In central Canada this spring and summer, there has been a wave of direct actions on the housing front that has lead to the establishment of high profile political squats in Quebec City, Ottawa and Toronto. A dozen occupations were closed by the police in Montreal. This wave of direct actions was spearheaded, and to a large extent influenced, by the Overdale and Prefontaine squats in Montreal last year. It seems the struggle has reached a new level.

Since the federal government completely stopped funding the development of new social housing in 1992, it has been harder and harder to get funding to address the growing housing crisis. Since British Columbia's Premier Campbell cancelled all social housing projects, Quebec is the only province where new projects are being built. However, even there, the housing crisis is deepening every day with a housing shortage unheard of since the early 1980s.

We have reached a point where we've won (or lost) everything that was possible with the traditional means of protests. Protest as usual will probably not bring any new results any time soon on the housing front in Canada. In this context we can keep on losing or we can re-evaluate our tactics.

The squat as direct action is one way we can get out of the dead-end of protest as usual. Short of a massive rent strike, it is the most dramatic action a housing movement can take. While most of the time public opinion can just ignore the effect of the housing crisis, high profile political squats polarize it. On one hand, there are homeless and badly housed tenants; on the other, there are empty buildings. Squats bring all of this "in your face." People have to take a stand.

As a direct attack on private property, squats can also bring to the fore the fundamental contradiction of the housing question (right to housing versus property rights / human needs versus the market). Squats are also everything but symbolic and, contrary to most protests, they can't be ignored by the authorities. This adds to our side of the balance of forces.

People will not struggle forever without winning sometimes. Anyone who came to politics in the 1990s knows how depressing it can be when it looks like the "movement" keeps on losing and losing. One advantage of squats is that it can bring immediate, tangible results (i.e. you can actually "win" the building you're squatting). It is doubtful the authorities will always give in, but for the moment, it often works.

The down side of this tactic is that while we may win a building here and there, much more is needed. Because they are done in isolation, most squat actions in Canada have only put real pressure on municipal governments. The problem, as we know, is that this is not where the money is. Any solution to the housing crisis must involve huge amounts of money from both federal and provincial governments.

If today only municipal governments seem challenged by squat actions, it does not need to continue to be that way. In 1947, when Communist organizers launched a squatting movement in Montreal, they deliberately targeted the federal government by occupying Ministry of Defence facilities. That is one thing we could emulate. In most cities across Canada there is empty housing that belongs to the federal government. With a concerted effort, it may be possible to force the Chretien government to finally take notice of the housing crisis. But to do that, we need a real, coast-to-coast, direct action movement. This movement is yet to be built.