Dying for a Home. Fighting for the Right to a Home.

Thank you for inviting me to speak here today.My talk today is about a very basic human right, the right to housing,the right to a home. CBC’s Rex Murphy recently said that the concept of home is the essence of our being. He said ‘home’ is a very powerful word, third only to mom and dad.

I’d like to begin this talk by getting a little bit personal and tell you about three different metaphors that have been important to me, metaphors that continue to inspire me in my own work for basic rights and human justice. The first metaphor is about the seed. I relate the seed metaphor to my friend David Walsh, a long­time social justice activist who helped found the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee. David said:

“The victories of Gandhi (showing non-violence works), Martin Luther King (civil rights), and the prophetic work of Archbishop Romero (Latin American justice)…sometimes these victories are more like planted seeds that will yield greater victories in future years.”

It’s not just these great figures of history that can plant seeds, you and I can do the same, and when the seeds of social justice do get planted and when the right thing to do begins to take root insociety, it is amazing what can be accomplished.

My second metaphor, which follows thefirst, is about the wind. When people do come together and form a movement, it creates energy – like the wind.

There’sa Ken Loach film called ‘The Wind that Shakes the Barley’, a title he borrowed from an 18th Century Irish ballad, byRobert Dwyer Joyce.

“The mountain glen I’ll seek at morning early And join the bold united men, while soft winds shake the barley.”

The ballad tells the story of a doomed young Wexford rebel who is about to plunge into the violence of the 1798 Irish rebellion. The reference to barley refers to the fact that the marching rebels would carry barley oats in their pockets as provisions. Years later, barley grew and marked the “croppy-holes”, the mass unmarked graves that the rebels were thrown into. The wind that shakes the barley came to symbolize the regenerative nature of Irish resistance to British rule.

The third metaphor originates with one of Canada’s best progressive thinkers Naomi Klein, who coined the phrase ‘movement muscle’. She used it to reflect what is needed to fight for climate justice but I think she would agree with me that we need that muscle in a few different places today!

I think of these metaphors – seed – wind –and muscle - to inspire me but also to help me understand what we must accomplish to make real wins on the issue of homelessness.

When the seed is planted and the wind blows strong, consider the kind of movement muscle we’ve achieved in Canada:

  • Suffrage, in 1916 women in Manitoba were the first in Canada to get the right to vote;
  • Economic rights, to organize trade unions, a shorter work week, a minimum wage;
  • Social programs, like Medicare,the Canada Pension Plan, social assistance and unemployment insurance;
  • The election of Jimmy Simpson as mayor of Toronto in 1935 - the first socialist mayor of a major city in North America (a sharp contrast to today!);
  • amendments to the National Housing Act in Canada in 1973 which
  • ensured the funding of about half a million co-op and non-profit homes;
  • the win against the return of the death penalty;
  • human rights such as same sex marriage.
  • The seed from these initiatives became huge movements of people, caught up in the wind of change, and ultimately movement muscle was formed that led to these wins which we all benefit from today.

With respect to homelessness, housing and poverty issues, we need to once again stir that wind.

People in Canada are dying for a home, in both interpretations of that phrase. It’s the double entendre in the title of my book ‘Dying for a Home’. Homeless people and those precariously housed are dying to find a home and some in fact have been leaders in the fight for that basic right to a home.

Publication Date: 
2011
Location: 
Canada