Land and Water

It's all connected.

Most of what I write about, the stuff that pays the bills at least, concerns housing in one form or another. This wasn't true before 2006 but that year my main project was a paper for the International Housing Coalition and the Canadian Real Estate Association on the subject of Aboriginal Housing in Canada. Since then, it seems as though property rights, housing and the whole idea of land and property ownership have taken over my working life.

That's OK with me, these are important issues. I can be moved to tears pretty easily by the thought of someone feeling safe in a home where they had not had that opportunity before. I suppose, in part, that is due to the fact that we moved around a fair bit when I was very small and once we did settle in Victoria my parents divorced and my home life became so chaotic and at times so dangerous that for months at a time I would just up and leave.

I stayed with friends, I house sat, I went back and forth between my parents and eventually I just moved out and lived on my own. The idea of home never really got through to me and I think, in many ways, it slowed me down a lot. I went to university late and I still seem to have a hard time accepting that I might have a place in this world. I'm just not accustomed to thinking of myself as someone who belongs.

In a way, that's a strength for a writer. I'm an observer and while I can certainly see how people would get very attached to a community or even a house, those things have never assumed a larger role in my life than they should. I value happiness, peace of mind, independence and the people in my life - and maybe in that sentence the order is even correct. (ask me on another day and I'm sure I'll have a different answer, human beings are like that.)

Anyway, I am entering the final stretch of my nomadic phase, that seems pretty clear to me. And it is fitting that as I do, the area that seems to be building in strength in my professional and personal life is the idea of belonging somewhere. Housing is at the heart of that.

Three years ago, I spent some time analyzing the Canadian government's First Nations housing policy for a national organization. The thrust of their strategy was really smart if you're interested in politics and thoroughly lacking in compassion if you're interested in humanity.

The First Nations Market Housing Fund was sold as a solution to facilitate home ownership for First Nations families and individuals. (it still is - here's a link ) The fund works like this: A Band ("Tribe" or "Community", depending on your verbiage which depends on where you are on the map, in Canada "Tribe" is considered racist - not so in the U.S.) Anyway, a Band applies to the fund when they decide to start selling houses to people instead of holding all the land and housing collectively. They apply to say they are proceeding with this plan and granting mortgages to people through one of the banks involved. It is the responsibility of the individual who is buying the house to pay the mortgage, just like anywhere else. The difference is, Native land cannot be used as collateral for a debt to any non-native person. So the banks could not, under the old system, foreclose on a mortgage if they had to. This meant it was impossible to get a mortgage to buy a house. Under the present system, the banks will grant a mortgage to qualified individuals because the $300 million fund is there to pay the bank back if someone defaults on their mortgage.

Smart banking. But how does it help poor people who need houses? Short answer? It doesn't. If someone defaults, it becomes the responsibility of the Band to pay that mortgage off. If the Band can't pay then the fund kicks in and pays the bank back. The Band in default must then withdraw from the program until they have paid the fund back. Get it?

The First Nations Market Housing Fund makes it possible for people who could already buy a house off-reserve to buy one on-reserve. Now lots of people might say that's a good thing, for my part, I'm kind of indifferent to it but it is not a means of providing housing to those in need. It does not ameliorate the crowding problem or the mould problem that comes from crowding in most social housing on-reserve. It does not give anyone who is not already on their way to financial independence the means to get there. (I suppose I should be happy about the establishment of this fund, I'm told it was established partly as a response to the paper we presented at the U.N. but somehow I can't shake the feeling that they just missed the point.)

Perhaps most importantly, the capital in the fund, all $300 million of it, will never be touched. Paying that capital back is a priority for everyone involved - and as long as it remains on the books it is a positive entry on the government's ledger that need never actually exist. It generates interest and some of that interest goes into housing education programs but most of it goes to the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation. It has created some jobs, mostly for First Nations Individuals who were already pretty well employed but then again, that makes room for the unemployed to assume the jobs on the bottom of the ladder when everyone else moves up - so that's a benefit. But it has done nothing to improve life for the 80 per cent of people living on-reserve who have bad credit.

It has done nothing to fix the situation for the thousands of native women forced to leave their homes and move to urban centers every year; women who are essentially immigrants to their own country. It has done nothing to help solve the problem of adequate infrastructure on-reserve, it has not slowed down the boil-water advisories that are in place in hundreds of reserves, it has not helped to build one single road or school or medical center. It has given comfort to the comfortable and done very little else.

In the last few days it has been brought to my attention that this situation has not changed. I will be looking into it, this time for publication, and I expect this blog will be given over to those concerns for a while and to the concerns that are related to it.

Another little factoid that was recently brought to my attention is this: Canada is a net water importer from the United States.

I never thought about it but it is true that most of the fresh fruit and vegetables eaten by Canadians are grown in the U.S. As most people know, water shortages have become a real problem in the U.S. They are not, by contrast, a problem here. Not at all. We enjoy pretty cheap fruit and vegetables from California and Florida as a part of our daily diet. Because of the free trade agreement, we don't pay much in tariffs for them either and yet we are terribly concerned that someday Americans might want our water. We frame it as an environmental issue but it's not. We're eating the water they use to grow those crops and we're not giving much back in return.

I'm not exactly sure how just yet but all of this is coming together in my head right now the way the issues of housing and how it is a determinant of social success came together just before the U.N. World Urban Forum in Vancouver.

Even if you don't buy the one-world platitudes, we are one continent and I think we have our priorities completely out of whack in this corner of the continent.

The goal of governing a piece of land should be to prevent harm to the land, to the people and to provide a structure wherein everyone has a chance to prosper, preferably an equal chance. Right now the Canadian government seems to think somehow we are going to win something by ending up as the guys with the most money or control at the end of all this. It's small minded and anyway, it won't work.

I don't know how to address this except to write about where things are going right and wrong. In Canada right now there is an awful lot going wrong, we are going wrong on a meta-political level, not just one case at a time. In the U.S I do see some hope for real and positive change, of course there are all kinds of injustices there too and terrible messes all over the place but there seems to be more dialogue. People don't seem so complacent with the status quo. That appeals to me.

Then there is the fact of reconciling my own gain with all of this - I have always thought that we should not benefit from the suffering of others and because of that I have not made it a priority to further my own journalistic career but that's a weird way to think. If I'm not making money, I get quiet and my getting quiet has never done anything much positive in my own life or anyone else's.

Plenty of times I wish I could go back to writing book reviews and critiquing the arts but like everyone else, I would like to think I might make a small difference on this planet and this is where my role seems to be - housing, water, land, freedom, belonging.

Funny the places life takes you, isn't it?