By Michelle Paquette and Doug Yearwood, members in Ottawa
On November 25th, Ottawa comrades attended the Rally Against Renovictions at the Smart Living Properties (SLP) headquarters.
The goal of this demonstration was to put an end to mass renovictions targeting tenants on Osgoode Street in the Sandy Hill neighbourhood. Since July, Osgoode tenants have been asking SLP to meet and negotiate. According to a recent article in University of Ottawa’s student newspaper The Fulcrum, “Many of the tenants living within the 13-address strip depend on the municipally-licensed lower-income shared rooming housing as they cannot afford current market rates for rental apartments.”
The situation between SLP and Osgoode Street tenants recently escalated after SLP boarded up windows, doors, and all fire escapes while a number of tenants were still living in their apartments. Social media posts by the Osgoode Street tenant group show that SLP have also refused to keep up with any maintenance work.
During the demonstration, some of the remaining Osgoode tenants came prepared to negotiate collectively with SLP, who in return insisted on individual bargaining. After some confrontation, three tenants and a negotiator managed to enter the building. They met with SLP representatives who in the end refused to keep tenants on Osgoode Street, but agreed to address some maintenance issues.
While the tenants negotiated, local activists, community members, students, and workers shared speeches about housing issues in Ottawa. The University of Ottawa Student Workers Union Local CUPE 2626 condemned the cruel actions of SLP and called for action by unions, asking labour and tenants to come together to fight evictions and demand decent, affordable housing for all.
Supporters also heard from comrade Doug Yearwood who, on behalf of PSAC Local 901, made a speech, some of which can be found on Osgoode Street tenants’ social media, and which can be read in full below.
Speech by Doug Yearwood:
“Friends and Comrades,
Thank you to the organizers for giving me the space and time to speak to you all here today. My name is Doug Yearwood. I’m Vice President of PSAC Local 901, and I am a tenant living near Byward and Lowertown, which continues to see its own peculiar forms of gentrification. I go to school in Kingston, where I’ve been involved in housing struggles, and soon I’ll be moving to Toronto, where I’ll be involved in housing struggles. The struggle for affordable and decent housing for all can be found everywhere in this province. As you all know, housing is increasingly unaffordable and out of reach for the many, while the few live lavishly.
The demand I have today is simple: Decent and affordable housing for all. Housing is a human right; It is fundamental to our health and well-being. But, with the for-profit system we live under, housing is treated as nothing more than a commodity. As workers, students, and members of society, we are expected to toil and work ourselves to exhaustion, only to give 30 percent or more of our income away at the start of each month, all so that someone else gets wealthier. Then, on a whim, a private individual or a company can decide to simply evict people, all so that they can make more money. That is what we see here, today in Sandy Hill.
Not only are Smart Living’s actions shameful, but they are against our collective interests as workers, students, and members of this community and society. If this place is flipped and turned into housing for wealthier people, how long until we are all priced out of the area? A year? A few years? How many other working-class people from Sandy Hill have already been evicted to make room for housing for the more privileged? The average price of a one bedroom in Sandy Hill was somewhere around $1200 in 2017, and today you’re lucky to find one for $1500. What type of person can afford that? Not you, and not me, and not the people working at the newly built Starbucks or Anytime Fitness. Even many of the students who move into the gentrifying community can’t really afford it: they likely have huge student loans that they’ve taken out, like I did, just to make due until a better time, far away in the future, when they hope to have a decent job that can help them pay off their education.
As workers, once-workers, and soon-to-be workers, we should all benefit from the fruits of society’s labour, and there is more than enough wealth in this country to make that dream a reality. I want my neighbors to have a healthy life, I want my neighbors to live with dignity, I want my neighbors to have a bed, heat, and a roof over their head. I don’t want to see them evicted, and I don’t want them to go broke and pay ridiculous amounts of money for simply trying to keep a roof over their head. They say that power concedes nothing without a demand: Well, like I said, the demand is simple: decent and affordable housing for all. The question then becomes, how do we get there?
We get there by fighting for a system that values people over profit. Call it a revolution, call it whatever you want, but there is no way out of this housing crisis without mass struggle and working-class unity. We need tenant organizations to grow in power, we need progressive community groups to raise awareness, we need students to get involved, we need unions to fight for our collective interests, and we need to develop mass movements capable of challenging the powers that be in ways that threaten their very existence.
We cannot remain isolated from one another, content to fight only within our community enclaves. We need to go above and beyond to work across cultures, languages, communities, unions, and whatever else to find common cause in the struggle for decent and affordable housing for all. Even if tenants here are able to win their demands, over the course of this particular struggle, who knows how many other tenants elsewhere have come under threat of eviction? We’re playing a constant game of whack-a-mole that we can’t keep up with. To intervene and make a difference, we need to take to the streets as one unified voice and demand a better system. We need to develop our own institutions capable of aiding in our efforts and win over already existing but imperfect institutions to our side. This takes commitment and coordination. And, comrades, this is a fight that is not easily winnable so long as we are fighting landlords on their turf: Here, as tenants living in a capitalist system—objectively speaking—we are only consumers of the house commodity. For us to win, we need to challenge the system itself and strike where we hold power: in production, via prolonged protest, strikes, and various other methods aimed at the increasing of a class consciousness.
This might sound impossible. But, if sooner or later we are all going to face eviction or pay more and more of our hard-earned income on rent, what choice do we have? This is a long and arduous struggle, friends. There is no easy path to victory. But, if we are successful in building a mass movement, along the way, the powers that be will concede to us important reforms, aimed at de-radicalizing us and making us complacent. But this will only add fuel to our fire: it will let us know the terrain has shifted in our favour. It will be a testament to our work as tenants and as workers. We know this method of struggle, the class struggle, to be the most effective. Nothing will be handed to us: decent and affordable housing for all is something we are going to have to struggle for.
To that end, tenant-workers from across Ontario have developed a resolution, which we hope serves as a first step in pushing back against the neoliberal austerity. This resolution calls for the end of renovictions, for the repeal of Bill 184, the need for rent-geared-to-income housing, the need for more public and social housing, and the need for labour communities to welcome tenant groups and perspectives into their spaces and provide them with resources. We need tenant-workers to challenge their labour communities and get them active in this fight. It is only through our collective efforts, in all areas of social life that we as tenant-workers occupy, that we will be able to achieve a better life for ourselves. Without the development of a mass struggle, we remain condemned to the whims of private landlords. Thank you, friends and comrades, for giving me the space to speak today.