Our big task is to build up human rights in Canada

Maytree President Elizabeth McIsaac spoke to Victor Beausoleil of Social Economy Through Social Inclusion (SETSI) about Maytree’s work.

Victor asked Elizabeth about her inspiration, challenges, and priorities, her attitude toward the future of human rights, and what success looks like for herself and for Maytree.

“I get inspired by the opportunity to transform systems so that we centre the dignity of people,” she said.

Elizabeth described two challenges in Maytree’s work. The first is cultivating relationships with partners in the community to find solutions that work. The second is building a culture of human rights. “We talk about it; we have it notionally; we have a human rights code; we have these pieces in place. But how do we live it?”

It is in line with a human rights approach to prioritize people whose rights are being violated. Those are the people in greatest need. But the challenge is engaging them in a meaningful, rather than tokenistic or transactional, way.

Elizabeth sees herself as an optimist. Though she understands progress to be slow and incremental, she spots signs of hope, as in the National Housing Strategy Act. “That was a breakthrough.”

The vision of success is simple: “Everyone in Canada is able to live a life with dignity; they’re out of poverty.”

Visit SETSI’s YouTube channel to see their full slate of interviews with Canadian community leaders.

Transcript

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Victor Beausoleil: Welcome, welcome, welcome our remarkable, brilliant colleague Elizabeth. We so appreciate your consistent leadership and solidarity. As always, at SETSI, we begin all things by giving thanks to the original stewards of the various lands we’re on. We give thanks to all our ancestors, all those who toiled without compassion or compensation. We give thanks to all our elders and community stalwarts whose shoulders we stand on, as we build, share, and learn together for our collective liberation and sovereignty. Elizabeth, can you please introduce yourself to our listeners and viewers and share a bit about your remarkable work?

Elizabeth McIsaac: Sure. Thank you. I just want to express my gratitude for the invitation for this conversation and the opportunity to tell a bit of the story of what Maytree is doing. We are an organization that is focused on advancing human rights — and in particular social and economic rights — as they relate to poverty. We’re focused on eliminating poverty and we’re doing it through what we believe is another approach, which is focusing on realizing and fulfilling people’s social and economic rights so that they don’t experience poverty.

Victor Beausoleil: Your work is truly inspiring and phenomenal, and I love the fact that whenever I go to your website there’s so much work happening. There’s so much to unpack on the site. Once again, I just applaud you and your incredible team.

I know it’s never one person that does everything, but it is usually one person that holds the vision and pulls people together. So once again, I just applaud your leadership and your consistency. My next question, what’s inspiring you right now? What has you curious, or what’s keeping you up at night?

What’s inspiring you right now?

Elizabeth McIsaac: With everyone, lots is keeping us up at night. But to your point, it is many people. It is a full team that is doing this work. We’re also inspired by our board, so it’s an all-hands together creating this vision. I think for me, the inspiration comes from two places as we work on human rights. In the first instance, we have systems in place that are creating poverty, and these systems are public policies and regulations and laws that are in place that are systematically putting people in a position of vulnerability.

So I get inspired by the opportunity to transform what happens when we’re able to change policies, change regulations, change laws so that we centre people, that we centre the dignity of people to live in place with a life of dignity as it relates to their housing, their ability to have food on the table, their ability to have adequate income coming into the family so that they can make things work for their family, for their children, and so forth.

Changing those systems and the ability to do that, and I believe we can. I think that if we’re smart about our work, if we provide the right evidence, if we work in constructive relationships with governments, with communities, with all of those players together, that we can make those changes that will transform those systems. I get inspired by transformation of those systems, but I’m really grounded. My inspiration is grounded in the people. So it’s the people that we work with. It’s the people whose experience is driving that change.

Recently, we’ve been supporting a group of young leaders in Malvern through Malvern Family Resource Centre, and they’re running a leadership program that’s bringing 10 young women together to engage in those systems that are challenging them. I think they’re focusing on housing as it relates to their community there, but also schools, schools that may not be including everyone in the community or ensuring that everyone gets the same opportunity to complete and to succeed.

Anyway, there’s this group of young women who are emerging leaders and they’ve got a lot of challenges in front of them that they’re working through. So their life, their work, their dedication. Because this isn’t a program where you drop in and say, “Hey, I’m here. Let’s see what’s going on.” They’re committing six months to really learn about how policy works, learn about how to meet with their government representatives, figure out how to get their message crystal clear so that it lands so that they can be effective in negotiating the changes that they want to see.

Last week we had an event in downtown Toronto and it was geared for our Maytree Policy School. It was an alumni event. So to get people who are off to work and so forth, we scheduled it at this ungodly hour, it’s at eight in the morning, and we had a great speaker, a woman whose name is Sarada Peri. She was one of Obama’s speech writers. So she came up from the States to talk about how you craft your message. Two of these young women made it from Malvern downtown to get in on that learning. That inspires me because they are going to make change happen because they’re focused, dedicated, and smart. So that’s where I get inspiration because that’s where the change is going to come.

Victor Beausoleil: It’s such a small world and that’s such a remarkable story of leadership and civic engagements. I grew up in Malvern. If I show my Malvern soccer picture, you’d cry if you knew the amount of young men that are no longer here that were in that soccer picture. One of my first jobs over 20 years ago was at Malvern Family Resource Centre. Funny enough. The other thing that’s such a small world is Sarada Peri; one of my colleagues from the TMU just connected us to interview her this week. I’m connected to her as well because she’s doing a fellowship at The Dais right now.

Elizabeth McIsaac: That’s what you’re great at, Victor, you’re connecting all of us. It’s so good.

Victor Beausoleil: Relational infrastructure is how ecosystems thrive. You have rivers, you have lakes, you have streams, and sometimes we use these terms, ecological terms, and sectors not realizing how important relational infrastructure is. It’s a framework for how we can really create reciprocity and create a system where resources are abundant, and we don’t have a scarcity mindset. Because there’s great power in relationships and stewarding them and cultivating them. Once again, I applaud that work in Malvern. That is unbelievable. Congratulations.

My next question, what challenges and barriers do you face in your work and how are you and your colleagues working to overcome some of these challenges and barriers?

What challenges and barriers do you face in your work?

Elizabeth McIsaac: That’s a great question and it builds on what you were just saying, Victor. It’s about relationships. How do we cultivate relationships? How do we build them? How do we make them strong and authentic? We are all very busy. We started this conversation earlier and talked about busyness that we’re all involved in, but we have to make time for these relationships. So as an organization, we do the work of human rights. We’ve got a team of 12 of us here working on this, but we also make grants to organizations. So it’s important that we find ways to make those relationships with our partners in community real so that they can feed us, that they can help us understand better, that we’re able to have a relationship of that reciprocity that you just talked about, that ability to understand the power relationship but also get past that so that we can be partners in finding solutions that work.

So building those relationships with people is key.

There are times that we’re funding. Sometimes we’re just sitting at a table as part of a network that’s trying to make a change happen. If it’s around the right to housing, we have networks at the federal level, we have them at the city level, and we sit shoulder to shoulder with people who are living with housing precarity so that we can begin to really share knowledge, expertise, and figure out how we can work better together and understand how to make the change happen. I think that’s part of it and making sure that we do that. To that end, within our very small organization, I have a director of community investment and engagement. Because you can’t have one without the other.

So I think language is important. We make sure if that’s how it’s crafted, then that’s what we’re going to do and that’s where we can measure results against and that’s really important. The other, I would say, big challenge that we have faced since we started down this path of a human rights approach to poverty almost 10 years ago, and I think this will resonate with you, is that we don’t live in a society where there’s a culture of human rights. We talk about it, we have it notionally, we have a human rights code, we have these pieces in place. But how do we live it? How much of it is part of our culture?

I think that there’s enough happening in our world right now that we can look around and say that it’s not shaping the relationships between people, between communities in how our systems work, and how our expectations and accountability of government works. It’s not functioning as a culture of human rights. So a big part of our task and the challenge ahead is to build that up so that it’s meaningful.

A couple of years ago — COVID’s funny, I think it must be four or five years ago now because that gap in our timeline is always significant — we did some thinking and we did a paper on what a human rights city would look like. I remember taking that bunch of ideas out to communities to ask, does this resonate? Does it make sense?

I recall sharply, and it has stayed with me, somebody from the community saying, “It’s all well and good. Those are good ideas. But in my community, people don’t see human rights in their offering. They see human rights as something that maybe white people get in courts. It’s not something that they experience in their day-to-day.”

So that’s a huge challenge to me. I think it’s a challenge that we have to hold really close. How do we begin to change that? How do we begin to work with people to articulate what human rights in their community needs to look like and what do they want to shape it as? Because that’s where it begins. Otherwise, it can remain just rhetoric and we have to make it lived.

Victor Beausoleil: I couldn’t agree more. My first meeting this morning… April 7th is the 30th anniversary of the Rwanda genocide. A million people in 100 days murdered. Those are staggering numbers, and you think about just the implications that the whole world just watched and waited. It shows the importance of the work, the policy work that you’re doing, and the fact that there’s intergenerational collaboration in it, that there’s young people actually recognizing, you know what, there is a link, there is an intersectionality between human rights, between poverty, between housing, between all these different lenses and major pervasive social issues that are generational issues.

We have to find ways and means to not stand by idly. Everyone has to find that voice, even though sometimes it’s challenging. Once again, I applaud your candour, your transparency, and a deep introspection of your team to just pull together those ideas and be able to share them and drive public policy in a way that centres humanity. A lot of folks can’t do that. They centre systems and structures or institutions and not so much humanity. So once again, I applaud your leadership.

My next question, do you have a set of key priorities right now in your work that you’d like to share with us?

What are your key priorities?

Elizabeth McIsaac: It’s exactly what you just said. It’s balancing those two priorities because it is systems, it is that stuff. But a human rights approach says you have to prioritize those whose rights are being violated. Those who are in greatest need is the priority.

So how do we do that in a way that is meaningful, that’s not transactional, that’s not tokenistic, like, “Here, we need you for an hour to do a consultation and see you later.” How do we really begin to build human-centred but engage that people are part of the decisions that impact their lives? Because that’s the test for me. Are you able to really engage in that decision-making process in a meaningful way?

So there’s lots of words in there. Meaningful. How do you define that? I think that’s the work that’s in front of us is really challenging ourselves to say, “What does meaningful look like?” Working with people with lived experience of poverty, of housing precarity, of homelessness to say, “What does it mean for you? What does it need to look like?” So that’s a big priority for us.

In the last year, as our team, we’ve done a fair amount of, to use your word, introspection. How are our processes doing that right down to how do we do our budget? How are we shaping this so that we really can say we’re changing the way that we work to make this a priority? That’s hard work. That’s not in a day. That’s not just because I flip a switch and now we’re doing it.

It means changing habits. It means changing how we look at things. It means changing how we do a balance sheet. All of that begins to shift. While we do that, we continue to stay focused on the others.

So getting in place the right policies, getting in place the right mechanisms that will hold government to account where people can take their claims, where we as a community can hold the city, for example, to account on what’s happening around housing; the federal government to account on what’s happening around housing. I default to housing a fair bit because we’ve done a lot of work in that space.

But it’s more than just housing, it’s also food security, it’s income security, it’s other elements. But housing, as we all know, is so fundamental. It’s fundamental to our mental health. It’s fundamental to our family security. It’s fundamental to our physical health, our ability to get work, our ability to be creative, our ability to be civically engaged.

It enables everything if we have a place that we can call home. So making sure that there’s accountability to make sure that happens is critical. So it’s some of the stuff of building mechanisms and processes, but that’s important too, as long as we’re centring and privileging the lived experience of people.

Victor Beausoleil: I couldn’t agree more. I had an hour conversation with one of our elders in the community, John Stapleton, and he’s been doing poverty reduction work forever. One of the things that stood out in the conversation because he went back to housing a few times. Housing’s one of the only things that you can’t really negotiate.

When it comes to food security, you can maybe spend a little bit less on the grocery bill. The rent is the rent. I mean, so when we look at housing, we have an eviction crisis. Once again, I don’t fault you at all for going to housing consistently. It’s such an important piece of everyone’s mental wellbeing. Just a roof over your head, somewhere to call home. That’s essential. If you don’t have housing, where do you put the fridge? Definitely, it’s essential. Once again, I just appreciate your leadership in that space.

My next question is how do you feel about the future of human rights in the context of Canada or international? Are you optimistic? Are you pessimistic? Are you hopeful?

How do you feel about the future of human rights?

Elizabeth McIsaac: I am the glass half full. I’m an optimist. I think that we need to be optimists to keep getting up and working every day. Because it’s heavy work, it’s heavy lifting. We are pushing uphill. I think in order to do that with strength, you need to be an optimist, and so I am.

But it’s not naive optimism. I think we’re seeing changes. I don’t think they happen overnight. I remember when I started in this role, my chairman said to me, “This is a long haul. It’s not three years and it’s not five years. This is a long haul to make the changes we want to see.”

I really focus that to know that we have to just keep getting up and pushing uphill each day to get there. But I see signs. When we started, we didn’t even have a national housing strategy. By 2019, we had a National Housing Strategy Act that recognized housing as a human right, as per our commitments under international covenants. That was a breakthrough.

Has the federal government in Canada lived up to that recognition? Not even close yet. But you start with recognition. Now the hard work of implementation is underway and then it’s the hard work of accountability that then follows from that. But people are referencing the right to housing. Once the federal government did that, the City of Toronto put it in its HousingTO 2020-2030 Action Plan, recognizing the right to housing as per the international covenant and the National Housing Strategy Act.

I hear people talk about the right to housing at the faculty of architecture. I hear them talking about it. Even the real estate investment trusts talk about the right to housing. We don’t all agree on what it means or what it looks like yet. That’s the work. So I’m pragmatic. There’s work ahead of us.

I’m an optimist, but I’m also pragmatic. So we got to do the work and we got to challenge ourselves. Do we have the right understanding? Are we telling the story the right way? Are we being true to the principles and approaches? Is it getting us closer to where we need to be?

Are we continuing to centre those in greatest need, those who have lived experience? I think that is the work that we have going forward. The City of Toronto has now centred human rights in its poverty reduction strategy. That’s another step forward. What’s it going to look like? I don’t know. But we’ll work on it and we’ll roll up our sleeves and hopefully work together to see how we can make that as impactful and effective as possible.

So it’s about sharing that vision and then building the way to do the work. It’s the way to do the work that is… Well, it’s work. That’s why we call it work.

Victor Beausoleil: Absolutely. It’s daunting work. But I think it’s rewarding. Because systemic transformation sometimes is too incremental. But the fact remains, we’re moving in the right direction around a lot of these issues. We stand on the shoulders of so many that have consistently moved it up just a bit, a bit. This is for so many issues from child care to housing to… I was talking to one of my colleagues that I won’t mention his name. Actually, I will, Jean-Marc PFC. He was talking about 40 years around child care. He’s like, “We’ve been at this for 40 years. Could you imagine if 10 years ago we gave up?” Same thing my colleague Peter Frampton says.

I’m saying there are folks that have been working on certain social issues for decades. David LePage, Buy Social Canada. That little policy from going from cheapest price to best value, that’s a huge difference in terms of how all three levels of government procure services and how anchor institutions, hospitals, and universities procure services. Just one line, cheapest price, it’s the best value. That’s years-

Elizabeth McIsaac: It’s the same with the Canada Child Benefit. Maytree funded the Caledon Institute for 25 years, and the big result was the Canada Child Benefit that put money in the pockets of families across the country to help them get food on the table, pay rent, and lift children out of poverty. It’s not complete, not every child is out of poverty, but what a difference that makes. That’s the power of the policy lever where we’re able to make that change. But, to your point, it doesn’t happen overnight. It’s years in the making, but we stay focused and we keep pushing at it.

Victor Beausoleil: Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. Thank you.

My second last question, what is your ultimate goal and what does success look like and feel like to you and your colleagues?

What does success look like for your work?

Elizabeth McIsaac: It’s simple. Everyone in Canada is able to live a life with dignity, that they’re out of poverty. We believe we can get there if we really focus on the systems and processes to ensure the realization of everyone’s social and economic rights, all of their human rights.

Victor Beausoleil: That’s absolutely beautiful. Thank you so much.

My last question, do you have any closing thoughts or calls to action for our listeners and our viewers?

Elizabeth McIsaac: Be ready. A lot of the work that we do is about getting ready. Windows of opportunity open.

With the work you’re doing, Victor, the right relationships, the alliances, the partnerships, the facts, the evidence, the ideas. When you’re ready with all of that and there’s a window of opportunity, then you can make stuff happen. So getting ready and doing all of this work is critical.

Victor Beausoleil: I couldn’t agree more. I grew up in Scarborough and our slang was born ready. Whenever anyone would say, “Are you ready?” We’d say, “Born ready.” That was a colloquium from Scarborough from the early ’90s. So I agree with you completely. We need to be ready and we need to stay born ready.

Elizabeth, I so appreciate your leadership, tenacity, and your consistency. This is the way you operate in solidarity. Since the day we’ve met, you’ve been someone that we can call on. But more importantly, you’re at this work day in and day out. There’s that macro patience around this work, but that micro urgency, day in, day out, and I applaud your entire governance structure, your board, your team, your volunteers, and all the work that you’re doing on behalf of so many.

We so appreciate you. Thank you for your time today. As always, at SETSI, we close the way we began by giving thanks to the original stewards of the various lands we’re on. We give thanks to our ancestors, all those who toiled without compassion or compensation. We give thanks to all our elders and community stalwarts whose shoulders we stand on as we build, share, and learn together for our collective liberation sovereignty. Thank you, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth McIsaac: Thank you, Victor.