Before wildfires ravaged the countryside this summer, throwing communication and transportation into chaos, Canada’s north was already a housing catastrophe.
And now it’s even worse.
“You have a housing landscape that hasn’t been sufficient and hasn’t met the needs of northerners for several decades,” explained Julia Christensen, At Home in the North Node Principal Investigator. “It’s in that context that we’re seeing the emerging challenges of climate change.”
As is well acknowledged, climate change is happening much more quickly in the north, so its impacts are being felt much more profoundly. In addition to wildfires, those climate challenges include melting permafrost, fluvial erosion (erosion of rivers) and flooding.
The melting permafrost affects both the existing housing stock, which is sinking into the ground, and the design requirements for new housing, Christensen said. It also affects utility lines that are servicing housing and roads, an important mode of transportation for the supply of materials and labour needed to build new housing.
“In the Inuvialuit Settlement region in the northern part of the Northwest Territories, there’s also been significant issues around coastal erosion, with houses literally falling into the ocean,” Christensen said. “That’s something that we’ve seen a lot of in Alaska. And we’re seeing that more in places like Tuktoyaktuk where housing has been removed to other sites in the community.”
Other impacts of climate change include flooding in communities along the Mackenzie River in the last several years, with housing being damaged in places like Fort Simpson and Good Hope.
Then there’s the absence of a private housing market in the vast majority of northern Canada, making the government the main landlord. In Nunavut or the Northwest Territories, for example, the main provider of housing is the territorial governments. That’s because most of the land is owned by the Crown and land cannot be bought and sold and banks won’t provide mortgages. Often people don’t have the personal credit required to apply for a mortgage, even if there was a housing market, Christensen said.
Private rental housing often doesn’t exist, even in the larger communities, such as Yellowknife. And rent is very expensive because of the high cost of building in the north.
“It’s out of reach for a lot of people, even those in very stable, well-paid jobs,” the Queen’s University professor said.
And if you’re fortunate enough to get subsidized government rental housing, you have to deal with a large bureaucracy with budget limitations in order to get repairs done.
“They’re ineligible to address their own repairs, their own renovations,” the At Home in the North PI said. “They have to wait for government staff to fix units which means that, oftentimes, people are living in housing conditions for long periods that are unhealthy.”
“There’s real frustration over just a lack of thinking outside the box. Thinking of different ways of involving the private sector. Housing really rests on government to be innovative and government, you know, isn’t always the most innovative. That means that it’s not always the best ideas that are coming to the table. So, you see some self-governments getting more and more into housing.”
That frustration was taken to a new level with the evacuation in response to this summer’s wildfires. At a time when government was needed most, many government employees in the N.W.T capital of Yellowknife were evacuated, leaving much of the populace to fend for themselves in a “survival of the fittest,” Christensen said.
North’s housing crisis set ablaze by wildfires
