Canada is a rich country– with homeless people dying on the streets

In the late 1990s the impact of neoliberal policies encroached on Canada’s proud history of social programmes, ranging from universal health care to pensions to unemployment insurance.

Canada once had a unique national housing programme. It was initiated after protests and direct-action occupations of empty buildings by World War II veterans, who created an outcry that housing was in short supply when they returned home from Europe.

The housing programme was so successful that it produced 20,000 new units of affordable housing annually, including both affordable homes to purchase and rent. Public housing, operated by local governments and not-for-profit co-operatives, were key components of this too.

Unfortunately, the Canadian government’s cancellation of its social housing programme in 1993, combined with federal and provincial funding cuts to other social programmes–all components of new austerity measures–resulted in worsening poverty, hunger and homelessness.

Within the next five years emergency shelter crowding, disease outbreaks, growing homeless encampments, and clusters of freezing deaths became the norm.

In 1998, frontline workers, impacted by what they were witnessing, formed an organisation called the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee and issued a national state of emergency declaration; it called for federal relief of a man-made (literally) disaster.

Toronto is Canada’s largest city and was widely considered the epicentre of the homelessness crisis, but the advocates knew the problem was national in scope.

The committee included a lawyer, progressive housing developer, professor, street nurse (myself) and outreach workers. The group utilised the concept of a natural disaster where people, made homeless by a flood or earthquake, would receive government aid, both for their immediate needs but also with rehousing efforts.

The concept of homelessness as a man-made disaster was supported by big city governments across the country and both the resulting media and persistent protests ultimately resulted in a new federal programme for homelessness. However, a serious and intentional omission of this is that it did not fund affordable housing construction.

Where homelessness was once primarily a big city problem, mass homelessness today is evident in every Canadian city, town and rural community. Emergency shelters are full, disease outbreaks are routine and include tuberculosis, strep A, Norwalk virus and of course in recent years COVID.

In 2023, Canada no longer sees periodic clusters of homeless deaths but constant deaths. In Toronto, a monthly homeless memorial has taken place for over twenty years. Where previously there was one or two names added to the memorial per month, it is now common for between 12 and 16 to be added.

The median age of death of a homeless person is 55 for a male and 42 for a female, essentially three decades earlier than a Canadian who can afford to live in a house. Homeless deaths are usually violent; worsening mental health and dangerous consumption of opiates have added to the death toll.

By necessity, encampments grew during the global pandemic due to increased economic evictions and the fear of viral transmission in crowded, congregate living shelters. Toronto experienced over 300 COVID outbreaks in its shelters with just under 3,000 people infected.

Essentially, people unhoused in Canada have become our internally displaced persons – refugees within their own country. This was most evident in some of the large Toronto park encampments during the pandemic, as outlined in the recently published anthology Displacement City. Fighting for Health and Homes in a Pandemic.

In addition, global refugees are now – marking a moral lowpoint – reported to be sleeping on the street, literally, as the local government holds them hostage, announcing refugees would be redirected from city shelters to inadequate federal programmes, in a bid to seek federal funding to cover their shelter costs.

While the City of Toronto did attempt several innovations to respond to these issues during the pandemic, such as utilising 29 hotels as shelters and creating a medical recovery isolation site for unhoused people with COVID, they generally continued a long pattern of denying unhoused people.

City officials refused, as they still do, to implement the most basic public health measures (like those seen at a refugee settlement) to encampments: access to water, hygiene amenities such as toilets and showers, nutritional food and support for self-governance and participation in their future.

Instead, showing outright contempt for human rights, including of course health care, they harassed and violently evicted encampment residents without offering them housing.

In the years prior to the pandemic, advocates, many of whom are frontline workers, tried to reinvigorate the concept that homelessness is an emergency requiring government interventions. Their efforts included petitions, deputations to government bodies, rallies, articles in the major newspapers and never-ending media interviews.

Many consider this decades-long non-response by governments as social murder, a phrase used by Friedrich Engels in his 1845 work ‘The Condition of the Working Class in England.’ It describes how those who socially and politically control society relegate great numbers of people, such that they inevitably meet a too early and unnatural death.

There was arguably reason for hope in January 2023. Toronto’s Board of Health recommended:

“Declare (homelessness) a public health crisis in the City of Toronto based on systemic failure of all three levels of government to provide adequate 24-hour, drop-in and respite indoor spaces, and call for the immediate provision of safe, accessible 24-hour respite spaces that are accessible through walk-in access.”

The effort, however, was defeated at Toronto City Council in the last days of John Tory’s reign as mayor. Everyone assumes he ‘whipped’ the vote to reject the declaration.

It is notable that three months after the mayor’s resignation, the City Council appeared free of that and voted almost unanimously to declare homelessness an emergency. Toronto has now joined other Canadian cities, issuing urgent calls to receive help for their respective homeless emergencies.

Will this make a difference? It will depend on the outcome of Toronto’s nearing mayoral election and how politically savvy municipal politicians can be. The emergency declaration is a tool that should allow them to leverage funding for emergency aid – more shelters, outreach, public health supports for encampments, innovations to leverage fast housing.

Will they also declare the lack of housing a public health emergency and know how to create political action to convince the federal government to reinvest in social housing? Probably not, which is why grassroots organisations will have to reenergise and mobilise.