Housing, Homelessness Intertwine with Climate, Housing Rights Network Says

As the federal election ramps up, the National Right to Housing Network (NHRN) is urging candidates from all parties to recognize that the housing and homelessness crisis and the climate emergency are deeply interconnected, and that approaching both as “stark violations” of human rights will be critical to solving them.

“More than 1.7 million people across Canada are struggling to afford a roof over their heads and thousands more are just one paycheque away from losing their homes,” NHRN Communications Lead Jessica Tan writes in a recent post.

In such a wealthy country, she added, this is “a moral and social failure.” 

Founded in the wake of Canada’s 2019 National Housing Strategy Act—the country’s first-ever right-to-housing legislation—the NRHN is a nation-wide community of policy experts. Members work alongside people who’ve experienced housing precarity and homelessness to realize the right to housing for all, and to eliminate homelessness in Canada.

Since signing the National Housing Strategy Act, which explicitly affirms the right to safe, affordable, and adequate housing as “a fundamental human right affirmed in international law,” the federal government has been “slow to implement a rights-based approach in housing policy and has instead continued to support the status-quo market solutions that do little to help those in greatest housing need,” Tan writes. Her post cites a December 2024 report by the Parliamentary Budget Office, as well as a January 2025 report [pdf] in which the Association of Municipalities of Ontario (AMO) warns that homelessness in Ontario “could more than triple by 2035, leaving up to 294,266 people without stable housing.”

The climate crisis is making, and will make, things much worse.

“The reality is that our housing stock is not prepared for the climate disruptions already under way,” Tan writes. Homeless people, she notes, are especially vulnerable to extreme heat and flooding, to the point that they are “at an increased danger of losing their lives.”

Such realities should be brought to the attention of campaigning politicians who might otherwise frame both crises as primarily economic in nature. NRHN argues that they’re actually “stark violations” of internationally recognized rights, Tan says.

The Human Right to Housing

In a recent conversation with The Energy Mix, NRHN Executive Director Michèle Biss spoke about the critical intersection between climate, housing, and human rights in Canada and her organization’s  hope that the next government will fully realize the rights-based mandate of the National Housing Strategy Act.

That the feds have been slow to deliver on the Actowes, in part, to Canada’s decision, when crafting its Charter of Rights and Freedoms, to part ways with many international law authorities who put civic and political rights (such as the right to vote and freedom of assembly) on “equal footing” with economic, social, and cultural rights—such as the right to housing, Biss said.

Rather than consider all human rights as “interconnected” and “indivisible,” Canada chose to “stratify, really, in a way that’s quite absurd, civil and political rights over economic and social rights,” she explained.

That stratification has led to a “real learning curve” for Canadians, most of whom grasp and would defend the right to vote, for example, but struggle with the idea of a “right” to housing, Biss added.

But “housing is a fundamental human right, as the Canadian government itself formally and fully recognized in 2019,” she said. “It all comes down to the intrinsic idea that the Government of Canada is responsible for fulfilling the human rights of those who are most in need.”

Slow, Perceptible Progress

The first difference in a rights-based approach to housing would be to automatically prioritize safety, affordability, and adequacy in the building of any home, Biss said. That line of thought stands in contrast to practices that treat housing as a commodity—a market-based rather than people-based approach that “has led to those luxury towers that just sit there, that don’t support communities, that almost nobody can afford.”

While progress on human rights-based housing in Canada has been slow, Biss credits the former government of Justin Trudeau for some “small wins that will eventually make really significant waves.”

Included in these “wins,” Biss notes, are the Canadian Renters Bill of Rights framework and a C$250-million commitment from the feds to help municipalities with encampments, both launched last September

What really excites Biss about the second measure is that the funding is conditional on cities and towns having community action plans on encampments that “reflected a human rights approach.”

Another bright spot: the federal Housing Minister Nathaniel Erskine Smith has been “referring more and more to housing as a human right.”

Safe, Affordable, Adequate… and Climate Resilient

Biss added that the crises in housing, homelessness, and climate are “so deeply interconnected.”

“The heatwaves, the floods, the wildfires—they’re forcing more and more people into homelessness and housing instability, and the housing systems that exist already need a lot of work.”

That means “climate resiliency needs to be built into more housing policy, not as an afterthought but as a core part of housing policy, because the climate crisis is here.”

To prevent “renovictions,” NRHN is also calling for climate resiliency and retrofit programs that include and protect lower income households, especially renters.