Bruce County will get more than $2.4 million in funding from higher levels of government this year to help tackle housing affordability and homelessness.
In a report to the council this week, Director of Human Services Ian Hanney mentioned that their yearly allocation from the Homelessness Prevention Program has stayed steady at $1.53 million.
Bruce County indicates that these funds are utilized for community outreach, emergency shelter solutions, housing assistance, supportive housing, and program management.
There was a slight bump in funding from the Canada Ontario Community Housing Investment (COCHI) Plan at over $715,000 and the Ontario Priority Housing Investment (OPHI) Plan at $207,000. However, Hanney pointed out that the combined support from those two sources is expected to decrease by about $69,000 next year.
The County plans to use these funds for repairs, housing support services and rent supplements.
Warden Luke Charbonneau expressed a desire for the province to create more funding opportunities aimed at addressing homelessness in rural Ontario.
“Those upper levels need to come forward with more resources, whatever those resources look like,” he said. “We don’t have a HART (Homelessness and Addiction Recovery Treatment) Hub in Bruce County; a lot of these things we don’t have and don’t seem to be slated to get. Our funding is frozen year-over-year and as we saw at a recent meeting, nights of shelter that we’ve been providing have seen massive increases in demand for the program without any related increase in support for us to provide the services that our population needs.”
Besides those funds, the Canada-Ontario Housing Benefit will offer $152,000 to assist around 20 households in securing stable, long-term housing.
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