Tents pitched along East Hastings Street in Vancouver, on Aug. 17.Rafal Gerszak/The Globe and Mail
Ottawa is unlikely to meet its target on cutting chronic homelessness because the federal bodies involved in the strategy are not working together or checking if they are helping more homeless people find homes, the Auditor-General warned on Tuesday.
A report to Parliament by Auditor-General Karen Hogan found the federal government is pumping billions of dollars into housing initiatives but does not know if the cash has led to the number of homeless Canadians going down, or up.
Ms. Hogan warned that unless government bodies start co-ordinating their efforts, they are unlikely to meet federal targets to cut the number of chronically homeless – that is, people sleeping on the street for at least a year, or repeatedly – in half by 2027-2028.
Ottawa’s homelessness strategy aims to help not just the chronically homeless but also those with no permanent address, who sleep at shelters or couch surf, or sleep outdoors.
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The Auditor-General’s warning came as organizations working with people sleeping outdoors or living in overcrowded and precarious conditions said the homelessness problem has reached crisis levels in Canada’s major cities, including Vancouver, Ottawa and Toronto.
“Canada is facing a significant wave of new homelessness, driven by the ongoing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis driving up prices everywhere,” the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness said in a statement.
Infrastructure Canada – the federal department taking the lead on Canada’s homelessness strategy, which is known as Reaching Home – has spent around $1.36-billion to prevent and reduce homelessness since 2019.
But it did not know whether homelessness or chronic homelessness has increased or decreased since then as a result of the money, the Auditor-General’s report found.
The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation – the federal government’s housing agency, which takes the lead on the national housing strategy – has spent around $4.5-billion and committed another $9-billion but did not know who was benefiting from its work.
“This is because the corporation did not measure the changes in housing outcomes for priority vulnerable groups, including people experiencing homelessness,” the report said.
It found initiatives to combat chronic homelessness were “not integrated” and the two lead organizations “were not working in a co-ordinated way.”
“In our view, without better alignment of their efforts, Infrastructure Canada and the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation are unlikely to achieve the federal National Housing Strategy target of reducing chronic homelessness by 50 per cent by the 2027-28 fiscal year,” it concluded.
It said that though cutting chronic homelessness was a “federally established target, there was minimal federal accountability for its achievement.”
The federal government launched its Reaching Home homelessness strategy in 2019, setting national policy objectives and goals.
Housing Minister Ahmed Hussen said at a press conference that he wants to see better data collection to measure the impact of federal programs.
“Though we have made progress, we must continue to be unrelenting in our efforts to end chronic homelessness in Canada once and for all and that means continuing to speed up data collection analysis, reporting and improving accountability,” he said.
The Auditor-General’s report remarked that rental housing approved under the National Housing Co-Investment Fund was in fact often unaffordable for low-income households.
Sarah Button, executive director of Centretown Citizens Ottawa Corporation, a community non-profit organization providing low-cost housing in Canada’s capital, including for people who have been homeless, said more and more people were struggling to pay their rent.
David Howard, co-founder and chief executive of Homes for Heroes, which builds villages of “tiny homes” for homeless veterans, said shelters in major cities across Canada are full every night, and there is a lack of affordable housing.
He said finding homes for people living on the streets saves the public purse huge sums in the long term, including in hospital bills.
Syed Hussan, executive director of the Migrant Workers Alliance for Change, said people from migrant communities were particularly vulnerable to ending up on the street.
“We have seen 15 to 16 people living in one-bed apartments,” he said.