Halifax ranks worst in country for adequate housing for people of colour: StatsCan

New information from Statistics Canada places Halifax ahead of Vancouver, Ottawa and Toronto in the percentage of people of colour who can't afford housing that's in good repair or suitable for the size of their family.

Statistics Canada calls this "core housing need" and in the 2016 census, Fredericton and the Ontario cities of Toronto, Barrie and London were slightly ahead of Halifax. 

But for 2021, Halifax ranked first.  

This may be related not only to the cost of housing, but also to how recently some of the people arrived in Canada. 

"The profile of Halifax is not necessarily the same," said Mireille Vézina, an analyst with Statistics Canada.

She said Halifax has a bigger proportion of immigrants, and the analysis found that core housing need was higher among those who had recently arrived in the country. 

Pandemic relief effect

However, nationwide and in major cities including Halifax, Statistics Canada found the overall proportion of households with people of colour in core need has dropped. 

It went from 17.8 per cent in 2016, to 11.3 per cent in 2021. 

The federal agency's analysis suggested this is due to pandemic relief programs, which came in different forms stretching between March 2020 and mid-2022. 

"During the pandemic, there was an additional income support," Vézina said in an interview Tuesday. "That might help the population with lower incomes to decrease the share [of income] that was dedicated to the cost of housing."  

Statistics Canada found that West Asian, Korean and Arab Canadians were most likely to be in core housing need nationally. 

Changes over time

In Halifax, the Dalhousie Legal Aid Service began to collect demographic data from its clients in September.

Joanne Hussey, a community legal worker, says it's too early to draw any conclusions based on their data and clients are never required to answer questions about their background, but where possible, the clinic staff felt it was important to collect race-based data. 

"It's to be able to say these are the communities we are serving, and to be able to notice if there are changes over time," Hussey said. 

Hussey has looked at the conclusions from Statistics Canada and says they make sense with what the clinic is seeing. 

"We've seen a huge increase in the number of residential tenancies files. It's almost 100 per cent of our caseload at this point, which is a big shift," she said. 

She says clinic staff know anecdotally that many of their clients are immigrants or international students, who are struggling with housing. 

"Poverty and other forms of discrimination overlay each other, and so we know that when people don't have the same incomes, it's harder for them to find housing," she said.