Federal housing advocate visits Calgary to discuss homelessness among women, gender-diverse people

The federal housing advocate has made her first visit to Calgary in her new role.

Marie‑Josée Houle was in the city Tuesday to speak with dozens of women and gender-diverse people about their experiences navigating housing precarity and homelessness — and to hear their recommended solutions to tackle the issue.

Houle said the discussion will provide input for upcoming human rights reviews on housing, which she's conducting alongside the National Housing Council.

"People often create policies and yet they're not the ones living in the situation, so they get it wrong a lot," Houle said.

"Who better to make recommendations than those with lived experience? Because they know exactly what's out there and why the systems have failed them — because it's not their individual failure."

The Women's Centre of Calgary hosted Houle for the discussion, in collaboration with the Women's National Housing & Homelessness Network and the National Indigenous Housing Network.

Houle said it's important for the Office of the Federal Housing Advocate to understand how different barriers affect different groups of people. That way, they can make policy recommendations to different levels of governments, she said.

"Women and gender-diverse folk — the rules, the policies affect them differently than they would men," Houle said. "We have to do that analysis in order to get it right."

'It's creating a safe space'

Hilary Chapple attended the event Tuesday. She's a founding member of the Women's National Housing & Homelessness Network.

It's been eight years since she was homeless for over two years, in both Calgary and Edmonton. She says meeting her now-wife, who eventually invited her to live with her, changed her life.

To this day, she says she still can't go back to the places she used to frequent.

"It was just horrific," Chapple said.

"The shelter … They didn't give you any food. You had to buy your own on very little money, on income supports — that's if you could get any. So there were days I went without food."

Chapple says she hopes sharing her story, in a room full of other people with similar experiences, is one step toward making change.

"It's creating a safe space. It means the world."

Lack of support for women experiencing homelessness

The discussion comes at a time when the number of women experiencing homelessness is increasing in Calgary, says Bo Masterson, executive director of the Women's Centre of Calgary.

According to a point-in-time count from the Calgary Homeless Foundation, there was a four per cent decrease in Calgarians experiencing homelessness between 2018 and 2022 — but the number of females experiencing homelessness grew from 27 per cent to 31 per cent in that time.

Masterson says there's a big lack of private support for women experiencing homelessness.

"We have [heard] stories of women who are staying in shelters who maintain poor personal hygiene for the purposes of safety for themselves. We have women who don't want to go to the shelter system because there's nothing specifically for women," Masterson said.

Masterson said shelters are working hard to create more resources, but the last couple of years have been difficult for women experiencing homelessness to navigate.

She says community members advocated for Houle to come to Calgary, and she's happy to see it come together.

"That really goes to show what kind of commitment we're seeing — from local to national level commitment — to this housing conversation around really bringing these voices of women and gender-diverse individuals to policy conversations on housing and homelessness, which has historically been lacking."