They’re fed up and they won’t take it anymore! Tenants of Toronto’s social housing have launched a multimillion dollar class-action lawsuit against the city, the province, and the Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC). The causes cited are rampant maintenance problems and necessary repair work not being carried out in their homes. In case you think that this is just a case of repairs not being carried out quickly, Josephine Mackie has been waiting for 17 YEARS for someone to fix her collapsing ceiling. Can you imagine the level of frustration that you’d reach after making hundreds of calls in 17 years and yet still you are ignored? With no other recourse left to her she became the first litigant in the class-action suit.

There are 165,000 tenants participating in the action and they are being represented by lawyer Sarah Shartal. She is seeking a payment of $1,000 for every tenant who’s had to wait more than two weeks for basic repairs, and an order for the TCHC to bring all of its buildings up to a state of good repair within six months. These repairs are not cosmetic. We’re talking about rodents, cockroaches, bed bugs, mould, doors that don’t lock, leaky roofs – all necessities to ensure a decent quality of life. Clearly these buildings are not up to code and yet they are getting away with it. How is this happening? How can we say that we live in a civilized society and then condemn our citizens to live in sub-human conditions? A society is judged by how it treats its citizens. What does this say about us?