Housing
Justice
Archive


Reading ListOral History Project
Toronto Disaster Relief Committee
1998 - 2012
City of Toronto Archives
The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty
1990 - 2020
Ontario Provincial Archives
Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU)
1998 - Present
VANDU Archive / SFU Special Collections
Toronto Homeless Memorial
2000 - Present    
City of Toronto Archives / Personal Collection / Rebecca Houston
Bob Rose’s Writing
[199- - 20--]
Bob Rose Personal Collection
Oral History Interview Transcripts
(in process)
2025 - Present
timothy martin


timothy martin, Postdoctoral Fellow, Simon Fraser University
timothy_martin [at] sfu [dot] ca

From the introduction to Cathy Crowe and Beric German: “Warriors from a different time.”

Welcome to the Housing Justice Oral History Project, I'm timothy martin. This episode opens with several cuts from this interview during what was an inspiring and eye-opening account from 2 of Canada's most notable leaders in the struggle for housing justice. This interview is titled Cathy Crowe and Beric German: “Warriors from a different time.”

Beric German:
In the 1930s—see we forget those things because, you know this is the good part of what we're doing—in the 1930s there, probably at least locally, there were very large gatherings of homeless people. In the park over here in Allan Gardens there were hundreds every night in those parts and during the day they’d go down and fight it out in City Hall—and fight it out.

Cathy Crowe:
…So there were many of those events but they had a few things in common, like they were always meant to be open and accessible for homeless people to be at. There was always visual components, something produced at the end. They were events that you wanted to be at.

Beric German:
We enter this forum, where aid is often restricted, and we break the ban. We had to fight for the idea that when we have events we have food because that food was rather key. When we broke the ban on food—when we went to Tent City we said ‘OK here we come, we're bringing food, we're bringing trailers, we're bringing in prefab housing, we're bringing in...’—Cathy was active with the toilets—and we would attempt to work with others to organize as much as we could to bring in things that people needed. We learned, and it was a good learning, to go out, to meet others and to be with them. We might disagree, that's fine, but we were with them.

Cathy Crowe:
Activism is really not encouraged. It's not taught, really, anywhere today. There's a lot of quiet. Housing First, when it entered Canada from the States, really flattened activism.

Beric German:
Housing First of course began to say—it started to use a kind of identity politics. It started to say ‘these people are different than others.’ Things come in waves…they aren't just your decision.

Cathy Crowe:
—peaks and valleys—you used to always say that to me: ‘we're in a valley right now…we're in a low…

Beric German:
Yeah. And today we're in a low low low period... So, we come today—we're warriors from a different time, but younger people will come—because they have to. There's nowhere to go.

Cathy Crowe is a pioneer of street nursing, a longtime housing justice activist, author, filmmaker, and educator. Beric German was an HIV/AIDS outreach worker at Street Health Toronto. He comes from the prairies, and outreach worker and activist Bob Rose once described Beric German to me as one of the great orators of the housing justice movement, and I quote, “with the voice of a Dust Bowl preacher.” Having watched speeches of his at the City of Toronto Archives, I can confirm this to be true.

Cathy and Beric co-founded the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee, or TDRC, which was one of Canada's most significant housing justice organizing efforts, active from 1998 to 2012. We were generously offered space at Street Health to conduct this interview.

Beric German:
It’s not for us this is for them, those people…

What Cathy and Beric are so keenly aware of are the ideological avenues that precipitate an us versus a them, when it comes to anti-poverty organizing, Housing First policy, and other such features in the landscape of neoliberal times.

In this interview, we discuss some of the history of the TDRC, the national disaster declaration of 1998, Tent City, Housing First, and the efforts to pass on their rich repertoire to the next generation in the struggle toward housing for all. When I first called Beric German to organize this interview, he ended the phone call by reciting the words of Antonio Gramsci: “the old world has died, the new world is struggling to be born, and we live in a time of monsters.”