Wellesley Institute

Wellesley Institute works in research and policy to improve health and health equity in the GTA through action on the social determinants of health.

Home Blog Housing Video: Human Rights and Housing, Ensuring Healthy and Affordable Homes For All

Wellesley Institute

Video: Human Rights and Housing, Ensuring Healthy and Affordable Homes For All

Taped on Oct 4, 2012 at Church of the Holy Trinity, Toronto, Ontario.

Presenters:
Chief Commissioner Barbara Hall, Ontario Human Rights Commission
Tracy Heffernan, lawyer, Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario

Moderator:
Michael Shapcott, Director Housing and Innovation, Wellesley Institute

International, national and Ontario human rights laws are a robust foundation on which to build effective housing policies.As part of its pioneering work on housing and human rights, the Ontario Human Rights Commission has been active in ensuring that the provincial Human Rights Code provisions for equal treatment in housing apply to critical municipal planning and zoning decisions that may lead to discrimination against certain people. The Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario, working with a range of partners, has launched a legal challenge under sections 7 and 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms that argues that Canada’s failure to respond effectively to a nation-wide homelessness disaster and affordable housing crisis is a violation of the federal government’s domestic and international rights obligations.

Acknowledgement of Traditional Land

We wish to acknowledge this land on which the Wellesley Institute operates. For thousands of years, it has been the traditional land of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, and the Mississaugas of the Credit. Today, this meeting place is still the home to many Indigenous people from across Turtle Island and we are grateful to have the opportunity to work on this land.

Revised by the Ceremonial Committee at the University of Toronto Office of Indigenous Initiatives in April 2021.