Rich or poor, if you have Multiple Chemical Sensitivity, safe housing is precarious.
Let’s take a comparative look at two stories in the news last week involving safe housing for chemically sensitive people.
On Thursday, Canary Report contributor Linda Sepp (at left), a resident of Ontario, reported on an article in her local paper about her housing crisis. The reporter mangled the details of Linda’s situation, making her landlord look like a sympathetic figure and Linda a difficult and unreasonable tenant. In fact, Linda’s landlord has been anything but sympathetic and has not acted in good faith to understand and provide for her housing needs as someone disabled by severe Multiple Chemical Sensitivity. Further complicating things for Linda is the failure of the social safety net in helping relocate her to a safer home, despite MCS being fully recognized as a disability by the Canadian Human Rights Commission.
But the reporter missed all these details, resulting in a story that belittled Linda’s urgent housing needs and that will probably not garnish her any help at all. This outcome, of course, was not what Linda hoped for when she agreed to do the interview. Since her pleas for help to social services have fallen on deaf ears, she thought an article might spark some support or perhaps a lead to a safer home. No such luck.
Meanwhile, The Globe and Mail reported that in another part of Ontario, former Microsoft Canada president Frank Clegg fights to keep a gas power plant from being built in his community of Oakville. Why? Because Clegg’s wife has chemical sensitivities and they have built her a safe home in the town of Oakville after having abandoned their $29 million mansion because the new building materials made her ill.
For Mr. Clegg, it’s partly personal. His wife has chemical sensitivities, which was one reason why the couple sold Ballymena, their 26,000-square-foot waterfront mansion [plus a 10,000-square-foot coach house], for a reported $29-million, in 2005. Its carpets and finishes aggravated her condition. Now, “we have a regular house,” he said. “It’s 7,000 square feet, which is a normal home.”
Now compare and contrast the Clegg’s predicament with Linda’s situation. Linda is barely scraping by with the pittance given her through Canada’s social services, and she has no resources to find and move into safe housing. No one is coming forward to assist her. The Cleggs, on the other hand, have all the resources in the world to build themselves safe housing and foot the legal fees to fight the government on the power plant issue. But still, even though rich with resources, the Clegg’s safe home is threatened, since natural gas and it’s emissions are one of the biggest enemies of the chemically sensitive. It appears being rich offers no guaranteed protection for the chemically sensitive.
However, despite the glaring economic disparity between Linda and the Cleggs, they share a common denominator: Safe housing needed by chemically injured people. Linda’s story, which appeared in Greater Toronto Area papers a day earlier than the Clegg’s, shows a more common side to the struggles of people with Multiple Chemical Sensitivity in finding safe housing. Linda cannot even find a safe home in which to live, despite looking for over four years, and could end up out on the street very soon.
Perhaps the Cleggs could get together with others less fortunate in their province and work together to develop a housing project that would ensure there are safe places to live and recover for people with MCS, no matter their income bracket. Now that’s an idea worth fighting for.
Linda left a comment on the story about the Cleggs:
Mr Clegg, I understand why you don’t want a gas power plant near your wife, but at least she has a safe home to live in.
Many people with chemical sensitivities become homeless because there are no safe places to live where we can avoid exposure to the toxic chemicals in everyday use.
We become so disabled we cannot work and need a safe home to recover in, but are then denied adequate benefits to cover even the most basic of our chemical free health care needs.
Perhaps you could do something that would help all the people with chemical sensitivities in Ontario, many of us forced to exist on $1000 a month, with no help from OHIP [Ontario Health Insurance Plan], by starting a safe chemical-free housing project for those of us who are dying because there is no place for us to live.
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