Human Rights is Like a Prism: My first month interning with a housing advocacy group during a housing crisis

After my first year of law school at McGill, I am often asked what kind of law I am interested in studying. Until now, I have always given the same response—with a wink and a nudge—that I am interested in criminal defense, however, I feel like I am being pulled into housing law due to the incredible need right now. When the Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism gently guided me towards an internship with the National Right to Housing Network (NRHN), I admittedly didn’t know anything about the team or their work.

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My name is Jay. I’m from Fredericton, off the Wolastoq watershed on the east coast. I (barely) survived my first year of law school at McGill. And I’m a carceral abolitionist, which means I don’t believe in police or prisons as a solution to public safety.

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It’s through my earlier studies on public safety policy and volunteer work with the Coalition to Defund the Police that I became determined to learn more about why Canadian criminal justice frameworks exist in their current states and where non-punitive approaches towards public safety might be more effective. So, I felt a bit hesitant at first to accept an internship that I saw as outside my scope, but I ultimately recognized the importance of the role.

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The dynamo organization of four at the NRHN have a massive mandate based around Canada’s commitment to the National Housing Strategy Act (2019), which legally recognized the human right to housing in the country. But what does the right to housing mean? Although there are international frameworks that define it as the “right to live somewhere in security, peace and dignity”, the act is lacking mechanisms for measurement and accountability. So, our team works to act as the gel that brings all the moving pieces together, while also playing a role in holding everyone accountable. Crucially, informed through rights holders, those with lived experiences, and with recognition of many intersections of normalized systemic oppression.

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After three weeks with NRHN I finally had that “Aha!” moment. How could I have been so daft when it was right in front of me? Criminal justice and housing rights are not two separate fields, rather they overlap with each other on the greater nexus of human rights. I’ve protested police brutality against unhoused people in Montréal, I’ve researched statistics on police ticketing and detainment of unhoused folks for states-of-being, and I’ve witnessed police involvement in illegal evictions of rooming houses in marginalized parts of the city—how could it not have been obvious from the beginning?

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So, my “Aha! moment” takes the form of a reflection on intersectionality and interdisciplinarity in social movements, particularly on the nexus of human rights:

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