The eviction of the likes of Maricarmen, an 87-year old women, retired, and requiring a wheelchair to move around, are sorrowfully common here in Canada.
Each year, roughly 40 000 people are evicted from their homes. Of these 40 000, people with self-identified disabilities are represented at twice the rate (28%) that they are in the total population (13%). Retired renters, who rely on an averaged fixed income of $2600, cannot realistically afford to pay the $1900 that the average one bedroom goes for in this country, and so increasingly rely on legacy contracts and subsidized housing to survive. But this leaves them susceptible to no-fault evictions, like “renovictions”, “demovictions”, the moving in of a landlord, and other non-payment related evictions, which account for 82% of all evictions.
With numbers like this, it isn’t hard to see that hundreds of Canadian Maricarmens are created every year. But Maricarmen only sparked this movement because it is just a particularly egregious case of social violence which is endured by working class at large, and the youth in particular.
And we see the conditions for such broad indignation here too. According to a Leger survey, half of Canadians are spending 50% or more of their income on housing, with this being the case for nearly two thirds of people 35 and younger. Half of those between the ages of 18-24 who were surveyed reported being in fear of eviction, and StatsCan reports a third of all evictions affecting those between the ages of 25 and 35.
The conditions that these figures represent make it clear that there is kindling enough here at home to allow a single spark to light a flame of indignation that will lead the Canadian working class and youth down the Spanish road.
