Options for Homes celebrates official opening of 341 affordable housing unit project

March 23rd, 2015 by Iler Campbell

Options for Homes celebrated the official opening of their Cranbrook Village condo project on Friday. The building, just north of Bathurst St. and Lawrence Ave. is comprised of 341 units which thanks to Option’s innovative financing model were sold for significantly below market value.

City councillor, Ana Bailão and Member of Parliment, Adam Vaughan were present to celebrate. The City of Toronto contributed funds to make 94 of the building’s units even more affordable. Vaughan lamented on Twitter that the federal government was not a funder of the project and had actually made money from it.

Options’ innovative model provides loans to condo purchasers to boost their down payment by 13% or more of the purchase price. The loan is repayable as an equivalent percentage of the sale price when the condo is sold. Those proceeds then go towards the construction of more affordable housing.

We’ve had the great fortune to be partners with Options from their very beginning.

Read more about Options in our profile of them. Check out what Anna Bailão had to say about the event here and catch up on Adam Vaughan’s tweets (including a picture of Shelina and Brian) here.

The Pope on co-ops

March 4th, 2015 by Iler Campbell

In a speech last Saturday, Pope Francis praised co-operative organizations, saying that “the foundation of new cooperative enterprises, along with the further development of those already in existence” should be a “first place” priority of society. Co-operatives, he said,  should “continue to be the motor for lifting up and developing the weakest part of our local communities and of civil society”. In co-operatives, he said, “capital does not rule over people, but people over capital.”

He called for “creative imagination to find forms, methods, attitudes and tools to combat the throwaway culture cultivated by the powers that support the economic and financial policies of the globalised world.”

Hear, hear!

Ending discrimination against First Nations children in Canada

February 26th, 2015 by Priya Sarin

In February 2007, a human rights complaint was filed by the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society (the “Caring Society”) and the Assembly of First Nations (“AFN”) against the Government of Canada, alleging that the government discriminated against First Nations children by providing inequitable child welfare services to children living on-reserve as compared to children living off-reserve (First Nations Child).

In particular, the First Nations Child complaint alleges that the federal government’s program underfunds children living on-reserve, such that children do not receive needed care and support that would permit them to continue to live at home and, as a result, First Nations children are disproportionately removed from their families in comparison to non‑First Nations children. The impact of the child welfare system on First Nations communities has been compared to the legacy created by the residential school system.

Read more on rabble.ca

Charity law blocks progress on issues facing Canadians

February 17th, 2015 by Iler Campbell

Saturday’s edition of the Toronto Star features an op-ed penned by Brian and Garfield Mahood. In it they write of Canadian charities under attack for turning a spotlight onto the Harper government’s policies or for advocating for public policy change. CRA audits of charitable status, they write, are creating a culture of self-censorship that is inhibiting many NGOs from working effectively.

Read the full article here

‘Whose body is this?’: The right to die with dignity revisited

January 29th, 2015 by Lauren Blumas

Over the holiday season a story out of Winnipeg grabbed the attention of the Canadian public. The story went something like this: an elderly woman fell in the home she shared with her middle‑aged son. She was injured in the fall and left unable to get up under her own power. Her son, apparently carrying out the wishes of his mother, did not call for emergency assistance and did not move her to bed. Instead, the 62‑year-old covered his mother with a blanket where she lay and provided her with food and water until she passed away several weeks later.

Read more on rabble.ca

Landlord and Tenant Board panel aims to define legal relationships between indirect housing providers, landlords and tenants

January 27th, 2015 by Celia Chandler

Thousands of Ontarians live in affordable housing units provided to them by non-profit organizations but which are owned by private sector landlords. The nature of the legal relationship between these three parties is unsettled: a few cases have addressed it but there has been no consistency in the decisions.  In large measure, the parties have worked around the lack of clarity in the law without the assistance of the Landlord and Tenant Board (the LTB).  The nature of the relationship, however, has come to a head in a couple of cases now before the LTB, both involving Toronto based providers of supportive housing to tenants with mental health disabilities.

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