People living homeless protest CBRM council decision on affordable housing

On the day she went to Cape Breton Regional Municipality city hall to protest in favour of housing for the homeless, Charlene Marie Johnson woke up with frost on her body.

For the last year, the 46-year-old has been living in a small tent in Sydney, N.S., with her husband and while she has a lot of blankets, she can't always keep the cold out.

"It's kind of hard, but I'm Mi'kmaw," she said. "I'm able to live outside and I'm able to make a fire all by myself."

Johnson was among dozens of people with precarious housing who attended an emergency meeting of CBRM council on Friday, where councillors were scheduled to try to find a way to keep $5 million in federal funding for affordable housing.

Council kicked over a hornet's nest earlier in the week when they rejected a 20-unit housing proposal submitted by New Dawn Enterprises and the Ally Centre of Cape Breton.

It was one of four applications that CBRM received under the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation's Rapid Housing Initiative and it was also the only one that met all the qualifications.

Johnson said council should have accepted the proposal and got busy building homes for people who are living on the street.

"The Ally Centre should get the funding they need to help us homeless people," she said. "They're trying their best to help out the homeless."

"Me and my husband, we've been looking for an apartment, but everything is full."

At the emergency meeting, which was hastily called after a public outcry over the earlier decision to reject the proposal, councillors voted to send all four proposals to the CMHC to get help vetting them.

Council unanimously backed the move, saying the CMHC rules had been too rigid — the funding was announced in November and the deadline to apply is March 15 — and they had only been provided some flexibility after risking the loss of the $5 million altogether.

While that provides a ray of hope that one or more of the proposals may be accepted, the decision upset the only proponents who had qualified for the funding and angered Nova Scotia's acting minister of municipal affairs.

New Dawn CEO Erika Shea and Ally Centre executive director Christine Porter called on the mayor and council to resign.

After the emergency meeting, Shea said the whole process made no sense.