Communist Party calls to scrap Bill 6 as an attack on victims of the housing crisis
PV Ontario Bureau
Under the ruse of addressing homelessness and public safety, Ontario’s Conservative government has passed Bill 6, The Safer Municipalities Act which gives municipalities and police sweeping new authority to issue trespass notices and forcibly remove unhoused individuals from public spaces.
The legislation is, in fact, a direct attack on people experiencing homelessness and a dangerous expansion of the state’s power to criminalize poverty.
Stating that the government is targeting people who have already been abandoned by the system, the Communist Party of Canada (Ontario) strongly condemned the bill’s passage and called for its repeal.
“This legislation does not make anyone safer. It does not create housing, improve shelter conditions or provide necessary mental health support. What it does do is allow governments to conceal the visible consequences of capitalism under the pretense of public safety. It punishes the poor, while leaving the economic structures that produce homelessness completely untouched.
“This is what capitalism looks like: a system where housing is treated as a commodity, not a right; where developers and landlords profit while thousands live rough; where public land is sold off, social housing is neglected, and working-class people are squeezed out of their own communities. Bill 6 is a weapon in this system – used not to solve homelessness, but to hide it from sight.
“The homelessness crisis in Ontario is not accidental. It is the predictable result of decades of austerity, privatization and deregulation that have gutted public housing, slashed social services and handed our cities and towns over to corporate developers. The Ford government’s refusal to invest in affordable, publicly owned housing or universal mental healthcare is a political choice that protects profit over people.”
The Communist Party calls for a fundamentally different approach which recognizes housing as a human right and treats it as a public utility to be provided according to need.
Such an approach includes building at least 200,000 units of publicly owned, rent-geared-to-income social housing; implementing rent rollbacks to ensure no one has to pay more than 20 percent of income on housing; and expanding rent control to include all units. It also involves raising social assistance to livable levels and fully funding mental health and addiction services.
“Even with expanded rent control, housing costs are still a massive assault on working people’s living standards. That means we need to legislate. It means taking housing out of the hands of speculators and introducing a comprehensive provincial social housing program that treats housing as a public utility and delivers it according to need.”
The Party calls on the government to repeal Bill 6 immediately.
“Bill 6 is not about safety. It is about upholding a capitalist system that thrives on inequality and discards those it cannot exploit.
“We stand with the unhoused, with housing advocates and with all working-class people fighting for dignity, justice and a future where the right to housing is realized.”
[Photo: Toronto police break up housing encampment during pandemic]
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