops. There are regional associations for housing co-ops, and an agency that took over responsibilities from the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation for federal co-ops in P.E.I., Ontario, Alberta and B.C. The other provinces and territories have their own schemes.

This confusion has created a sector which is barely understood by many in it, let alone those on the outside. As a result, the sector is largely left to its own devices, requests for financial records are denied.

Members who raise concerns with the lack of oversight and issues of governance in co-op housing are often given the runaround or subsequently targeted as dissidents. Ken Hummel, a co-op resident from Whitby, Ont., who for the last 15 years has tried to hold his housing co-op accountable by requesting information on audits, raising issues of favouritism, and filing complaints with police and government, is constantly told to find solutions internally.

“I had shared my concerns and complaints about [my co-op’s] governance and management problems with CHF Canada and CHF Canada referred me back to the co-op board of directors to find some resolution with issues,” writes Hummel in an email.

A member in Toronto was recently told by her co-op’s lawyer “to remove my digital footprint anywhere on the internet where I may have talked about co-ops suggesting I was disparaging them or receive a ‘notice to appear’ for consideration for eviction.” These kinds of actions create an environment of fear and submission in co-ops, something most outside the sector rarely understand.

Nicole Chaland, the Community Economic Development program director at Simon Fraser University, established a housing co-op in Victoria, B.C. a decade ago with strong ideals and high expectations. She envisioned a community-supported lifestyle, separate from the “paternalistic” system of a mainstream, managed housing provider. Though she didn’t live in the co-op she co-founded (a stipulation of a financial backer), Chaland saw the factionalism develop.

“The potential for built-in resentment is all there,” she says. “I think housing co-ops are particularly difficult because you actually have to cooperate with your neighbours and there is that opportunity for resentment to breed.”

Chaland also described the fiction she was sold early on that coops are cheaper to run due to lower operating costs. “Every single co-op is doing two things at the same time,” she adds, “you’re running a business and you’re nurturing an association of people. And that means the costs are higher.”

There are, naturally, some advantages to the co-op model. Through her research on housing co-ops, Catherine Leviten-Reid, assistant professor at the Shannon School of Business at Cape Breton University, discovered that members who actively participated benefited from “skills development, the development of self-confidence, social ties and the ability to influence the housing in which one lives.” There is no doubt that many housing co-ops do work well. But there are too many that don’t.

Victims of abuse, harassment, and fraud are left naked before their management, with nowhere to turn for help. By design, many co-op members are economically vulnerable, unable to afford representation or represent themselves.

Co-op housing represents so many appealing concepts, which is why it’s hard to find anybody who doesn’t support it on principle. A recent bill to amend the co-op legislation in Ontario received all-party support. Co-ops symbolize participatory democracy, social justice, redistribution of wealth, DIY—so many progressive movements rolled into one. They’ve maintained the impression they are bastions of true democracy, a place for the people by the people, while the number of people practicing these ideals has become smaller and smaller.

“That’s a small radical subset of the housing co-op movement in Canada,” says Chaland. “This isn’t really part of our culture. We teach competition. We teach persuasiveness, we teach winners and losers. And these things are at odds with co-op principles.”

JOSH HAWLEY is a writer, editor, and musician living in Montreal. He studied journalism at Concordia University

Photo by Benoit Rochon

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What would happen if housing were enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms? One activist’s inside account of the radical new fight to end homelessness

In 1996, fresh out of high school, I co-founded the Calgary chapter of the anti-poverty activist group Food Not Bombs, together with a group of youth active in the local punk music scene. We collected donations of food and served vegetarian meals to the hungry and homeless in front of City Hall, an outdoor soup-kitchen and weekly protest rolled into one.

We couldn’t stand by as the number of people without homes in boomtown Calgary continued to rise; by 1999 estimates put the number of homeless at almost 4,000 people.We sent letters to politicians, held rallies, and spoke to the press. No one should go hungry, we argued—after all, food did grow on trees. And we knew without a shadow of a doubt that housing was a human right.

Canada prides itself as “a consistently strong voice for the protection of human rights,” and has signed onto many international human rights covenants. It was a Canadian, John Peters Humphrey, who was the principal drafter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Together with the UN General Assembly, Canada adopted the historic document in 1948, which guarantees everyone the right to “a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services.”

Despite this guarantee, the numbers of homeless people in Calgary has remained largely unchanged; in 2008, the city counted 3,601 people without a home. In 2014, that number sits at 3,533—and many other Canadian cities face the same high, stagnant rates.

Almost 15 years after those first small actions, I was privileged to stand outside a courthouse in downtown Toronto as four individuals and the Centre for Equality Rights in Accommodation (CERA) filed a historic legal challenge against the Canadian and Ontario governments. The housing and homelessness crisis had only deepened over the years, and these activists intended to hold Canada to its 1948 promise. They wanted the Court to declare homelessness itself a human rights violation and to rule that under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the government had a responsibility to end it.

“Across the county and in Toronto, various activities have been employed to end homelessness, from research on the health effects of homelessness to meetings with politicians and protests,” says Cathy Crowe, a street nurse and voluntary executive director of the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee. “It’s hard to imagine one thing that hasn’t been tried, and done really well, by groups across the country.” Crowe is one of 12 expert witnesses who provided evidence in support of the legal challenge. “It felt to us way back, that we should go to court.”

The legal system isn’t the only avenue for marginalized people to seek justice. But, after years of organizing to end homelessness with few victories to celebrate, the possibility of a court ruling that would force the government to act was an exciting prospect.

Supporters have since dubbed the CERA-led case the “Right to Housing” challenge. Unlike past legal skirmishes led by anti-poverty activists, which targeted specific laws—such as those that banned panhandling or sleeping in parks—it is a broad, all-encompassing challenge to government policy. A shared experience of living without adequate, affordable housing brought the applicants together. They deeply wanted to help prevent others from facing the same challenges. Together with the non-profit organization CERA, they argued that the federal and provincial government had failed to implement effective strategies to address homelessness and inadequate housing. As a result, the applicants argued, the governments had deprived them, and others, of “life, liberty, and security of person”—a violation of section 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.”

The case also relies on the rights to equality found in section 15 of the Charter. Women, people with disabilities, aboriginal people, new immigrants, youth, and people from racialized communities experience inadequate housing and homelessness at greater rates than the general population. The applicants argued that by failing to effectively address the housing crisis, Canada and Ontario were “creating and sustaining conditions of inequality.”

“I lost my husband, my children, my home,” says Janice Arsenault, one of the four applicants involved in the legal case. In 2003, her husband, who owned their Pickering, Ont., house together with his mother, died during a routine operation. Heartsick and homeless, she was forced to relinquish custody of her children to her parents. Arsenault ended up living on the street, and then in a series of poorly maintained apartments where she faced abusive roommates and drug-dealing neighbours. “I’m 45 years old. I don’t want to wait ten years to live in a safe place,” says Arsenault, who has struggled to find a decent apartment that she can afford with the money she receives in provincial disability benefits.

In Canada, 200,000 people experience homelessness each year, and at least 1.3 million have experienced homelessness or extremely insecure housing in the past five years. People without adequate housing suffer from a range of health problems, including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, tuberculosis, skin and foot problems, and others. These conditions are a direct result of, or made worse, by their housing experience. They also face increased risk of violence: a 2007 Toronto-based survey found that 35 percent of homeless individuals experienced physical assault and 21 percent of women experienced sexual assault in the previous 12 months.

Without stable housing, life expectancy is significantly reduced. A 25-year-old woman living in shelters, rooming houses or hotels has a 60 percent chance of living to 75. For men, that chance drops to 32 percent. Even those who have a place to call home face serious challenges. Finding a good, affordable apartment is difficult. Forty percent of renters in Canada spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent; over 400,000 tenant households are living in overcrowded conditions; and at least 370,000 rented homes are in need of major repairs. People wait years to access affordable housing: In Ontario there are 158,445 households on the social housing wait list.

The housing crisis in Ontario hasn’t always been this bad. “Canada has always had many people living in poverty,” University of Toronto researchers noted in their 2009 book Finding Home: Policy Options for Addressing Homelessness in Canada. “But it was only in the 1980s that more and more people found themselves not only poor, but unhoused.”

This trend, caused by the erosion of social programs, grew more exaggerated when the Liberals withdrew all permanent federal funding for social housing in the early ’90s. Since then, successive governments have granted ad hoc funding for programs and new social housing, but none have re-established an ongoing program to support social housing.  “There’s a sort of collective amnesia among people about the loss of the national housing program in 1993,” says Crowe. “The current reliance on the charitable sector is problematic, and it’s a result of the underfunding of social services.”

But, there are others, like Crowe, who haven’t forgotten. In 2010, supporters of the legal case formed the Right to Housing (R2H) Coalition of Ontario. The R2H Coalition included individuals with lived experience of homelessness, as well as academics, workers, and community activists from over a dozen organizations and agencies. In the long periods between court appearances, we organized workshops and rallies to build awareness of Canada’s housing and human rights obligations. On November 22, 2011, R2H joined with the Occupy movement in Toronto to mark National Housing Day. The mood was sombre— the Occupy encampment had recently been served with an eviction notice by Toronto Police, but spirits lifted as the crowd grew in St. James Park. It was clear to me and many of the young activists sleeping in the park that homelessness was one of the starkest examples of the increasing inequality in our society which had sparked the Occupy movement. This event was one of many organized by anti-poverty activists, social service agencies, and tenant groups over the years of the housing crisis.

This sustained advocacy has not gone unnoticed by politicians, both within and outside the governing parties. In May of 2012, members of all federal parties voted in favour of a non-binding motion that acknowledged that the government has an obligation to “respect, protect and fulfill the right to housing.” A few months prior, in February, the federal NDP had introduced the Act to Secure Adequate, Accessible and Affordable Housing for Canadians to create a national housing strategy to fulfill that obligation. Members of the Liberals and the Bloc Quebecois vowed to support the bill when it came time for its second reading vote on February 27, 2013. In the lead-up to the vote, advocates called and wrote to backbencher Conservative MPs from across the country, who were free to vote with their conscience. There was hope that a few MPs, seeing the problems that lack of affordable housing were causing in their ridings, might vote in favour of the bill.

Yet, on the morning of the vote, Conservative MP Tony Clement, president of the treasury board, held a press conference and characterized the private member’s bill as a “dangerous and risky NDP spending scheme.” This statement was intentionally misleading, as private members’ bills cannot allocate funds without government approval. In the end, Clement’s message found its mark, the bill was defeated 153 to 129, with all Conservative MPs voting against it.

Housing advocates have long argued the idea that it is too expensive to end homelessness is a red herring. Take, for instance, a 2008 Government of Alberta study that concluded it would cost twice as much to maintain homelessness as it would to end it by building affordable housing and providing social/health supports to those who needed them.“Moving 11,000 individuals and families out of homelessness will require investments of $3.316 billion,” reads “A Plan for Alberta: Ending Homelessness In 10 Years.” “This is far lower than the cost of simply managing them.”

Outside of Canada, there are examples of countries addressing homelessness and the right to housing. Decades of organizing and public education in Scotland paid off when the government passed a law in 2003 ensuring that anyone who is unintentionally homeless has a right to settled accommodation. Individuals without housing can apply to a regional council which has a legal duty to provide them with permanent housing. If there aren’t any units available at the time, the council must provide them with temporary housing—a bed in a shelter is not enough. France passed a similar piece of legislation in 2007. Section 26 of the South African Bill of Rights declares: “Everyone has the right to have access to adequate housing.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s precisely the kind of legal obligation seen in other countries that the governments of Canada and Ontario oppose. This attitude has made the Right to Housing case a hard fight. In 2012, the governments brought forward a motion to strike the case before it began. Rather than debate the evidence and present their own counter-arguments, they wanted the case to be thrown out without any of the evidence being heard by the Court.

“The use of a motion to strike by the government in an important Charter case like this is deeply troubling,” explains Tracy Heffernan, from the Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario, one of three lawyers who represented the applicants. “It can serve to quell dissent and prevent the voices of marginalized groups asserting Charter violations from being heard before the courts on a full evidentiary record.”

On May 27, 2013, three years after the case was filed, I sat in a packed courtroom watching Superior Court Justice Thomas R. Lederer preside over the motion. At the end of the three-day hearing, the Justice reserved judgment. He needed time to carefully consider the arguments put forward by both sides.

The judgment arrived four months later, on a Friday afternoon in September. The Ontario Superior Court of Justice agreed with the government. Lederer ruled that it was “plain and obvious” that the case could not succeed, and struck the case. Contrary to Canada’s pledge under the Declaration of Human Rights, it seemed, this decision made it plain that there is no right to housing in Canada. “This will come as a shock to those in Canada and the international community who have been assured that Canada recognizes access to adequate housing as a fundamental human right and that the most marginalized are protected under the Charter,” Leilani Farha of CERA said at the time.

The ruling was a clear setback, but we refused to mourn. The court is one venue to assert the right to housing, the streets another. In November 2013, the R2H Coalition helped organize a week of actions from Victoria to St. John’s in support of social housing funding and a strategy to end homelessness. In Toronto, over a 100 people gathered in the rain at Yonge-Dundas square, and our cries of “housing is a right, we won’t give up the fight” echoed off the buildings around us.

The Right to Housing applicants appealed Lederer’s decision and the Ontario Court of Appeal heard the case at the end of May 2014. In addition to arguments from the applicants and the governments, a panel of three judges considered submissions from eight intervenor groups who supported the case, including Amnesty International, the Ontario Human Rights Commission and the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund. “The proper role of the Court in this case,” wrote the Charter Committee Coalition in its intervention factum. “[Is] to provide the ‘last line of defense’ for some of the most marginalized and powerless members of Canadian society.”

As of June, there’s no way to know how long we will have to wait for the Court of Appeal decision. A positive Appeal ruling would mean that the case could continue, and Arsenault and the other applicants could finally present evidence that shows the depth of the housing crisis and its impact on human rights. It could be years before we see a final ruling, unless the applicants lose at the Court of Appeal. A negative appeal decision could mean the end of the case; the applicants would pursue a Supreme Court of Canada appeal, but there is no guarantee such an appeal would be allowed, let alone successful.

Regardless of the final outcome of the legal case, Arsenault remains steadfast in her conviction that no one in Canada should be without a safe, affordable place to live. “As a human being, I have a right to adequate housing,” says Arsenault. “It’s not just for myself. I want to fight for everyone.”

Yutaka Dirks lives in Toronto. His writing has been long-listed for the CBC Literary Prize for Creative Non-Fiction and his fiction and non-fiction work has appeared in Briarpatch, Ricepaper Magazine, and Rhubarb Magazine. A long-time social justice activist and community organizer, he contributed essays to Beautiful Trouble: A toolbox for revolution, published by O/R Books in 2012.

A lack of good statistics on the scope of Calgary's homeless population have hampered efforts. Creative Commons photo by Flickr User C Law.

Three years ago, the City of Calgary adopted a 10-year plan to end homelessness. The much-lauded, and now much-copied, program was the first of its kind in Canada. Funded by the provincial government and led by the Calgary Homeless Foundation, the plan hinges on an ambitious “Housing First” strategy, which promises to move 1,800 of Calgary’s homeless population out of shelters and into their own apartments. No more than 10 percent of that population will return to homelessness, it pledges, and by 2018 no one will stay in an emergency shelter for more than a week before permanent housing is found. But does the golden-on-paper policy shine in practice?

Unfortunately, it’s hard to say. The City of Calgary has not taken a homeless count since May 2008, when the tally hit 4,060. This leaves no solid way to measure the plan’s progress. While the foundation has launched its own system to keep track of the population, it will be December before there’s an official number. The foundation does know that, as of January, 2,300 people had been moved into their own apartments, says Tim Richter, President and CEO. However, it’s difficult to determine whether others have replaced them, or even if they’re still living in housing.

Kristen Desjarlais-deKlerk, a former frontline worker at The Mustard Seed, an emergency shelter in downtown Calgary, is one of many who would like to see more emphasis on a “Housing First, with support” approach, including frequent visits from caseworkers, treatment for illnesses and addictions and life-skills assistance—services that are not always delivered with the necessary frequency and consistency now.

“We need to find a way to build a sense of community into these Housing First initiatives,” she says. Otherwise, risk factors that contribute to homelessness in the first place aren’t being addressed.

The program largely relies on the Calgary Housing Company to pay subsidies equivalent to 70 percent of the client’s rent. But what happens if the subsidy funding pool runs dry, and people are living in apartments they can’t afford with no skills and no support?

There are plenty of questions surrounding the plan’s long-term goals, and for now, not many answers. Even so, Calgary has started a necessary conversation. “The wonderful thing about the 10-year plan is that it put homelessness back on the agenda,” says Desjarlais-deKlerk, “And made it something that people saw as solvable and worth their time.”

Michael Shapcott is the Director of Affordable Housing and Social Innovation for the Wellesley Institute, an independent research institute working to advance population health and equity through policy development. He is recognized as one of Canada’s leading housing policy experts and is a long-time housing and homelessness advocate.  He took some time to talk with us about the upcoming G20 Summit and what it means for low-income people in Canada and around the world.

Q&A

Jesse Mintz: You are very involved in the housing and income equity struggle on a local and national level. Can you talk a little about some of the issues facing low-income Canadians?

Michael Shapcott: This country has undergone a shift in the last decade. We’ve had all the indicators point to not only a big growth in visible homelessness in Toronto and across the country—this includes people who are living in homeless shelters and on the street—but we’ve also seen a corresponding growth in housing insecurity, that is people who are a little less visible but may be in overcrowded housing, substandard housing or unaffordable housing. So while we’ve seen this huge increase in housing insecurity and homelessness in this country in the past decade, we’ve also seen the face of homelessness change as well. Whereas, say, 20 years ago, by far the vast majority of homeless people were single middle-aged people, most often male, we began to see in the 1990s the rise of family homelessness, youth homelessness, and seniors homelessness. The situation across the country is pretty grim, and it’s not just something that Canadians have noticed. In 2007 the United Nations Special Rapporteur on adequate housing visited Canada on a fact-finding mission and he confirmed how desperate the situation was in the country.

Overall what we have is a very grim and serious picture in terms of housing insecurity. That, of course, affects not only the individuals and their ability to find a good home but it also has a profound impact on personal health. The affordable housing crisis is triggering in turn a health crisis that is affecting individuals. It’s also disrupting communities. We’re seeing an increase in polarization in a number of urban areas across the country between rich neighborhoods and poorer ones. On top of the health and community aspect, the housing crisis is having an impact on the economy on a local and national level. We’re seeing more and more business, such as TD Economics on the national level and Toronto Board of Trade on a local level, come out and claim that attracting and retaining workers has become more difficult as a result of the lack of affordable housing. They recognize that the social dimensions of the affordable housing crisis affect businesses as well as individuals. The housing crisis is directly impacting a national health crisis, disruptions to our urban environments and the economy. So the overall picture of Canada’s housing market is of a steadily deteriorating situation and there are plenty of statistics and personal stories that illustrate what’s happening.

Jesse Mintz: It is obviously a very complex issue but, generally speaking, what factors can you point to as causes for the affordable housing crisis in Canada?

Michael Shapcott: There is no question that there are a number of mitigating factors at play. But the key factor that has been driving things has been the erosion of government support for affordable housing. The simple reality—and everybody in the country knows this—is that housing is very expensive and it’s always been that way. About two-thirds of Canadians have adequate incomes to afford housing and they are able to buy or rent a home and still have enough money left over for food and all the other necessities. The really enduring problem is what about the roughly one-third of Canadians who are low-, moderate-, and in some cases even middle-income who are finding it increasingly difficult to rent housing in this country.

So the number one driver in terms of the deteriorating housing situation has been the high cost of housing. What we’ve seen, though, right up until the start of the recession was that Canada was still producing near record amounts of new housing. So the problem obviously wasn’t that we weren’t building enough housing. The problem was that housing is too expensive for an increasing number of Canadians. Before the 1990s the issue was addressed by a national housing program. There were several versions of it but the most significant version, launched in 1973, created a plan to ensure that people who were excluded from the private housing market would have access to an affordable home. The federal government worked in conjunction with the provinces, municipalities, private sector and non-profits. So from 1973 to 1993 the government funded over 600,000 new affordable homes, mainly non-profit and co-op housing, across the country. While there certainly were housing problems for some Canadians in the ’70s and ’80s, we  didn’t see this sort of mass housing insecurity and homeless for that period because governments were paying attention to people who were excluded from the private housing markets. By 1993, though, the federal government stopped all funding for new affordable housing. In 1996 the federal government decided that it would transfer the administration of most federally funded housing projects to the provinces and territories, and in 1998 the federal government decided to partially commercialize Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, which is our national housing agency and the lead agency supporting affordable housing programs in the ’70s, ’80s and early ’90s. Virtually every Canadian province in one way or another mirrored the federal moves, downloading funding to municipalities, and the pattern was established of governments not only not creating any new affordable housing but also stopping subsidization of existing affordable housing projects from previous programs. This occurred simultaneously as populations were increasing and poverty and income inequality were growing exponentially in Canada. All these factors together led to the perfect storm of our current and growing housing crisis.

I also want to make clear that the governments in the 1990s didn’t just single out housing programs. Right across the spectrum there were cuts in a whole range of government social expenditures. Income transfer programs, everything from welfare to employment insurance, you name it—all the programs designed to put a little bit of money in the pockets of people who don’t have much money  were dramatically cut.

We see in the 1990s, at both the provincial and federal level, a real determination to cut social expenditures to the point where Canada, which used to be near the top in terms of percentage of GDP spent on public social expenditures  when compared with the other nations of the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), more recently we’ve slipped down close to the bottom of the list. In 2008, the OECD released a report called “Growing Unequal” which was focused on poverty and income inequality in the 31 countries that compose the main countries of the OECD, the richest and most developed countries in the world; one of the things that the OECD noted was that up until 1995, Canada was ahead of the rest of the OECD in terms of reducing poverty and reducing income inequality but after 1995 Canada fell behind the rest of the OECD and in some measures Canada is among the worst in the OECD in terms of poverty and income inequality. So what you have is a radical change in political direction in the 1990s which led to wholesale cuts in housing policies, in housing funding, plus a whole related series of government social expenditures and the net impact of all of that is the situation that were facing today.

Jesse Mintz: So if I’m understanding you correctly, directional changes in federal policy have led to a confluence of factors contributing to the housing crisis specifically and to a whole slew of social ills as a result. Is there a connection you can draw between Canada’s domestic policy and the issues facing low-income Canadians and international policies and the issues facing people of the global south?

Michael Shapcott: There’s no question. The politics that led to the massive erosion of housing and other social programs in Canada in the 1990s at the national level are often referred to on the international level as neoliberal policies. The neoliberal agenda is basically to shrink the role of government and enhance the role of the private market. It was explicitly adopted with the Mulroney government in 1984 and it was followed by the Chretien-Martin administration and of course the current Harper government. The neoliberal agenda stands very much in sharp contrast with the previous notion that there is an important and legitimate role for the government in terms of dealing with issues that markets couldn’t satisfy, issues such as equity and access to basic human needs. What has begun with the onset of the recession, which was triggered entirely by a failure of private markets, is that people have begun asking serious questions about the neoliberal agenda of unregulated private markets in terms of its failures to meet people’s needs. There is a talk of a new role for government, of government regulation of the private sector that seeks to ensure that everyone within the country has access to basic needs and basic rights.

One of the issues at the G20 summit, of course, is that you have a number of governments coming—the Canadian government and the coalitions of Germany and England, respectively—that are firmly committed to the neoliberal ideology of small governments and big markets. You have the U.S. government that, while under the Bush administration, was very committed to the neoliberal agenda but has since made overtures under Obama to more regulations in the aftermath of the recession. What we’ll see at the G20 meeting is a very enthusiastic group of cheerleaders for the neoliberal agenda on one side and on the other hand at least a few voices saying that the recession is a wakeup call and that governments have to figure out a new way of working.

Jesse Mintz: So you don’t think that the G20 is prepared or even interested in addressing the underlying issues of income equity on an international level?

Michael Shapcott: I think that it’s hard to say. It’s certainly on the domestic agenda in every G20 country, Canada included. And while the critical issues affecting people internationally are very much there, often times the leadership of a country doesn’t reflect the political will of the people in terms of direction of the G20. There are some interesting trends beginning to take shape in many parts of the world. One of the most important ones, I think, is emerging in Australia, the U.S., Britain and many other European nations, and it’s beginning slowly here in Canada as well. It is the idea of the social economy. The social economy is very complex but in its simplest form it exists between the private sector of business and the public sector of government and uses traditional economic tools geared towards meeting basic human needs as opposed to the private sector mentality of maximizing profit. The best example at the international level are micro credit organizations like the Grameen Bank that started in Bangladesh but has since gone global. It is not simply profit motivated but is organized very explicitly on a social economy basis.  Canada, with the exception of Quebec, lags behind the United States and most of Europe in terms of developing our social economy. Almost certainly the social economy will be nowhere near the radar screen at the G20 because, for some reason, the social sector gets very little attention from governments despite its often disproportionate contribution to the overall economy. In Canada, for instance, the non-profit sector contributes six times as much to the GDP as the auto manufacturing industry. There are literally hundreds of thousands of non-profit organizations providing a variety of services and employing a huge number of people generating economic activity. Yet they’re not on the radar screen.

We would love to see a real dialogue at this year’s G20. Instead of this polarized debate between people on the one side who think that the private sector needs free rein to maximize profits, and people on the other side who want to build big government to deal with the big social and environmental issues of the 21st century, we want to develop a third alternative. We think the most sensible way out of this mess is to address the social economy. It’s neither big governments nor big markets, but a whole range of social enterprises—some of which may look like traditional businesses from the outside but are in fact geared towards social objectives rather then profit. There are examples in Toronto of modest little social initiatives like an organization called Gateway Linens that is run by Gateway Homeless Shelter as an employment project for men who live in the shelter. There are more and more examples like this around the country everyday but, with the exception of Quebec, the social economy is not organized yet in Canada.

Jesse Mintz: Thanks for taking the time to talk with us today. What rallies can we expect to see you at this week?

Michael Shapcott: I’m going to be at the big one that the CLC is part of (the People First rally, on June 26). I’m also working behind the scenes. We know that at summits like this there is a lot of media attention either on the official meetings—which are pretty low key because we know by this point that most of the official communiqués have all been drafted and the meetings serve more as a photo opportunity then anything else—and there will be a lot of media attention aimed at the antics at street level. We think it would be great if there was some media attention both locally and internationally using the summit as a way of focusing on real solutions to move us forward. We’re going to do our best within the “Cone of Silence,” or the “security bubble” to connect with media and try and interest them to report on issues other then the action on the streets or the communiqués flowing out of the press offices of the leaders.