This week the city approved a subsidy exceeding 1 million dollars to a real estate corporation for a market housing development. The project, located in Vancouver’s Kitsilano neighborhood, will not be affordable but has been put forward by city council under the false guise that an unregulated rental market is inherently affordable.

The new housing development was approved under the city’s Rental 100 program, formerly called the STIR program. The five story mixed-use building in Kitsilano will offer 83 units of market rental housing, located at 3002-3036 West Broadway. Following the STIR model, the Rental 100 program offers the developer subsidies in return for the construction of rental housing, with no upper limit on rents.

Over the past decade, the Canadian economy has become increasingly dependent upon exploited temporary foreign workers, in large part through the Canadian government’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP), an arm of the government’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program. A new book, titled Tomorrow We’re All Going to the Harvest: Temporary Foreign Worker Programs and Neoliberal Political Economy, explores with scholarly attention and detail many of the problems inherent in this program.

Written by Leigh Binford, professor of Sociology at the City University of New York, this timely book weaves together compelling evidence from the past ten years to show how the SAWP scheme has created an economy based on oppression — providing Canadian employers with a steady stream of cheap labourers who are themselves silenced by the constant possibility of capricious deportation.

In addition to being denied labour and political rights, temporary workers are forced to endure unsafe conditions. Binford points out that SAWP participants “are sometimes poorly housed, frequently overworked, occasionally maltreated, exposed to dangerous chemicals without adequate training and/or protective gear, socially excluded from active participation in community life, and told to “aguantar” (endure) by the very officials charged with defending their rights.”

Several non-profit organizations across Vancouver have received eviction notices this month. Evictions include COPE in Chinatown, VIVO Media Arts, Spartacus Books in Strathcona and the Junction in Gastown. The high-profile evictions point to the deteriorating security of tenure for renters in Vancouver, including non-profits and cultural organizations renting in commercial spaces.

This month’s evictions come as part of a long trajectory of art and social spaces evicted in the city, particularly for organizations with roots in low-income areas facing rapid gentrification. Spartacus Books, based in the DTES area for 40 years, was pushed out from its previous location across from Victory Square due to “staggeringly high rent.” Spartacus was only one of a number of groups pushed out and evicted from the one-block radius of the Woodward’s mega-project, including W2, Red Gate, Dynamo and “151 E Hastings.”