A small group of people being evicted from their accommodations to make way for fly-in, fly-out workers in Labrador West gathered outside the Labrador City town hall yesterday to bring attention to their plight.
Area NDP MHA Jordan Brown says the housing crunch is at a crisis point in the region, with few, if any solutions available.
Brown says Lab City lost 106 units and Wabush lost 86 between 2016 and 2021, all of which were gobbled up to house rotational workers.
“We didn’t have 106 house fires,” Brown says of the units in Labrador City that are “no longer available for families, or residents. These are now for fly-in, fly-out contractors.”
Those units account for nine per cent of the region’s housing stock, he said.
Brown says both municipalities have put out requests for proposals offering up land for housing development, but with no takers.
He believes the province has a role to play to help developers with the high cost of construction in the region by helping to service the land and keep costs down.
