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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.
Please be advised that the topics discussed in this series can be challenging to listen to and explore topics of homelessness, abuse, torture, racism, transphobia, and drug use. Please take care while listening and if you need support, unfortunately there isn't a national crisis line in Canada, but you can find provincial crisis lines and other resources on the podcast website.
Welcome back to She They Us, brought to you by the Pan-Canadian Voice for Women's Housing. I'm your host, Andrea Reimer. I'm a former City Councillor for the City of Vancouver, an adjunct professor of practice at UBC's School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, and a housing advocate who has experienced homelessness firsthand. In our last season, we met a diverse group of people who are fighting for housing rights for women and gender diverse people right across Canada.
We hope that from it, you learned how these groups are disproportionately affected in the current housing crisis and what you could do to help. In this season, we will meet more individuals at the front lines as well as experts in the field to help us better understand why households led by women and gender diverse people are disproportionately impacted by the housing crisis. Since last season, there have been some exciting developments and I can't wait to share them with you. But first, let's check in with Janice Abbott,
the founder of the Pan-Canadian Voice for Women's Housing. So my name is Janice Abbott. I was the CEO of the Atira Women's Resource Society for 31 years. Since then, I've been doing consulting work mostly related to housing and in particular housing women and children and exclusively so far with First Nations and First Nations organizations. In 2017, Janice founded the
Pan-Canadian Voice for Women's Housing. I asked Janice to tell me a bit about that experience. Women's organizations, which when I first got into the women's anti-violence sector in the early 90s, it had stopped meeting. So it was really about getting together again, being able to talk to other women who were facing the same challenges we were, ⁓ women from across the country.
you know, because while there's definitely geographical differences, there's a lot of things that we were all experiencing that were similar and being able to organize, being able to learn from each other, being able to lean on each other. It had been a long time when the Pan-Canadian Voice for Women's Housing came into being since we'd had an opportunity just to sit in a room with each other and talk and share and organize and...
learn from each other and lift each other up. So it was a pretty awesome thing. So if that's where this started, how is it going now? Canada's not immune to everything else that's going on in the world. And we would be, I think, remiss not to talk about populist governments and what's happening with diversity, equity and inclusion and how that impacts women and gender diverse people.
We've been a little bit insulated from it in Canada to some degree because the government we've had in power up until now has continued to either fight for or not consider dismantling DEI a priority. But I don't know what that's going to look like after this election. An important note, all of the interviews you'll hear this season were recorded just prior to Canada's 2025 federal election.
I live in the downtown Eastside. I've been here for 20 years. Despite the fact that we've been immune to a certain extent to what's going on in the rest of the world, I do see more and more, especially women on the street and especially senior women over the last couple of years. So where I live, there's a group of senior women who sleep sort of in the rail town area. I think
probably because it feels like it's better lit and maybe feels a little bit safer than other parts of the neighbourhood. But ⁓ the number of senior women sleeping in that area has increased over the last couple of years. I certainly haven't seen a decrease of women, people generally, but including women and gender diverse people on the street. So sadly, I don't feel like things have gotten better. And in fact,
when you're out and about, feels like they've probably gotten worse. What Janice is saying doesn't feel great, but it's also not a surprise. As we learned last season, when the economy is in trouble, women and gender diverse people are more likely to be the ones bearing the brunt of that trouble. But I promised you some exciting developments, and the first of those is NEHA. NEHA is a review panel on the right to housing for women, two-spirit, trans and gender diverse people and the government's duty to uphold this right.
NEHA was established by the federal government's National Housing Council and will report directly to the new Minister of Housing and Infrastructure. NEHA addresses and investigates three specific focuses. The first is the impact of the failure to uphold the right to safe, adequate and affordable housing for these populations. Second, the actions and inactions of the Government of Canada that have led to the failure to uphold the rights of those populations when it comes to safe, accessible housing.
And last, solutions within the jurisdiction of Parliament to address the issue and progressively realize the right to adequate housing in Canada. NEHA follows a rights-based approach that was launched in response to human rights claims by the Women's National Housing and Homelessness Network, also known as the Women's Network, and the National Indigenous Women's Housing Network. The panel, composed of Sylvia Maracle, Pamela Glode Desrochers, and Marie-Pascaline Manono,
invites individuals with lived experience or organizations representing them to submit written testimonies detailing violations of housing rights. In the written dialogue phase, Neha received over 100 submissions. Neha is accepting oral submissions throughout the summer of 2025. Now, let's meet Arlene and Stefania, two women working with the Women's Network, which has been at the front lines of establishing Neha.
Hi, my name's Arlene Hache and I live in Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories, otherwise known as Dene. I hitchhiked to Yellowknife as a young person and I was homeless and ended up living in a shelter. And I didn't survive shelter life well, mostly because I couldn't meet expectations, behavioral expectations, let me put it that way. And so myself and a few of my peers started our own shelter. And well, I...
say that it's a peer-run shelter. And so I've been involved in addressing issues of homelessness and mental health since 1980, 1990, and have been involved at a national level, international level, and on and on it goes. And so the issue of housing and homelessness is a passion. It is, you know, a major...
rights violation in Canada and around the world, particularly when it comes to Indigenous peoples. So that's kind of where my efforts are really focused. I'm Stefania Seccia I work with the Women's National Housing and Homelessness Network and co-lead it as the Executive Director of Advocacy and Public Affairs. And I was a journalist for 10 years and since 2018 I've worked in the homelessness sector and advocacy because I felt my time as a journalist was the end.
I really focused on social justice issues, particularly homelessness in the Downtown Eastside. I was the managing editor of Megaphone magazine and the homelessness fix reporter with the Tyee. And I think it just got to a point where I wanted to get more involved with the solution side and homelessness once and for all. I mentioned previously, NEHA follows a rights-based approach. I asked Arlene why this is important.
From my perspective, a rights-based approach is essential because the needs of people who experience homelessness get buried in all kinds of constructs around charity, social services, supported living, and all kinds of things that remove rights. And it's really kind of embedded in a colonial approach that marginalizes people who experience homelessness, homelessness that really
discriminates against people with mental illness, people of colour, ⁓ women, ⁓ particularly Indigenous peoples again. And so I found ⁓ whether you're delivering a service directly or whether you're advocating, a rights approach is really essential to move people out of homelessness because kind of that charity social services kind of approach actually removes agency and sort of
takes the position that people who experience homelessness are not capable of making decisions, of making kind of good decisions. And ⁓ so I find it's actually the state of the service providers in Canada and around the world is really embedded in, again, that colonial lens that removes power and places people in infantile positions waiting for
you know, someone to come along and save them and waiting for someone to support them, you know, so that they kind of are removed from their own power and their own place to make decisions about their life. Stefania explains how a non-human rights-based approach impacts the way policymakers think about housing for women and gender diverse people if they think of it at all. So often when we come in to talk about, you know, the right to housing for women and gender diverse people,
Sometimes folks reconnect it back to, well, we have emergency shelters that women fleeing domestic violence are going to with their families. We have transitional housing. But then when you push a little bit farther and try to unpack, well, what about the spectrum of housing that women and gender diverse people need? What about permanent housing? What does that look like? What does multi-generational housing look like? And unfortunately, we really seem to get stuck in the mud around gender-based violence shelters.
The issue with women and gender diverse homelessness is that this population experiences it very uniquely. ⁓ From the research that we've done at the Women's Network, we know that women experience homelessness in a very invisible way. So we're not really collecting data. I mean, the way we collect data in Canada anyway is pretty awful in the sector. It's really hard to know actually how many people are experiencing homelessness today. And then when you add women and gender diverse,
experiences to that, we extra super duper do not know what's going on. And like any problem when you try to fix it, if you don't have the correct data, if you don't have the correct information, there's no way you're actually going to meet the need of people on the street today. So unfortunately, it's become this really, really big question mark gray area, critical human rights issue.
And so at the Women's Network, we stepped back and we were like, okay, to untangle this huge mess that's in Canada right now, we need to really ⁓ get a better snapshot of what's happening at a bigger picture so that we can get granular and make sure that there aren't people on the streets in corners or women and gender diverse folks who are hiding in couch surfing, in cars, who don't want to be connected to the system because the way the system has been built.
It's not built for women and gender diverse folks. So let's meet one of these women who has experienced invisible homelessness. Meet Margaret Wanyoike. Hello, Margaret. How are you doing today? I'm good. Margaret has been through a lot. When she arrived in Canada, she thought things would get better. But as you'll hear, they didn't. At least not at first.
I asked her to tell me a little bit about her story, but before she does, I want to note that while this story sounds sensational and maybe even over dramatized, this experience is more common than you would think for the tens of thousands fleeing violence across the globe who make it to Canada seeking safety each year. I remember when I entered through YVR I expected a lot. felt like now I have come to a place where I felt it will be my home.
and also the country that always protect human rights. Because that time I was pregnant, I was due in 19 days to give birth for my daughter. Now I had another two more children like I was carrying with, I was coming with. So that time I get into YVR, I was so hopeless and I had to be told by one of the people that I met in airport that I can just go and seek about
the housing that will help me like the shelter, emergency housing that is it. So I went to the shelter and that time because I was due in 19 so I was so heavily pregnant. So I went there and when I went there, I got ⁓ into a place that I felt like this one, it will give me a house or a place to sleep. And from that time I...
When I went there, I asked about the housing. So when they look at me, they told me that we don't give housing for the people. You can just go check anywhere, but we cannot give you a house when you're pregnant. And also about my colour. They really discriminated me about the way that I am, about my skin colour. And they told me that I don't think they gonna be involved in such kind of a person.
So I had now to go and sleep outside, by that time it was summertime. So we went to sleep and it was 19, ⁓ due to my kid then. I'm having two kids, I don't know anyone, I don't know anywhere, but I thank God because that time I know how to speak English because some of the things that happened to other immigrants, feel ⁓ they don't speak well in English. There is language barrier, so.
For me, I slept outside for three days. That is a moment that I saw another couple who was speaking in my language, Swahili language. And they took me, I gave them my story and they took me in and I have been sleeping. They gave me one of their room because they had only two bedroom apartment. They gave me one room with a double bed. That is where I was sleeping with my children.
And from that time, I keep on looking for the other housing, so I had to get involved into income assistance. So when I asked about the other housing, because I was in income assistance, they could not give me any housing because they want the proof of my income. When they see that I'm in income assistance, they want me to get involved into me because I don't know what was in between them and the government. So I remember one time also
I called BC Housing and they had to ask me the last name and my place of origin. I don't know whether they are, some of the policies that they use, but that made me feel, I remember the moment that I was tortured from the first time. I remember my second daughter told me like, mommy, you better give birth to a white child because they feel like
They don't belong. Unless you have that skin colour or being white, that is a moment that you're going to be favored by what you're asking from. That is, wow, you feel like you belong. I cried a lot by that time because when they asked me about all the things and also I'm a tortured person, I felt like they're just asking me.
discriminating me because my last name, I've been betrayed. And when I remember that I was being tortured in my home country, I hated myself like I don't like myself anymore. I feel like I was hopeless by that time. And that is the moment now I felt like I don't want, I won't ever trust anyone, any person who is within me or who is just speaking to me.
Also, I remember a lot that I got into the housing circumstances because I remember one day I went, one of the landlords told me that they're gonna give me the housing. And we did interview through the phone. And when I get into, when he gave me the exact date that I have to report and to go see the house that he gonna give me, when he looked at me and he said, ⁓ you are Black?
And I cried so much that time. And I remember I knelt down begging for the way, begging for that house because it didn't matter. Like it was like a one bedroom. It didn't matter as long as I had a roof. It didn't matter by that time because this is my son and he's growing. He's growing and he needs his own room. And here we are sleeping in a double bed. The two of us that I kept, this is a new pond and I have to sleep on the same bed.
That is a moment that I felt like my life is, let me just use the way that we use as a person who live in poverty. Like my life was a life thing for me. And it was a scenario that I won't let anyone to live in. And that is the moment that I declared that. I won't let even my kid, not even my kid, even the person who is Black, who is.
with a woman who doesn't have a man to fight for.
Margaret's story is pretty harrowing, but it doesn't end there. Her whole family stayed in that room for five years. She finally managed to get new housing that's a bit bigger and all her own, but it had mice and mold. And both of these things exacerbated her daughter's asthma, and they ended up in the hospital a few times. So I keep on rushing to emergency to get help.
That is the most challenging because when you go outside it's mug, when you're just inside it, it's so hot. I had to cry a lot because you don't know how to speak to because you lack trust from the first beginning. You have this mental, like I can just call it mental issue because when you feel like you are hopeless, you don't feel anything. You don't feel you have nothing. Thankfully
her family doctor connected her to a lifeline, the Community Action Network, or CAN. I got involved in CAN when I came here in Canada because I'm a woman who entered Canada through the refugee claimant. ⁓ So I was involved in CAN being introduced by my family doctor, is Dr. Mei-ling Wiedmeyer, through the Umbrella Clinic. And I got in touch with them because I am a woman who came
As a single mum, I've experiencing a lot in housing and so being tortured from the home country. So she saw that I have something in me because that time I was hopeless. So I had to get involved in CAN, that is Community Action Network. And ⁓ from there, they taught me a lot about how to advocate about myself because a lot of us, I say my grant when we come here, we don't have hope.
We are tortured, we are just like feel like we don't belong. So they trained us. It's a training that I had a word for about one year.
to train me to be the Margaret you see today because the moment that I was so many pieces of Margaret, I was Margaret with anger. I was Margaret who was hopeless, turned to be a hope on Margaret. I was that person that I felt that I don't belong. I was not doing anything in a community engagement because of the fear of what I faced through racism as a woman.
And also I felt like I didn't have any right as a person or as a woman with colour. And also even being a person who is living under poverty. So I felt like that Community Action Network brought me to be the Margaret who I am. So they helped me to pick up all my pieces and build this Margaret who can speak about everything that she had already faced.
Being supported to use her voice has made a big difference in Margaret's life. I asked her where she's living now. Okay, I got to a new housing, which is in New West. It's called Luma Housing. I advocated for the housing because from the time I got into Pan-Canadian and also being involved into so many platforms for about the advocacy they got me in.
With my kids, it's a three bedroom housing because the first one, was a one bedroom house. So ⁓ I'm living in a new building. It's called Luma Housing in New Westminster. And it's affordable housing, affordable, it's accessible. It is about the Black community and Indigenous people. So it's two community that are living in New West.
in this building. it's amazing. has air conditioning, it's like the other housing. I first met Margaret while working on the She They Us project through the Pan-Canadian Voice for Women's Housing. We had brought together women and gender diverse people who had had challenges with housing for a training to support them talking about their experiences with housing publicly. Yeah, I decided to do that training because I was, by the time I was involved in CAN, Community Action Network.
And now because I wanted a lot because in CAN it's an organization that switches under a poverty reduction coalition. And I'm a woman of colour and also a single mom. So I had to get in touch with a Pan-Canadian organization because of the way that I am and I felt like I need more training of it.
And also, I need hope for the women and also the work of the Pan-Canadian, which ⁓ you guys are doing. And I needed a lot to learn from you and to be as a bridge for the generations to come. So that is the most thing ⁓ I get about being Pan-Canadian. I asked Margaret if she was thinking of making a submission to NEHA.
Yeah, I'm hoping to contribute into the panel because I think it's a bigger platform that maybe the government can listen to because I always say that if they don't have that inclusivity because we need the inclusivity in decision making unless we have that inclusivity, unless we have to bring that transgender, unless we have to bring that ⁓ gender diverse and also women with colour.
Unless we have those on that table, I think they're making ⁓ the bad decision. They always call it bottom up, whereas it's going to be still in bottom, like it is borrowed forever. Unless there is that inclusivity. Unless because everybody's going to bring their own table, what they have. These experienced people, they're being left behind.
who people lived experience, people they being left behind. Because you cannot tell me that you're gonna go speak on behalf of lived experience person like Margaret. And you tell me that you're gonna fit in on my shoe. No, there is nothing that you can fit in my shoes until now they get into that, on that table where there is sharing of decision-making so that I can talk about what is women of colour are
facing on what these are like gender divers are facing. They are those vulnerable people. You know, we have to bring every person on board because where the cake is shared, you got, you have to get a piece of it. Finally, I asked Margaret if she thinks the government is listening. Not yet, because there is no change yet. Let's go back to Stephanie and Arlene.
to hear why they fought so hard for Neha and what they hope will come from it. You know, when this all started two years ago when the National Indigenous Women's Housing Network and the Women's National Housing and Homelessness Network, we submitted two human rights claims to the federal housing advocate, basically showing evidence that, you know, the Canadian government has absolutely failed to uphold the right to housing and address the homelessness crisis for women, two-spirit and gender diverse folks. And from that time, with our human rights claims,
All of that work was driven by People with Lived Experience, led by Arlene, our Human Rights Task Force, which was composed of scholars, ⁓ academics, people with lived experience from across Canada with very diverse backgrounds and experiences. And that's always been a really big value to us at the Women's Network is that we're
Everything we do, we seek to be as peer-led as possible. So we're actually a really small team driven by a really powerful and incredible steering committee. So when our two human rights claims were taken by the federal housing advocate and they were submitted to the National Housing Council for this review, and Neha is actually led by three really incredible people with lived experience themselves. And Neha actually is a Mohawk nation word for our ways.
And ⁓ it also, I think, really shows the value that they've created this written submission process and are figuring out their next sort of oral dialogue process, which is basically just them going across the country and collecting more evidence and testimony to build on our human rights claims that will all lead to recommendations that will go to the federal government. My conversation with Arlene and Stefania was taking place during the 2025 federal election in Canada.
I asked them what they think the outcome will be for households led by women and gender diverse people. think when we talk about investing in Canada or putting Canada first or common sense or whatever, we want to take all these political little phrases and actually put some meat behind them. We need to start recognizing the rights of each individual person in this country and being really meaningful in meeting their rights to make sure we're creating a country that
we actually want to live with in a country that reconciles with its genocidal past meaningfully and addresses the issues brought up with land back and human rights. And we need to make sure that we're not leaving women, two-spirit and gender diverse people behind, that we're meeting their needs and that we're demanding better for their futures and our future because all of our futures are tied together. And I just so wish that this next federal government, when they talk about investments, they mean that within a human rights framework.
I do expect that the government will take a more, in a rights approach and what that means. So for example, I find, you know, how they say they're supporting women and gender diverse people in decision-making and housing is pretty vague. And they kind of bury it in all the other stats and all the other funding instead of like being clear about, you know, what are the markers that we're looking for in terms of measuring success.
How do we know how much of the funding, millions and millions and millions of dollars, is not going strictly to developers that totally disregard the needs of women and gender diverse people and people of colour? I just want to give a quick example of, you know, the immediacy of government if it chooses. And that's when COVID happened in the Northwest, well, COVID happened across country, but I mean in the Northwest Territories, one of the service providers in the Northwest Territories had been trying to get
the government of Canada and the government of the Northwest Territories to collaborate and cooperate and work together to set up a large transition house for women and gender diverse people. And so they just like put the blocks to anything that was going on, so much so that the service provider and the building ⁓ owner decided not to proceed. It was off the table. COVID happened and in two weeks,
that agreement was done. Purchased, overdone, renovations happening, it was doable. And so it's a clear, if you look back at the COVID experience in some ways, it's clear evidence that when the government wants to get it done, they can. So any kind of failure to do so is a deliberate choice by politicians and decision makers, primarily the bureaucracy who really kind of runs the show anyway.
regardless of what politician happens to be in place.
So that's it for today's episode and the launch of season two of She, They, Us. Thank you to Stefania, Arlene and Janice for sharing their expertise on today's episode and an especially big thank you to Margaret for sharing her gut wrenching story. It's hard to share some of the worst moments of your life in public and I hope you'll honour Margaret's story by sharing this episode far and wide and by joining us for episode two
where we will explore what the federal government has done to address and combat the extreme circumstances faced by households led by women and gender diverse people in Canada's housing crisis and what could potentially change now that we have a new government. What I learned, I would say, is the places that did the best had a plan for how you address homelessness and housing issues all through the continuum.
Like you can't just do one thing. You can't just do shelters. You can't just do low income housing. You can't just do middle income.
market rental, you can't just do social housing or co-ops or whatever. It has to be this really comprehensive complex set of solutions that addresses the housing issues that are very different at different income levels. I'll never forget this woman in Florida who was trying to find housing for seniors who were constantly being evicted out of, you know, the cheapo places they'd had in Miami for a long time. And she said, it's like there's a homelessness factory out
there. You know, like no matter how much I do, how many people I place, there's just like this increasing stream. And I have thought of her so often because that's what we essentially have seen throughout North America. It's like a homelessness factory because the housing system that used to function somewhat for poor people has just fallen apart in many ways. That was Frances Bula, a journalist with a long history of reporting on housing policy.
Hear more from her and others in the next episode of She, They, Us. Thank you for listening. I'm Andrea Reimer on behalf of the Pan-Canadian Voice for Women's Housing.
Another Everything Podcasts production. Visit everythingpodcasts.com, a division of Patterson Media.