Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Welcome to She They Us, a podcast about making room in housing for women and gender-diverse people brought to you by the Pan-Canadian Voice for Women’s Housing.
Join host Andrea Reimer to hear about why Canada’s housing crisis is hitting households led by women and gender-diverse people harder and what you can do about it.
Welcome to She They Us, from the Pan-Canadian Voice for Women's Housing. Your host, Andrea Reimer, is a housing advocate, educator and former Vancouver City Councillor, who's experienced homelessness firsthand. Andrea has spent her career at the intersection of power, policy and courage to catalyze transformative change. And here, she brings that passion to the stories of women and housing across Canada. This...
Is She They Us? A podcast about the women and gender diverse people living at the front lines of Canada's housing crisis. We need to end poverty. We are matriarchs. We are the life givers. We are the pillars of the community. You can't just go willy nilly evicting us. I feel like we honour our ancestors when we make an effort to remind a new generation what that path has been. We've gone so far beyond the boundaries of what's...
humane and it has to change. There's so many people that are trying to do just that. Our hopes for African Women's Alliance is that housing in Canada becomes truly inclusive, accessible. Home is much more than four walls. It's safety, stability and a place where I can just be myself without fear, where I can live with dignity.
Welcome back to She They Us. I'm your host, Andrea Reimer. Last episode, we looked at the modern housing crisis from the perspective of four black women that's rooted in a hard truth. Housing in Canada is not about free markets. It's about power and economic access. Stephanie Allen reminded us that the health of women is the health of the community and that courage, not just policy, is what shifts systems. We also heard how when home is precarious,
Women still find ways to make quote unquote home place, a site of safety, dignity and resistance. We're staying with that thread, how women build belonging in places that weren't built for them by turning to subsequent waves of immigration, the POC or people of color in BIPOC. Canada's housing story for those communities began not with policy about land grants or affordability, but with laws about who could belong at all.
Those histories still echo in how families live, organize, and find home today. I feel like I've woken up from this long slumber of indifference to my history for the first time. I'm proud of it. I'm proud of, like, amazing endurance. Heads up. This episode includes discussions of racism, forced displacement, and the intersection of those issues with housing precarity.
Please take care while listening and reach out for support if you need it. Let's dive in. My name is Catherine Clement and I'm originally from Vancouver and now living up on the Sunshine Coast where I am semi-retired and really enjoying being up here in a quieter environment. As you're about to hear, Catherine is not fully retired. Full disclosure, I know Catherine from my time as a City Councillor in Vancouver.
She was the vice president of public engagement and communications at the Vancouver Foundation, and her husband was the city's head of engineering at that time. I reached out to her out of desperation because I was having a very hard time finding someone to talk to me about the history of Chinese women in Canada for reasons that are about to become clear. I asked her what she's been doing since she's been quote unquote, retired. Well, since I left ⁓ regular work,
Like full-time work, I've been doing a lot of work in Chinese-Canadian history. And I think I have found the true calling in my life. And I'm very, I'm actually half Chinese. So my mother was Chinese and my father white, but I really didn't know much about Chinese-Canadian history. And a few years ago, well, actually it was many years ago now in 2009, I ended up volunteering to interview the last of the World War II veterans.
and the first person they assigned me to was a Chinese Canadian veteran. And that interview changed the course of my life. It introduced me to a part of my culture that I always dismissed as uninteresting, even embarrassing sometimes, being able, you know, saying I was half Chinese. I didn't know why, but I always felt that way. I never talked about being Chinese. And, but these interviews and learning about what that
one community went through, it's history in Canada, which wasn't even taught in schools, was so fascinating and affected me so much that I wound up spending the last number of years really doing a lot of history work, community history work, work in memory especially, people's memory of life and growing up like bringing history to life through the human experience of history.
And from there, curating exhibitions and writing books. Two books. I asked Catherine to go back to the early days to tell me about the Chinese experience in Canada. The Chinese-Canadian experience is very unique in Canada.
And this is what I discovered through the historical and memory work that I've been doing over the last 10 or 15 years. And first of all, the history is interesting in that, and this is not always well remembered, is that next to indigenous people, the early Chinese were sort of at the bottom of the rung, of the ladder in terms of how a dominant white community felt about them. And
And they came, many of them, thousands came to help complete the building of the railroad through British Columbia, through the most dangerous terrain for which they could not recruit White help. But the moment, or just as that railroad was completing, the government felt, we don't want these men to stay. They don't belong in Canada. And we certainly don't want them to bring their families over.
So that was the beginning of the Chinese head tax, which essentially was like a penalty entry fee. And that started in 1885. And then over time, it went up because it wasn't being effective. And then it went up again because it wasn't being effective. And Chinese were still coming in. Some families were reuniting. And then by about 1921, 22, governments...
especially the British Columbia government became desperate. And there is a famous newspaper story out of the Times, Colonist, from November 1922, which reads, must bar Orientals completely to save BC for the white race. And the call from British Columbia was to ban all Chinese, all Japanese, all South Asians of any type.
and basically, sweep up and close the doors for all those communities to come to Canada. But by July 1923, so seven, eight months later, it's only the Chinese that are actually targeted for a complete abolition of immigration. And that particular law called the Chinese Exclusion Act is what it's more commonly known by, went on for another quarter century.
So it was 40 years of head taxes designed to really, they were exclusionary measures followed by almost 25 years of exclusion. When Catherine says targeted, she really means targeted. Along with the law comes a registration process. And while that was designed to dehumanize Chinese Canadians, it's also why we know a lot about their early experiences today. What's interesting is also when the Exclusion Act came in,
there was a mass mandatory registration. Every Chinese person in Canada had to register, including those who were born here. And they were going to be given an immigration card as part of that process. And what's fascinating though is to see the results of that count. And that registration also involved an interrogation and proving who you were and bringing in three photos of yourself, et cetera. But the results were that it showed there were about
48,000 single adult males here in Canada and only 1,300 adult females in all of Canada, Chinese, which created this massive skew, of course, and where here it was predominantly a male. They called it a bachelor society, but most of these men we're finding because of these registration papers, now that we're going back through them 100 years later.
that about 80 % of the men are married and have families in China and are really separated for decades and decades and decades from their wives and children. And as I said, in here, there are very few women and there's a lot of competition for the few that are born here. And that creates its own problems too. And mainly most of these men who are on their own here are working as laborers.
The Exclusion Act is very much a class story. So, there are a few men here with their families intact. They have wives and they have children; they have a legacy. But the vast majority of men are, as I said, separated for years and often partly why they are and why they, even after the repeal of the act, they can't reunite with their families, and they never return is because they're poor. And they never...
They worked in seasonal jobs and they just barely eat out of living, barely even to look after themselves. And we find, ⁓ especially when the act goes in, a number of like many, many men committing suicide, others who are just, you know, so impoverished that they are, you know, they die quite sick or they end up in mental health institutions. That was something we discovered on a
big research project that we did recently for the 100th anniversary of the Exclusion Act. So really creating a skewed society with very few women. women really in some ways can have the pick of who they want because there are a lot of men to choose from. that ⁓ kind of gives you an idea of just the implications around family separation, around this gender gap that's created.
And really after it's over with, the aftermath of it is that many hundreds and hundreds of men, for them, exclusion never ends. Even when it ends legally, it doesn't, it's like a life sentence for them. They die here alone. And the other aftermath of it is just the effect it had on families. When they finally can reunite, they've been separated for so long that there's such a, there is an inability to bond.
And yeah, so there's just many implications to ⁓ this, but this is not something that was really taught in school. The only thing we knew about Chinese was that they helped build the railroad. And then later on we learned they had a head tax, but we never really understood the implications and the longer-term implications of this legislation.
thousand men separated from their families. I asked Catherine what we know about how they lived. Interestingly, we've discovered a few things. One is that many men, especially those who are seasonal laborers would be coming back to Vancouver, let's say, for example, would often live in rooming houses. And in the early days,
You even shared a bed in a rooming house. Sometimes it would be up to four men per bed, and they would have to take shifts for when they would sleep. And there was a common kitchen and a common washing area, washroom area. But really, when we hear people describe, the people, like many of the people who are describing this to me now are people in their 80s and 90s who remember seeing these bachelors, and they were children at the time.
but they remember how there was so little, like there would be a bare light bulb. It wouldn't be very much like what we call an SRO today, but probably even worse in some ways, because you have so many people jammed into a room and very little possessions. So whatever they owned was underneath that bed, in a sack or in a trunk and had very little. And we often see pictures of these men, bachelor men, out on the street. And I think because probably the housing was so unpleasant to be in.
that they spent most of their day just lingering on the street. But sometimes, you know, some men would, and again, I'm saying this mainly from the point of view of men, because that's what was here. And sometimes a few of them who were like cousins or related would actually pool their money to buy a place together, which was really a step up. So that was ⁓ better. But it was interestingly that if you got sick,
and you look like you might die. It became this huge issue because nobody wanted someone to die in a house. And there's a very famous story of a nun who would be called in and she'd come in and rescue some of these men and take them to hospice. And she said, what was so sad was that we had to, when we undressed them,
We would have to go through every little nook and cranny of their coats and pockets and shoes because we would find they had squirreled away money. And they squirreled away that money because they were, because they had no family here. They were worried that nobody would bury them. And so this was the way that they had a bit of money put aside so they could be properly buried. Which I find really heartbreaking when I hear that. It must feel really alone.
⁓ to do something like that. And ⁓ many people are renting or ⁓ many people that are working in it like a restaurant or in a ⁓ shop will often be rooming in the back of that shop. So there might be ⁓ beds separated by curtains, so not a lot of privacy. And we've seen photos of that. it's just people are, they don't have housing in the same way. They have a place
to sleep. That's kind of what the priority is, a to kind of put their trunk or their bag. And ⁓ that's about it. Not very good conditions, obviously. It's a lot to listen to if you don't know the history. And most of us who grew up in British Columbia don't. Canadians like to think of themselves as tolerant and inclusive, but our story does not start there. I grew up hearing the stories of the Head Tax and Chinese Exclusion Act.
But I was well into my thirties when I first learned the extreme lengths that legislators in Canada, and particularly those in Vancouver, went to segregate Chinese people and exclude them from public spaces and public life. Chinese people couldn't vote, couldn't own property in most parts of the city, couldn't even go into hospitals in Vancouver, or if they could, were relegated to the basement. I asked Catherine about it.
Again, the term exclusion applies very broadly. It's not just exclusion to immigrate, but it's exclusion of where you can live, exclusion of what you can practice, what jobs you can have. It was a very broad definition of exclusion. And it was very prevalent and the government sanctioned. This is what's harder. It's one thing when it's the community that's up against you, but when it...
it infects government and government policy. And I was saying earlier that British Columbia was the province that actually pushed originally for the head tax and also pushed for the Exclusion Act. And I have no bones about saying that in many ways, British Columbia was like the deep south of Canada or the Mississippi of Canada.
the worst of racism, not just against Chinese, but indigenous people, South Asians, ⁓ was all here in this province. And at that time, the majority of Chinese in Canada were actually living in British Columbia. And it was interesting to hear stories of people who escape, who want to get the hell out of here and go somewhere else where they'll...
will not be subjected to the same amount of racism. They still were subjected to it, but not to the degree that they were here, which was so powerful. asked Catherine what changed. It was the Second World War that sowed the first seeds of change for Chinese Canadians. And the irony is that so many of the men and women who enlisted and volunteered to serve
were those same children that were born in Canada, but had an immigration card. And at the bottom, that immigration card was the line, this certificate does not establish legal status in Canada. So it was in many ways those cards that galvanized that generation to want to serve, to prove they were Canadian, and to also realize that if they fought for Canada and some would die for Canada,
that that in turn would make it really difficult for the Canadian government to continue on with the repeal and to continue to deny full citizenship rights to Chinese Canadians. But it didn't come easy. I think also so many men and women, especially the men who served overseas in the European theater or the Asian theater of war, Pacific theater, were really emboldened by their experiences overseas.
Some of these guys were superstars. I just, it's so impressive. These same men who were initially rejected by the army or the air force turned out to be aces when they went overseas and they were so talented as such good soldiers and airmen. And they come back with a bit of swagger. But then when they come back, nothing's really changed here. And they still can't live where they want, they still can't vote, all these things. And so they become part of a larger movement across Canada, which really pushes, first of all, for the repeal of the act. And then secondly was the push for citizenship. And in 1947, which is really two years after the war, everything changes. So the Citizenship Act goes in and Chinese-Canadians among the first.
Young veterans are among the first to get their citizenship certificates. And later on in that year, it's the repeal of the act happens. And in many ways you think everything is fine after that, but in fact, what we learned through our research was that there's the attitudes that created exclusion to begin with and shaped it do not disappear overnight.
They linger on and the effects on the community take at least another generation, two generations to actually finally disappear. can we talk a bit about Chinese women? I mean, there's, I don't think it's that useful to talk about the experiences. Well, I mean, it's always useful, but in our context today, in the time we have, I think those early 1300, I mean,
that's one experience, but let's talk about women like in the late 40s. So 1947 happens, the repeal happens. What, if anything, changes for Chinese women at that point? Well, initially a number of things change. One is that they become citizens. So they have, they step up in status. Now they have officially rights. ⁓ But for a lot of women at that time, there's rights, in theory, but there's not rights. I remember one veteran telling me that when she wanted to start her little hair salon business, that it was her husband that had to sign so that she could get a loan to start it. So that women are still in this position where they're still second class. ⁓ we find, and one of the things that is actually still sad for me is that even I know there's only 1300 women, but that was 1924. So by the time we get to the 40s, we have a new generation that are born here. They're growing up who are Chinese, but very Western in many ways. They feel Western, they dress Western, they have Western attitudes, but still struggle, like especially with occupations. We find when we were collecting these stories from across Canada, the stories of women are just, well, she liked to cook and she liked to garden. And that was the extent of what most families could say about their mothers or grandmothers. It's like it wasn't important and she didn't do anything important. But every once in a while we find a really interesting woman. There's one named Buddy Toy, who we came across quite by accident in somebody else's album, actually.
And ⁓ she winds up like inventing ⁓ that gadget that they put around horses when they race to keep, I don't know what they're called anyway. Like blinders. Blinders, yes. So she's like helps invent that. And she's playing golf and she's traveling and there's all sorts of stories about her in the newspaper. But now, now she and her sister have gone down to Las Vegas, you know, and they're all dressed and how fashionable she was.
But for others, women, so of those 1300 women and more eventually some of them lose their husbands. And in that time with very little birth control, sometimes the families are quite large. You've got eight, nine children. And now you're a single woman trying to raise these kids and you don't really have an education. Women starting in the 40s start to have an education. But if you're already a mother in the 40s, you don't necessarily, usually grade eight would be the top grade you'd have and yet you have to try to survive. And sewing, interestingly, we've discovered sewing becomes a very big trade, something you can do at home, you can still look after the kids. And so the Singer sewing machine becomes a very important tool for women at that time.
But eventually you begin to see the change, but it actually takes another generation before you start to see a lot more women going on to post-secondary education. So it was still pretty rare for those coming of age in the 40s. I asked Catherine how much she thinks these experiences have shaped and impacted her view of who she is today and her access to broader Canadian society. Well, I would say that, so this last project that I did, the paper trail, was probably the most personally transformational project I've ever worked on. I've worked on a number of history projects. All of them were interesting. All of them I learned something. All of them were excavating memory. But this one profoundly changed me. And for the first time, and in fact, this happened to so many other people when I've been doing my book talk, so many others come up to me and say the same thing is I, even without words, even with all this silence, the silence still communicates something to you. And so, as I said, as I grew up, I didn't want to be Chinese. I didn't want to identify Chinese. When I was younger, I even looked more Asian and I would always get asked, like, Catherine, what are you? And I would always say, I'm Swedish and Irish and Chinese - always put at last. The friendships that I made, the men I was attracted to and not attracted to. ⁓
It shaped me, I had no idea. This was just the way it was, and I never gave it a second thought until I started to work on this. And I realized, I realize now where this comes from. And so, as I said, the generation born after exclusion, so the people born first 25, 30 years after exclusion, often share this same...not just, it's not really shame, but it's like a real indifference to our history. And I feel like I've woken up from this long slumber of indifference to my history for the first time. I'm proud of it. I'm proud of like amazing endurance. ⁓ With all of that, that Chinese Canadians have gone on to, when given an opportunity, they quickly...
Well, we call it model minority, but in some ways that's what they did. They so badly wanted to blend in that that's what they did so well and became the doctors and the lawyers and the accountants and really didn't want to cause any trouble anymore. So just really kept their heads down. And sometimes I wonder, I wonder if it still lingers at some level.
I was noticing a while ago that there had been no stamp, ever a Canada post stamp of a Chinese Canadian, but there have been several of Indigenous people and Black Canadians. You know, just even in popular culture and music, really the Chinese community is not, you know, attracting the same attention as some of the breakout Bangras, entertainers and Black entertainers.
Indigenous entertainment is doing so well. I don't know if there's a relationship there, but there's something about still staying under the radar that I've noticed. I've heard similar debates in the Japanese-Canadian community about the internment and whether the past should be left in the past, whether as a community it's better not to be defined by the worst moments of your experiences in Canada. I asked Catherine about that. But we do a disservice.
to those who lived through that and survived through that, or those who collapsed because of it, like the men who exclusion broke them and fell into despair or took their lives. We owe them something too. We do a disservice by pushing it under and making it seem like it wasn't that significant. It was significant. And I feel like we honor our ancestors when we make an effort to remind a new generation what that path has been. And there's a famous saying, I think it's Foucault that said it, that the past is in the present. Catherine reminds us that forgetting isn't peace. It's permission to repeat the same mistakes. The laws that excluded people from belonging didn't just vanish. They reshaped who had the power to build, to buy, and to feel safe in a home. By the time Canada opened its doors again, the foundations of our housing system were already laid and they were never neutral. But every generation finds women who refuse to live inside someone else's blueprint, who redraw the lines for themselves and for everyone who comes after. One of them is Ceta Ramkhalawansingh, she came to Canada from Trinidad and Tobago as a young woman with her family and then found herself leading a fight that would change Toronto's housing landscape forever.
Sita calls herself an accidental housing activist. But as you'll hear, there was nothing accidental about what she and her neighbors built. My housing journey, I sort of became an accidental housing activist. And in 1971, as I said, I've lived in this neighborhood since then. I moved into a house, which a number of us were students at the University of Toronto. And it turned out that the block on which I was living was an entire neighborhood block which was being assembled for redevelopment, which is how come we were able to have a house and to share it. But it also turned out to be a block because all of the houses were ⁓
were people who were living there because they needed places to stay, to live that were not their parents' homes, that weren't the... A lot of it were co-ops because there are about 40 houses on the block in which I live, many of which were, many of whom were students, many of whom were draft judges who had moved to Canada. And so I...lived on this block for a long time. We faced, because the block was being assembled and we believed that it was being assembled for demolition, for high-rise housing or so on, we had a constant struggle with our landlord. The properties were managed by a trust company for the owner. The owners of the block, I guess I can say who they were, it was the Weston family.
And the original Westin cookie factory was on this block. And the managers, the property managers were not interested in doing any maintenance. So there was always an issues around windows which didn't have storms on them. was issues around ⁓ furnaces not working. I the house that I lived in had an old oil fed gravity furnace.
An old octopus which had arms going up into each room. The houses were built at the end of the 19th century. So they're really old Victorian houses. So to make a long story short, with all the consultants we hired and the lawyers we hired, we made a number of offers to the lawyers for the Weston family. They were not interested in selling to us because we were a co-op.
So we were obviously a bunch of communists. We were obviously not the kind of people they were interested in doing business with. So we made about four different offers for the entire block, 44 houses. And they still wouldn't deal with us. They sold it to a property developer who only offered $100,000 more than we did. We had offered $2.8 million. They sold it to him for $100,000 more than we offered. So we then had a dilemma about what were we then going to do. So we convened a summit with this developer and we more or less said to him, we know how much you paid. We know how much the properties are worth because we did our own ⁓ market survey of the properties. And we would really like to talk to you about an arrangement that you could come to terms with. As I said, we said you essentially have bought a block of 44 houses and we have no intentions of going anywhere. We're staying here. had signs. We were into, you know, agitation propaganda. So we had signs made and put in all the windows of the houses.
And this is a fairly main street, you know, so the sign said, you know, hell no, we won't go. And at one point before this developer bought the properties, when we were dealing with the Westons, we had some signs made which said more than our price is right, which is a takeoff on the law of laws slogan, which was more than the price is right. And so we used a yellow paper and Calvetica lettering, which was their lettering. So, you know, we were really in full campaign mode at this point. So we said to the developer, well, you know, you've essentially bought a block with 44 full households of people. We're not going anywhere. So let's talk about what we can do. In the meantime, the federal government finally decided what to do with their little piece of property on the block. So they sold it to the city for, you know, I think the amount was $275,000 or something. And the city had at that point intended to lease it to us to be part of the big co-op we were trying to build. But that wasn't clearly not going to happen because we didn't own the block. So we said to the developer,
Here's what we think should happen. Anybody who wants to buy their house, who's living in their house, should be able to buy it. And we know the price because we just had them all praised. Anybody who's moving into this new building that the city's converting the old RCMP site into housing through City Home, was then City Home, now it's Toronto Community Housing should be able to stay in their homes until they can move in. And, you know, we don't care what you do with the rest of the houses. And half of the block was vacant land. And we said to the developer, and you can begin your construction on the vacant land. Now that was really interesting because in the middle of all of these other offers with the Westons.
We, another charity, was trying to build a claim nonprofit housing. So they had schemes, but their offers were conditional upon rezoning happening in six months. ⁓ And it was a pretty ugly design. So we then worked with the city to create design guidelines for that part of the block, should it ever be developed.
So when this developer who finally bought Bugatti Block acquired, you know, all of it, he also acquired all of those design guidelines for that vacant piece of property. So it wasn't the square four story rectangular building that the previous charity wanted to build.
Instead, they were design guidelines which replicated what the rest of the block looked like. was parking instead of, know, the tradition, you know, the suburban approach to parking is to build a garage in front of their house. Instead, the design guidelines had a laneways with garages and parking in the back and the house form and the windows and the fenestration pretty much matched what was already on the block, which are Victoria houses, knowing that we had city council and our city councilors and knowing that we had other people within the neighborhood who were backing what we were trying to do. So at the end of the day, ⁓ many people were able to move into the old RCMP building, which was reconverted into apartments.
About a third of the houses were bought by people who lived on the block. And eventually, ⁓ about 10 of them, because you had to own your house for a year before you could sell it if you were planning to do that. So about a third of the houses were converted a year later, with the help of a credit union, converted into a co-op.
Co-op is still running today and it's got about 30 or 40 units because many of the houses, they were large enough. They could be converted into two or three units. So what that then did was create a very, very stable neighborhood. In the meantime, because of our location in downtown Toronto, there were other blocks which were also up for grabs in different kinds of ways. So in the course, you know, as I said, I've lived in this neighborhood since 1971. We were able to actually put into place at least a dozen social housing projects, stabilizing the neighborhood very much and making sure that many of the people who lived in the neighborhood could continue to live here. And that's what I mean about becoming an accidental housing activists. didn't set out to do that, but circumstance required us to become involved in creating our housing and in making sure that that housing was stable and continued to exist over the years. you know, I feel ⁓ that we've been remarkably successful.
When you use the word fenestration, I'm like, my God, like I was imagining you 53 years ago, starting out as a young person, just trying to have stable housing and suddenly like here you are having to learn architecture and financing and negotiation and community organizing and all of these things. It's such an incredible story. Yeah. Well, know, it's, you know, necessity often makes people take their lives into their hands. you know, because many of the people who lived on the block were university students, were, you know, going to school, some of them were budding lawyers, some of them were, you know, fairly middle-class kind of background, because most of us were, many of us were university students, because the university was just about six blocks north of here. ⁓ You know, we had the kind of skill set that made it possible for us to do this. But across town and other parts of the city, the people in Regent Park, the people in other parts of the city were also carrying on similar campaigns, fighting developers from moving to demolish their homes and so on. I think the period of 1971 to about 1990, pretty remarkable years of creating housing in Toronto, because it was also the period of what we referred to as the reform of city council when David Crombie was elected mayor, John Sewell was eventually elected as mayor. So you also had all kinds of other progressives on city council who were part of that journey was also that period of time when ⁓ Crombie and others had set up
City Home, which is a city housing company. I guess I learned all sorts of other skills so that later on as other issues arose in the neighborhood, usually not around housing, but usually around redevelopment, those kind of skills around community benefits, around heights, around negotiating to protect green space and so on, because that was pretty important to a downtown neighborhood, which has a limited amount of green space. It was pretty heady times in a way. thought back to Catherine's comments about model minorities and can't help but ask Sita what inspired her to act outside that box. Can I, I mean this may be my bias as a parent, but I feel like your parents must have had an impact on you. Like it's not every...young woman in 1971 that was out there like doing the kind of things you were doing. did my parents know what I was doing? ⁓ that's great. They didn't know. ⁓ You know, they had never gone to university. My father never had a formal education. He was self-educated. My, they both came out of church backgrounds, did a lot of church related work, but they
Many years later, my father passed away in 71, a few years after we arrived here. And my mom was, you know, she knew we were tough and could look after ourselves in a way. But many years later, you know, my mom really came to understand what this work was all about. The one thing I could say about both of my parents was that they made sure that we had enough resources to be able to go to school. So I didn't have to get a job to pay for my tuition. They covered that. They understood that education was really important, but they also understood that our role was to contribute back to society. And so that was their big gift. And it was one of the things that I took away from how we were brought up was that, you know, our privilege meant that we had to give back. We had to do something. They were pretty remarkable. I don't think that my father would have approved of my activism in the way in which we carried it out, you know, the signage. I made sure I was never arrested, so, ⁓ and all of that kind of stuff.
You know, it was just a pretty remarkable life that I think and expensive experiences are bad. And I continue to be engaged in my neighborhood around new fights and new fighting, new developers and making sure, for example, ⁓ when two or three of recent developers were putting up projects, we made sure that some units were allocated for social housing. asked Ceta what she's hopeful about right now.
I sort of became an activist kind of out of necessity in both my academic life and in my neighborhood life. And as you know, Andrea, I worked at City Hall for about 30 years. headed the Equity Studies program and we had our own challenges there and we had our own campaigns and our own fights and created ⁓ new models of doing things and new...
guidelines for city divisions to follow and so on. But I find that today people are more timid and not quite as willing to take on the order or maybe it's that because some of these programs, we fought so hard to get them that now that they're entrenched into the system, I don't think many of the younger generations quite realize the fights that went on to create
social housing, feminist studies, equity studies, human rights programs, and so on. I think there's quite a bit of complacency in our younger generations, although a few days ago, I was a queen in university and I was blown away by the numbers of students from U of T who were there protesting ⁓ in support of Palestine and Gaza.
So there are certainly, and certainly the big long-term occupation on the university campus last year was an encampment in support of ⁓ Gaza and Palestine. And that was pretty remarkable. I hadn't seen that for a long time, but it's been like, you know, the world is shifting back to an understanding that we need to re-engage in all of these fights and procedures taking back the institutions. Ceta's story reminds us that change doesn't always begin with a plan. Sometimes it begins with a furnace that won't work and neighbors who refuse to give up.
Half a century later, those same fights look different, but the feeling is familiar. Women still trying to build home in systems that weren't built for them. One of them is Adeem Younis, who came to Canada from Gaza just a couple of years ago.
She arrived alone, with no family, no luggage, and no plan. Within weeks, she was homeless. But even in that moment, she told herself one thing. I refuse to disappear. This is her story. So first of all, my name is Adina Younis. I am originally from Gaza, Palestine. And now I'm living in City Bridge, Columbia.
⁓ Currently I reside in one room apartment. It's very different housing experience compared to what I was used to back home. But it's part of the journey of starting a new chapter here. Adim has studied in many fields and worked as an architect back home. She was in Chicago studying on a leadership development fellowship program when the war broke out in Gaza. The U.S. refused to renew her visa and so she had to make some very difficult decisions was meant to be short time, four months only. But after that, everything changed because of the war that started attacking Gaza. And then I have no place to go. And then they refused to renew my visa in US. And then what I have to do, I just like cross border and come to Canada with nothing. Because if I was crossing the border with my suitcases, they will figure it out and they will send me back to US. It would be easy to give up, but a team didn't.
I arrived in Canada with nothing, no bags, no family, no support system. The first place I stayed was an Airbnb. The landlord was kind. He knew about Gaza and the war happening there. And when I shared my story, he gave me a small room to start figuring out my life. He even brought in a couch to make the place feel more warm. But the couch changed everything. It was infested with pit-bugs. Soon my body and my life were taken over by them. And eventually the landlord asked me to leave.
I suddenly found myself homeless in a new country where I knew no one. I remember sitting on the edge of the bed asking, how did I get here? How? And then for a short time, a friend let me sleep on her couch, but when it became too difficult for her, she also asked me to leave. The night something in me broke. I stopped resting. I stopped speaking. I felt invisible, but deep inside a small voice kept saying, I refuse to disappear.
Even in the hardest days, I never stopped searching. asked people about housing, checked Facebook groups, walked the streets looking for signs. Most doors were closed because I was in EU and had no papers. Then the same landlord reaching out again and he said the room was clean and I returned. But once again, bed bugs come back. It felt like endless. Finally, after the trek, he offered me a small apartment suite with a living room and one bedroom. That's where I live now.
It's a modest, but it's mine. And after everything I have been through, I have turned into a real home. I asked Adim, with all the displacement and the challenges she's faced here, what does home mean to her? You know, I kept thinking about that question a lot, a lot, a lot. And then when I came to this place, it was in bed. It was like nothing, just like two chairs, two old chairs, and just one bed inside.
I kept looking to the bliss. This is the bliss. How we can make it home, how we can feel it homes. Do you know what? I felt it with like green trees inside the homes, plants. And then I make like, I make it very colorfully, just like to give me, keep give me good inside, good vibes every day. I have like small coaches, orange and pink. And just like when I have to add more colors, I got many signs of Palestine just to me make me feel home. But home is much more than four walls. It's safety, stability, and a place where I can just be myself without fear. It's where I feel I belong, where I can live with dignity, and where life feels settled. Home also connects me to who I am, my memories, my identity, and my hopes for the future. And you know, like last thing that really, really make me feel home, when I cook, like, good food.
I feel like, yeah, there is life in this home. There is life. There is the smell of the food. And the funny thing that now I eat all the food, all the meats that I refuse to eat with my family, but I keep cooking them because they remind me of the home, the feeling of the home. Now, Adim is taking what she's learned about finding home and using that and her strengths to help other newcomers. I started working in an organization called Diversity last year.
First of all, I started working as settlement with people who had status PR or they are a protected person after they got their court decision that they cannot accept them to have them as project of Canadian. And then I was supporting them and I remember that time when I applied for the job and then I applied and then I have no idea about the job that I will be doing really. And then when I was preparing for the interview, I was like, did you apply for this job?
And then I start to study, study, study. I get to all the information while I was studying for the interview. And then I master everything. And then I went to the interview. And then I start working. And I start to navigate the system here. Navigate the IRCC applications. Navigate what the newcomers are facing. And then after like a period of time, I change my role to be supporting refugees and asylum seekers. And it's totally different when the people come here with PR.
then they come here to seek peace and they are just only asylum seekers or refugees. It's still a different story. It's not about that you are applying for them for the income assistance or for renewing their work permits or to help them like going through and learning language and all the obstacles about language barrier and you support them. It's about that.
I feel like sometimes I carry on their feelings when I go home. I keep thinking about them because I was in the same situation first when I come here. And then when I give them all the support that they need from deep, deep my heart. And it's about working beside people, especially women and families and making sure they feel support and not alone. As they start over looking for homes they can't find and the soldier can't have them for more than three months.
It's hard and when you keep calling people just like to help them figure it out. It's like, okay, we will put them on the waiting list. Okay, hopefully we will find something for them. But there is no answer after that. You keep checking up, checking up, following up. But it's like, unfortunately, it's not the case.
Can you tell me a bit about the women that you're working, the women that you were referencing? Where do they come from? Like what countries are they coming from and what kinds of circumstances? Yeah, one of them is from Algeria. One of them is from Morocco. ⁓ One of them, she's from Gaza. She came with a little daughter. She left because she's a war injury. So she lose one of her legs, the daughter. And then she took her daughter, leave her husband and other children in Gaza under the war.
and she just because she got this privilege because they were like give medicine to her and support her daughter. And then she has a US visa. So she come to US and then from US she just across border and came here. Now here she has no money. She has no support. She's living in the shelter and she's like she wanna to get sweet chair for her daughter. Her daughter is 15 years old.
This one of the stories, the other stories, she's another woman, she's with it, and she's from Algeria. She came here because she felt unsafe there because they want to get her daughter married. She's only 14 years. And she want her daughter to be educated, to get for herself, to be, to work and to have money. She was like, she took her daughter and she just come here. She has been now in the shelter for two months and she cannot find house until now.
Adeem's story of the women and families arriving here today brings us full circle and back to Catherine, who showed us how exclusion was engineered into Canada's foundations. Who could belong? Who could build? Who could be safe? Ceta reminded us that change can start with the block of neighbors who refuse to be moved and how women wrote themselves into the rules of a city. And Adim brings that history into the present. Arriving with nothing, naming the loneliness and still insisting on dignity for herself and for every woman she now walks beside. Belonging wasn't handed to any of them. It was made. In kitchens and co-ops, on picket lines and paperwork, one stubborn no turned into a yes. A huge thank you to Catherine, Sita, and Adim for sharing their journeys and for helping bring to life the stories of so many women who have come here.
and who continue to show us why households led by women, especially racialized women, still face an uphill battle to make space, exemplified by a deems courageous spirit and refusal to disappear. Please honor their voices and amplify their message by sharing this episode, tagging us at Voice for Housing, Voice the number four housing, and joining the movement to support women's housing rights at PC.
www.vwh.ca. In our next and final episode of this season, we'll talk with Jane Melenfant about the experiences of households led by gender diverse people and close with messages of hope from our guests throughout this season. See you next time.
To close today's episode, I want to thank the women and gender diverse people across the country who had the vision to create the pan-Canadian voice for women's housing and the tenacity to keep it going. Because of you, we can imagine a future without the violence, poverty, and housing insecurity that so many have endured. I want to share a few resources and a call to action.
If you're a woman or gender diverse person who's experienced housing insecurity but feel unsure about sharing your story, the Pan-Canadian Voice for Women's Housing can help. We offer training programs to support and amplify your voice. Learn more and sign up at pcbwh.ca
join a local housing advocacy group, or meet with your member of parliament or provincial representative. And if you haven't personally experienced the housing crisis, we still need you. As many of our guests have said, allies are essential, and that means you. Share this podcast, use your voice, and help others raise theirs. Thank you to Everything Podcasts for bringing She They Us to the next level. Shout out to Jordan Wong, our sound engineer, Linda Rourke, producer and writer,
Lisa Bishop, Senior Account Director, and Jennifer Smith, the Executive Producer. Also, a big thanks to Reid Jamison and CVM, who generously provided some of the music you heard on this episode from The Pigeon and the Dove. We're on a shoestring budget and so grateful for their support. And my final two thanks, first to my partner on the She They Ask Project, Ange Valentini with the Strategic Impact Collective, and finally, the project coordinator, Monica Dang.
I'm Andrea Reimer. Thank you for listening to She, They, Us, a podcast from the Pan-Canadian Voice for Women's Housing. You can find other episodes wherever you get your podcasts. I call on every one of you You're my sister, brother too We're all under the same moon There's still something we can
Another Everything Podcast production. Visit everythingpodcast.com, a division of Patterson Media.