Canada

The Face of Homelessness

The face of homelessness has been changing across Canada, where people without shelter have gravitated to the cities. Many of the native-born homeless are Aboriginals, indigenous people who have moved from reserves into cities to secure shelter and social services; they are overrepresented by a factor of ten in Canada's homeless population. The largest municipalities, Montreal, Vancouver, and Toronto, receive well over half of all immigrants. As a result, half of the urban population in the largest cities is foreignborn (Statistics Canada, 2001). In Toronto, the Mayor's Homelessness Action Task Force found that about 15 percent of people in the hostel system are immigrants or refugees (Golden et al., 1999, 19).

Most new arrivals to Canada who experience housing difficulties find support within their own ethnic affinity groups, rather than with drop-ins, hostels, and social housing organizations. The latter have been slowly adapting to the need for more culturally sensitive services. For those in need of social housing, the waiting lists are so long—often seven years or more for individuals and families—that many applicants either move to another jurisdiction or opt for illegal basement apartments or “couchsurfing.” As the demand for housing has increased with the rising tide of immigrants and urban dwellers, there has been a commensurate increase in the cost of rentals. Between 1995 and 2000 in Toronto, average wages rose by 9 percent while rents increased by 29 percent.

The idea of a richly diverse multicultural society holds out the promise of inclusion and equity, but the reality for many new arrivals is lack of respect, low wages, poor working conditions, and exclusion. The housing situation for households living marginally is characterized by a growing trend of evictions, landlord discrimination, overcrowding, and increasing evidence of an invisible homeless population that suffers from ill health, lack of access to services, and social isolation.

In Toronto, whose trends are representative of large Canadian cities, 60,000 households are on the waiting list for social housing, shelter use doubled during the 1990s, and each year more than 32,000 people resort to shelters. Most are single adults over 24, but 20 percent are young people, ages 15 to 24. The number of children in the hostel system more than tripled in the past decade, to a total of 6,000. Some are handed over to child welfare agencies by parents who cannot manage to keep the family housed together (City of Toronto, 2001). These numbers do not include all those who are doubled up, living on the edge of homelessness, or living in substandard units, or who refuse to patronize shelters because of health or safety concerns, even during the coldest weather (Golden et al., 1999).

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