Faculty Colloquium with Alexandra Flynn - Binding Rights: Contractual Federalism and the Right to Housing in Canada

Abstract

Canada’s housing crisis continues to deepen, exacerbated by constitutional fragmentation and intergovernmental reluctance to implement human rights-based housing policy. While the federal National Housing Strategy Act recognizes housing as a human right, its application is limited and its legal force is limited to the federal level, leaving provinces and municipalities unbound. This article argues that contract law—particularly conditional funding agreements between the federal government and subnational actors—can serve as a pragmatic and legally coherent mechanism to bind municipalities to housing obligations, including the recognition of housing as a human right. Drawing on the Canada Health Act as a functional precedent and supported by constitutional jurisprudence, this paper demonstrates how the federal government can use contracts as justice-oriented tools to implement the right to housing. Contracts, though not a constitutional panacea, offer a legal and institutional bridge between aspirational rights and material obligations in a complex federal system.

For Zoom details, email: eventassistant@allard.ubc.ca

Building Homes, Upholding Rights - A Human Rights Approach to Housing Agreements

Speaker 

Professor Alexandra Flynn’s teaching and research focus on municipal law and governance, administrative law, and property law. She has published numerous peer-reviewed papers, public reports, and edited books on Indigenous municipal legal relationships, housing and homelessness, and the constitutional status of cities. She is the Director of the Housing Research Collaborative, which comprises CMHC and SSHRC-funded projects focused on Canada’s housing crisis: the Housing Assessment Resource Tools project, which helps communities to measure and address their housing need; and the Balanced Supply of Housing Node, which brings together academic and non-profit community organizations to research responsive land use practices and the financialization of housing. She is also working on several projects related to precariously housed people in Canadian cities, including the governance of personal property of precariously housed people, and human rights and tent encampments.