Binding Rights: Contractual Federalism and the Right to Housing in Canada

Canada’s housing crisis continues to deepen, exacerbated by constitutional fragmentation and intergovernmental reluctance to implement human rights-based housing policy. While the federal National Housing Strategy Act recognizes housing as a human right, its application is limited and its legal force is limited to the federal level, leaving provinces and municipalities unbound. This article argues that contract law – particularly conditional funding agreements between the federal government and subnational actors – can serve as a pragmatic and legally coherent mechanism to bind municipalities to housing obligations, including the recognition of housing as a human right. Drawing on the Canada Health Act as a functional precedent and supported by constitutional jurisprudence, this paper demonstrates how the federal government can use contracts as justice-oriented tools to implement the right to housing. Contracts, though not a constitutional panacea, offer a legal and institutional bridge between aspirational rights and material obligations in a complex federal system.