The Great White North’s Soaring Homeless Crisis
London, Ontario has become emblematic of Canada’s Homeless Crisis. But hope remains.
There’s a homeless crisis gripping North America. But while most have heard of the conditions in US cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and the state of California more generally, far fewer are aware of the homeless crisis in Canada, of which the town of London, Ontario is emblematic. While LA has surpassed New York City with 69,000 homeless people — one out of every 150 people in the city — the situation in Canada has been little less grim.
With a population that grew by 10 percent between 2016 and 2021 to blow past half a million, London is one of Canada’s fastest growing cities. The fastest growing segment of the population are the homeless, who doubled from about 1,000 to over 2,000 between 2020 and 2022. This is reflective of a wider trend in Canada. In 2005, the nationwide homeless population was estimated at 150,000 people. In 2009, it was 157,000. In 2021, the figure was 235,000 people, with some experts projecting the true number to be as much as three times more. By comparison, California, which has about the same number of people as the country of Canada, has a total estimated homeless population of 171,500. This increase hasn’t just been among those who find themselves temporarily without a place to stay or on a friend’s couch. According to the Canadian Human Rights Commission, homeless encampments are “visibly rising.” The problem of homelessness in Canada is beset by similar obstacles and political divisions to those in the US, and is likely to get worse before it gets better, but there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
As a Canadian and a Londoner, born and raised, I’ve seen this homeless crisis take shape before my eyes over the past decade. Growing up in the 1990s, the homeless were present, but nothing like the bleak landscape seen today. Back then the city had a vibrant downtown area which has since deteriorated into vacant stores, boarded-up shops, and homeless encampments. Carts filled with personal belongings like sleeping bags and clothing, once a rare sight in London, have become common all around the city. Late at night, residents hear the clanging of metal and glass as their recycling bins are rummaged through. Down the street from where I live, I recently found a small waterlogged box, its contents strewn across a patch of grass alongside trash. They were photos of someone’s life going all the way back to their childhood, left discarded.
It has become a part of the daily routine of Londoners to walk or drive past people on street corners, sidewalks, or alleys smoking crystal meth or shooting heroin. A local volunteer told the CBC in a 2020 report that “I have never seen anything [...] on the scale now of people living rough down at the river […] We never do a cleanup without finding needles. We always find them. It’s just about how many we find.” That same report details the riverbank of the Thames having “Submerged shopping carts, filthy mattresses, old blankets, ripped couch cushions, tin foil, credit cards, half filled bottles of pop and, hidden among the heaps of refuse on the water's edge, are bloodied tourniquets and used needles.” It’s an image less eye-popping than the concentrated tent cities of LA, but unlike sunny California, Canadian winters can spell death for those without shelter.
I saw this firsthand during a visit to a London hospital on a bitter winter night last year. Security was trying to wrangle a homeless man out of the lobby. The homeless man, who’d been sitting unobtrusively in a corner, protested that he would freeze to death outside. It was around -20 degrees Celsius (-4 Fahrenheit). To his credit, the guard spoke with the hospital staff, and several phone calls were made to local shelters. But they were all full. The man was eventually sent packing into the sub-zero night. It’s a sign of a broken system where individual kindness has no effective or actionable outlet. Semisonic once sang that “you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here”, but when there is no here or home, only the howling winters of the Great White North, something has to change. But that’s easier said than done.
The London municipal government’s 2018 “Counting Our Way Home” report identified the top challenges for securing permanent housing for the homeless. In addition to the usual suspects — poverty, addiction, and mental illness — are serious challenges with the housing market, whose values spiked in recent years in part due to an influx of foreign investors purchasing large amounts of Canadian real estate.
Provincial governments took steps during the pandemic by raising taxes on real estate speculation and international property sales, however these measures were blunted by the housing boom resulting from crashing interest rates. Eventually, in January 2023, the federal government was forced to enact a two-year moratorium on residential property purchases by non-Canadians. This, combined with post-pandemic rising interest rates, have begun to reverse the housing market woes. The overall demand for Canadian housing, however, specifically for government-subsidized affordable housing, far exceeds the current supply, an issue that can be traced back, in part, to a defunding of both mental health services and social housing projects in the 1980s.
Alongside these trends have been rent hikes and high inflation. This has given rise to the increased use of “renovictions” and “own-use evictions” — where a landlord evicts a tenant by claiming they’ll be performing major and needed renovations, or that they plan to take the unit back for a family member to move in. In times of soaring prices, these maneuvers have been used to get rid of existing tenants to re-lease units out to new renters at higher rates. Local governments have begun stiffening penalties on exploitative landlords in an attempt to curb this, though the effect it will have, if any, will take time to filter down.
The relationship between mental health and homelessness is, by this point, well-known. The Brain & Behavior Research Foundation found that “Affective disorders such as depression and bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, anxiety disorders and substance abuse disorders are among the most common types of mental illness in the homeless population.” Indeed, 25 to 50 percent of all homeless people in Canada suffer from mental illness. What’s worse, the relationship appears to be two-way. The Foundation reports that “homelessness can be a traumatic event that influences a person’s symptoms of mental illness. Having ever been homeless [...] can be related to higher levels of psychiatric distress, higher levels of alcohol use and lower levels of perceived recovery in people with previous mental illness.”
The negative feedback loops of homelessness were described to me by Rick, a formerly homeless Londoner who managed to get his life back on track. After a nasty divorce left him without a house and financially crippled, he took to drinking heavily and ended up wrecking his vehicle while both drunk and uninsured.
“I ended up in jail.” He told me. “When I got out I had no job, no money, no home, and no family. I was lost, depressed, and suicidal.”
Rick spent his days on the streets in search of cardboard, firewood, clothing — anything he could use to stave off the cold. He lived in a small makeshift camp in a nearby forest.
“I lost over one-hundred pounds and a lot of teeth.”
He attempted suicide twice. After the second, he was discovered and placed in a mental health facility. That was where things finally began to turn around.
“I was counseled and kept until I could get help from social services and let out on day passes to look for a job and find a place to live. A friend helped me find a job and soon after an apartment.”
I also spoke to Geoff Bardwell, a street outreach worker who has worked closely with the homeless. He echoed the need for more affordable housing and mental health support.
“All of these things cost money and we are in a time where the cost of living has skyrocketed,” He said. “At the same time, we have not seen the same increases to housing allowances for individuals on fixed incomes or for people making minimum wage. So, unsurprisingly, people simply can’t afford housing and are left with no options.”
The politics of the homeless crisis in Canada bear a depressing resemblance to those in the United States. Government mismanagement and partisanship have led to inefficient, ineffective, and largely inadequate actions by governments at every level, regardless of political party. The Liberal Party, Conservative Party, and New Democratic Party (NDP) can only point fingers at one another. The federal government blames the provincial and local governments, and vice versa. Partisan pundits and commentators, never letting a good crisis go to waste, use the opportunity to smear their rivals to score points. What it comes down to, as always, is that too little money is reaching the problem.
The perception many Americans have of Canada is of a streamlined, Nordic-style welfare state, where taxes are higher and services are utopic. The truth is rather less rosy. Many of Canada’s social policies, from healthcare to housing and beyond, have been chronically underfunded. Exploring the “why” behind that is a multi-volume book in itself. Suffice it to say that the people closest to the problem lack the resources to do what’s needed. The funding for mental health services is insufficient. The supply of affordable housing is too low, with years-long waiting lists. That said, there’s a reason the United States doesn’t see influxes of Canadians flooding into its northern border. Canada isn't about to adopt a US-style system. But while the cracks in our social infrastructure have spread too far to ignore, there is an unexpected ray of hope in, of all things, inflation.
The pandemic-induced inflation has, in Canada, opened a window of political convergence in the attitudes surrounding homelessness. The tone of the conversation feels different. As middle-class households feel the squeeze, they have come to empathize more with those in extreme poverty. Conservatives are less likely to attribute homelessness largely to personal failings. And the appetite for finally tackling this problem is growing. Money is starting to flow. Ambitious plans are beginning to take shape. We can all help this process along by shining a light. The more the world sees the Canadian homeless crisis, the more pressure it creates. Opportunities like this one don’t often fall into our laps. Failing to seize this moment is not an option.
See also: “Universal Basic Income: Everything You Need to Know”
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Now you're just ranting like an idiot.
There is nothing that can be done to solve the homeless crisis; it will only get worse. Alvin Toffler wrote in the 1970s of the phenomenon of *Future Shock*. People can not adapt to change as quickly as we think. Every incidence of change leaves a few people behind. That change can be cultural in the cases of immigrants, technological in the case of cell phones and such, or social as when norms change.
Consider a person who moves from a reserve to a city. Noise, the pace, strangers, and there is no escape. Just think of any holiday you've taken where what you expected was not what you got. Were you upset? Did you react rationally? When people are subject to future shock they seek out the familiar so we see groups naturally forming around race or preferred drug use. *Change causes mental imbalance* and the current rate of change dooms any attempt to alleviate the problem.