Jeanne Maki
Guest Opinion
This morning I heard how climate change is affecting the health of children and others, and how this affects an already heavily burdened health-care system. Our world as we know it is rapidly changing.
Here on P.E.I., and elsewhere, there’s something else that’s affecting the health of many, and that is homelessness.
About a year ago, there was a public outcry and meetings to discuss what could be done about all the people being evicted from their rental homes due to no fault of their own.
They hadn’t caused harm to property or neighbours. They had paid their rent. No, it was because the laws in P.E.I. allow landlords to give 60 days' notice to all the tenants in an apartment building so they can renovate and increase the rents.
The present and past P.E.I. governments have failed to protect people’s rights to secure housing. What does this do to people’s health when they’re faced with this immense stress and have nowhere to go? Many of these people have children who also feel this stress. Will they have to change schools in the middle of the year? Are they going to be out in the street in the middle of the winter?
How can we, as a society, have allowed things to get so bad? The Band-Aid solutions have been to have more housing built with little consideration of how and where that’s done and offer rent subsidies so people can afford the huge increases in rent that are being charged in this zero per cent vacancy rate situation. That’s all well and good but it doesn’t get at what’s causing the problem in the first place, which are the laws regulating rentals.
If my memory serves me right, there was once a time when people couldn’t be evicted in the winter without just cause.
When it comes to renos, does a whole building have to be evicted at once? In Quebec, I’ve been told, if tenants have to move out for a reno, the landlord has to provide them with housing and then let them move back in with no rent increase. If the renos are done for health and safety reasons, maybe the government could offer landlords some sort of tax incentive rather than allowing them to cause huge societal problems.
I know it’s not always easy being a landlord, but to be able to cause such an upheaval in tenants’ lives smacks of greed rather than need.
In P.E.I. we have hundreds of houses sitting empty because they got too expensive for investors to keep buying them.
Prime farmland is being bulldozed to build new homes to make up for the shortage this has contributed to.
I’ve seen little evidence of sustainable practices being used or consideration for liveability with apartment buildings being built right next to busy highways.
This is an emergency and something has to be done now. It needs a multi-pronged approach so it’s done right, not just a temporary fix.
Jeanne Maki is a resident of Charlottetown, P.E.I.
