Claim Your Right to Housing!

Homelessness among women and gender-diverse people in Canada has been declared by the Federal Housing Advocate a national human rights crisis. Make history and contribute to Canada’s first-ever human rights-based review panel on Canada’s failure to eliminate homelessness for women and gender-diverse people.

Want to Participate in the Review Panel?

Let's make history!

The Review Panel on Canada’s Failure to Eliminate Homelessness Amongst Women and Gender-Diverse People plans to hold public hearings to gather oral and written testimony of housing-rights violations and solutions that could transform the system. The panel will then report back to the Minister of Housing with recommendations.

Download Toolkit:

We want to prepare ourselves and our communities to participate in this historic process, so we created this toolkit and site!

Our Goals:

Support lived experts and their allies to participate in the upcoming Review Panel
Provide practical tools and templates to enable Review Panel participation
Provide tools and diverse frameworks and mechanisms to enable community organizing on the right to housing
Democratize knowledge about the right to housing in Canada and how to claim it

Check out our Resources and FAQ pages to support you and/or your community’s effort to create submissions!

Become a Community Champion

Help make history. Collect testimony of housing rights violations in your community. Help someone claim their right to housing, chat with your peers, interview service providers and decision-makers.

Fill out this form, get involved and take action!

Someone from the Women’s National Housing and Homelessness Network or National Indigenous Women’s Housing Network will follow-up and give you the tools you need to claim the right to housing! Your support is crucial in this endeavor!

We can support your local efforts and stipends are available for community champions with lived expertise.

We Can Support With:

Support lived experts and their allies to participate in the upcoming Review Panel
Provide practical tools and templates to enable Review Panel participation
Provide tools and diverse frameworks and mechanisms to enable community organizing on the right to housing
Democratize knowledge about the right to housing in Canada and how to claim it

Reach out to us to find out more: [email protected]

Land Acknowledgement

We would like to acknowledge and recognize that Canada is a settler colonial state on Turtle Island, which for generations has been governed and inhabited by Indigenous Peoples practicing traditional ways of doing, knowing, and being. As recognized in Homeless on Homelands, a human rights claim submitted by the National Indigenous Women’s Housing Network: “At the core of the matter is dispossession from lands Indigenous women, girls, and gender-diverse people have called home since time immemorial. Colonial conceptualizations of land, ownership and housing as commodities that are bought, sold and are subject to financial speculation disrupt the relationship of mutuality and reciprocity that is inherent to Indigenous relationship with land. It commodifies land and positions housing development as a tool of extracting wealth and profits. Current housing crises and ongoing financialization of housing in Canada deeply relies on disruption and elimination of Indigenous ways of knowing and living.”

Read Our Human Rights Claims

We came together to utilize the new procedures under the National Housing Strategy Act to claim our right to housing and our right to substantive equality. Our Claims spotlight violations of the right to housing experienced by marginalized women and gender-diverse people across the country, calling for immediate action. We are here to claim a better future for ourselves, our children, our communities, and the planet. We will no longer accept the unacceptable.

We call on the Government of Canada to fully realize our human right to housing and be held accountable for the human rights violations being perpetrated against us.