Can the Carney government end homelessness? (Not on its own)

详细摘要

Homelessness is hardly a new problem. But in the wake of the pandemic, homelessness has come to the fore as a visible and salient concern in communities across Canada.

Mark Carney is not the first prime minister to embrace an ambitious commitment about homelessness. He is not even the first prime minister to do so in the last 10 years.

In 2017, Justin Trudeau's government released its national housing strategy. As part of a broader plan for housing, the Trudeau government set a goal of reducing "chronic" homelessness by half over the subsequent decade — at the time, an estimated 25,000 people were said to be chronically homeless.

Three years later, in a speech from the throne, the Trudeau government went further, stating that it was now focused on "entirely eliminating chronic homelessness in Canada."

However worthy the goal, and whatever efforts the Trudeau government put toward achieving that goal, it was not met. A progress report released by the federal government last December acknowledged that there had been a 34 per cent increase in chronic homelessness among shelter users between 2016 and 2024.

Carney has committed himself to a more ambitious target — putting Canada on a path to end all homelessness within 10 years.

"There's no simple answer. This is a hard problem," Carney said in Winnipeg last week. "And hard problems demand the humility to learn from previous well-intentioned efforts that have fallen short. And it demands the resolve to build on what's succeeded."

Homelessness is hardly a new problem, but it was in the wake of the pandemic that homelessness came to the fore as a visible and salient concern in communities across Canada — exemplified by the issue of encampments in public places.

A national homelessness enumeration in 2025 found that more than 65,000 people were homeless on a given night in Canada, a 59 per cent increase over five years. The share of unhoused people living in unsheltered locations, including encampments, had also increased from 23 per cent to 27 per cent.

The underlying factors that might have contributed to the current situation are numerous and thorny: a longstanding lack of government funding…

文章开头，摘自CBC News。如需阅读全文，请前往媒体网站。