Ottawa pledges $638M for urban Indigenous housing

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This article was published 19/02/2019 (1891 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

GATINEAU, Que. — The Trudeau government intends to uncork more than a half-billion dollars to help Indigenous people find housing in urban centres, including troubled parts of downtown Winnipeg and the North End.

At a midday Wednesday announcement just outside Ottawa, the Liberals unveiled $638 million in spending over the next decade, aiming to help create homes for rent-paying families, as well as roughly a 70 per cent boost to existing programs that tackle homelessness.

While the funding has yet to be delegated by area, the office of federal Families Minister Jean-Yves Duclos pointed out Wednesday that Winnipeg has the largest Indigenous population of any major Canadian city.

The announcement includes some new cash, while the rest specifies how part of the national housing strategy will be rolled out. The money is separate from existing cash for projects on First Nations reserves.

The announcement represents Ottawa’s slow shift to supporting an Indigenous population that is increasingly migrating to Canadian cities. Ottawa has constitutional and treaty obligations to support services on reserves, but is increasingly being asked to help First Nations off-reserve, as well as Métis and Inuit.

“Safe and affordable housing gives people a sense of security and helps build strong communities,” wrote Duclos ahead of the announcement.

The 2016 census found the Winnipeg area has 92,810 people identifying as Indigenous distributed throughout the city but especially in lower-income areas.

Local Liberal MPs have said they expect the decade-long national housing strategy to help reduce poverty in their ridings, but the government has slowly rolled out specific programs since launching that strategy in November 2017.

The Conservatives have been critical of the Trudeau government for scheduling distribution of most of the promised housing cash after this fall’s election, while the NDP has argued the qualifying criteria for housing supports doesn’t match the need in cities like Winnipeg.

dylan.robertson@freepress.mb.ca