Question Period Note: ELIMINATING CHRONIC HOMELESSNESS

What is the Government of Canada doing to eliminate chronic homelessness?

• Everyone in Canada deserves a safe and affordable place to call home. One of the most important roles of our government is to support Canadians experiencing or at-risk of homelessness.

• Homelessness is a complex issue. Budget 2022 announced an additional $562 million for Reaching Home. Those funds allow for a doubling of the program's annual funding until 2025-26. This funding is aimed at providing longer term certainty for the community organizations doing vitally important work across the country to prevent and address homelessness.

• Budget 2022 also announced $18 million over three years to conduct action research on additional measures that could support communities in eliminating chronic homelessness.

• Eliminating chronic homelessness will take time, resources, and coordination. Our Government is committed to continuing to work with partners and communities, including Indigenous partners and housing providers, to achieve this important objective.

Speech from the Throne, Mandate letter and Budget 2022
On November 23, 2021, the Speech from the Throne reiterated the Government’s commitment to “working with its partners” to end chronic homelessness in Canada.

The Minister of Housing and Diversity and Inclusion’s mandate letter, published on December 16, 2021, included a plan to “Proceed with the appointment of a new Federal Housing Advocate to monitor progress in meeting the goals of the National Housing Strategy, including ending chronic homelessness, and move forward with our plan to invest in Reaching Home: Canada’s Homelessness Strategy, to support communities across the country.”

On April 7, 2022, the Budget announced:

• an additional $562.2 million over two years through Reaching Home beginning in 2024-25 to maintain the funding levels from 2023-24. This funding is aimed at providing longer term certainty for the community organizations doing vitally important work across the country and to ensure they have the support they need to continue to prevent and address homelessness, as well as continue to make progress toward the Government’s goal of ending chronic homelessness;

• $18.1 million over three years, beginning in 2022-23, to conduct research about what further measures are required to support communities in eliminating chronic homelessness. The aim of action research is to identify and document persistent barriers to preventing and reduce chronic homelessness experienced by communities and to test potential approaches to address persistent barriers and document successes and challenges. Projects will focus on three priority areas of study: collaboration, system alignment and data. Flexibility will remain for each individual community to identify specific priority areas, including placing a focus on specific populations through the co-development process; and

• committed to eliminating chronic homelessness in Canada by 2030.

Key Announcements on the National Housing Strategy
As part of the National Housing Strategy (NHS), in 2018 the Government of Canada announced an investment of $2.2 billion over 10 years to prevent and reduce homelessness, and support a broader NHS objective of reducing chronic homelessness by 50% by 2027-28. On April 1, 2019, the Government of Canada launched Reaching Home: Canada’s Homelessness Strategy.

Reaching Home is a community-based program that provides funding directly to specific communities through the Designated Communities, Indigenous Homelessness, Rural and Remote Homelessness and Territorial Homelessness streams. It also makes funding available to Indigenous partners to support distinctions-based approaches to homelessness services. The Community Capacity and Innovation stream supports communities with the implementation of Coordinated Access and supports innovation in the sector.

As part of Canada's COVID-19 Economic Response Plan, the Government announced a total of $394.2 million in additional funding for Reaching Home in 2020-21, to address the needs of those experiencing homelessness in the face of the COVID-19 crisis by supporting measures such as temporary accommodations and isolation centres to reduce shelter overcrowding.

On September 23, 2020, the Speech from the Throne committed to building on the work of the NHS by focusing on “entirely eliminating chronic homelessness in Canada.”

On November 30, 2020, the Government announced an additional $299.4 million through the Fall Economic Statement for Reaching Home in 2021-22. In addition to extending emergency measures, this investment will support communities in shifting focus towards housing stability.

On April 19, 2021, the Budget announced an additional $567 million over two years through Reaching Home, beginning in 2022-23 to maintain the 2021-22 funding levels announced in the Fall Economic Statement in response to the pressures of COVID-19. This funding is currently being disbursed to Reaching Home communities. Budget 2021 reiterated the Government's commitment to eliminate chronic homelessness.

Key Statistics on Chronic Homelessness in Canada
According to Infrastructure Canada, the number of shelter users decreased from 143,000 in 2017 to 106,000 in 2020. The drop from 2019 to 2020 (from 118,759 to 106,000) is largely attributable to the pandemic and the reduced shelter capacity due to social distancing. However, prior to the pandemic, from 2017 to 2019, there was also a downward trend in shelter use. Despite a decrease in shelter users, occupancy rates have increased over the study period due to longer shelter stays. Shelter occupancy approached 85% in 2020.

Other key facts include:
• In 2020, among 106,000 emergency shelters users, about 32,000 experienced chronic homelessness;

• Results from the 2018 Coordinated Point-in-Time Count show that in the 61 participating communities, 60% of the people that were homeless on the night of the count had been homeless for six or more months during the previous year.

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