URGENT ACTION: Confront Housing Ministers: Stop Displacement and Build Homes Now!

On Tuesday June 28th, a major gathering of Provincial, Territorial and Federal housing minsters will convene just blocks away from Victoria’s long-standing Super InTent City to discuss homelessness and housing action. Meanwhile, the BC Liberal government is taking that tent city back to court for a second attempt at an injunction to use police to scatter homeless people out of public view rather than out of homelessness.

Activists from West to East are converging on BC’s capital to press the Minster’s conference for action to end homelessness, not manage or displace it. Join us to send a loud and strong message to the Ministersthat they must stop the displacement of Super InTent City and end homelessness now. We will meet at the fountain beside the hotel where the Ministers are meeting, then make our way to the hotel.

DEMANDS:

1. Stop the displacement of Super InTent City! Tent Cities are places of safety, survival, and resistance against anti-homeless bigotry and police movealongs. They should be ended only by building enough housing and ending anti-poor laws and ideas that make them necessary. We demand that the government stop criminalizing and displacing the homeless, and that the BC Liberals cancel the injunction and displacement threat against Super InTent City in Victoria.

2. End homelessness now! We call on federal and provincial governments to build 78,000 units of social housing at welfare/pension rates every year in Canada until homelessness is ended. We calculate that we need 10,000 units of social housing every year in British Columbia to end homelessness, and BC has 13% of the population of Canada. Despite claims to the contrary, the Federal budget for housing is primarily directed towards shelters, support staff, renovation and maintenance of existing housing, and market subsidies. It will not end the housing crisis on Indigenous reserves or the homelessness crisis in cities and town across Canada. Super InTent City residents and other homeless communities in British Columbia have rejected shelters and institutionalizing “supportive” housing project and we join them in demanding that governments build the homes we need now!

ORGANIZERS: This action is supported by an ad hoc coalition of groups including Alliance Against Displacement, Carnegie Community Action Project, Homes Not Hate, Pivot Legal Society, and Together Against Poverty Society.

***This event is being held on the traditional and current territories of the Lekwungen people. Dispossession and displacement go hand in hand. Disproportionately high numbers of Indigenous people are homeless, as a result of colonialism.***

Accessibility: The rallying point is 1 flat block from the #32, 47, 47, 48, 50, 61, 70, 71, 72, and 75 bus stop on Government, and 2 flat blocks from the #3, 27, 28, 30, and 31 bus stop on Belleville.