A man stays warm sitting over a grate on Toronto’s King Street West that releases warm steam from below on March 3, 2016.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Chad Bouthillier is no stranger to couch surfing, homeless shelters, transitional housing and addiction issues — but until now, the rest of the country has been largely in the dark about the depth of homelessness in Canada.
A new federal government report is shedding more light on the problem in 32 Canadian cities, exposing a need for a targeted approach to help vulnerable populations like veterans, indigenous people, and recent immigrants.
Last year's federally organized "point-in-time" homeless count found 5,954 people living in shelters, on the street or in transitional facilities, says the report released Thursday.
Indigenous people, long over-represented among the homeless, were nine times more likely to be homeless than non-indigenous Canadians, the report found. Veterans comprised about five per cent, twice their proportion of the general population.
The count also found entire families of homeless — mostly single parents with children — and people aged 16 to almost 80. Recent immigrants and refugees accounted for four per cent of those counted, with women and girls in that category more than twice as likely than non-immigrants to cite domestic abuse as a cause of their homelessness.
While addiction and substance abuse was often cited as a cause for those under 65, financial problems, such as being unable to pay the rent, was a prominent cause among seniors, the report found.
"Homelessness does not discriminate against age, race, anything like that," said Bouthillier, 40. "Nobody chooses to be homeless, but your actions bring you there. Either mental health, addiction — anything."
There were also a higher than expected number of "chronic" homeless who have been homeless for more than six months, many of whom don't go to shelters and may be harder to reach through traditional support systems.
Then there's the so-called "hidden" homeless — people who don't typically make use of available shelters or social services.
Those who are "couch surfing" — staying temporarily with friends, family or acquaintances — accounted for between 1.1 per cent and almost 50 per cent of the homelessness found in some of the cities involved in the count.
"That number never comes out and it's a lot," said Bouthillier. "I can remember coming into a house where people use (drugs), and there were 20, 30 people there and you know none of them have a place to stay.
"That's just one little house in a large community where there are many houses like that."
Combined with shelter usage figures and data from cities not part of the point-in-time count, such as Toronto and Vancouver, the report suggests that what is happening in big cities is being largely repeated on the streets of smaller communities as well.
Future counts — the next one is scheduled for 2018 — will provide insight into changes in the population, or the impact of new policies, said Patrick Hunter, the Employment and Social Development policy analyst who crunched the numbers.
The federal government will use the numbers as part of its effort to craft a national anti-poverty strategy.
Cities and provinces are moving forward with their own anti-poverty plans. In Ottawa, talks are underway to help the city's homeless veterans.
Mike Coe, a volunteer with the Alliance to End Homelessness Ottawa, said the plan will look to help those who served in the military, the RCMP and the Canadian Rangers, a subset of the Canadian Armed Forces that patrols the North.
Solving homelessness — among veterans in particular — is going to take more than a municipal plan.
"It's got to be from the bottom to the top ... coming down from the federal government to provincial governments to local governments and everyone working together," said Coe, a navy veteran.
"You can't just have one solution. There has got to be several."