The numbers are heartbreaking and the estimated prices to unravel the homelessness disaster on this province are staggering.
The report by the Affiliation of Ontario Municipalities (AMO) is titled Municipalities Underneath Stress: The Human and Monetary Value of Ontario’s Homelessness Disaster. It exhibits that 81,515 Ontarians skilled recognized homelessness in 2024. That’s a 25 per cent leap since 2022. To make issues worse, most advocates and consultants agree that quantity is probably going greater.
The report additionally exhibits that if left unchecked, the unhoused inhabitants might greater than triple to over 294,000 folks by 2035 — practically the inhabitants of Windsor, Ont.
Waterloo Mayor, Dorothy McCabe was a visitor on The Mike Farwell Present and stated most of the points introduced up within the report are points they’re seeing on the bottom. The overwhelming sentiment is that the province has deserted its duty to cope with dependancy and homelessness, foisting the burden onto the municipal property taxpayer.
“Municipalities are doing what we can. The property tax system was never set up or designed to deal with a complex social issue like homelessness or the opioid crisis. We need provincial help,” she stated.
McCabe believes a provincial election is the right time to wave the flag of help for municipalities. She additionally added that stories like these are important within the struggle for higher governmental funding.
“That’s why a report like that is so important because data is data and facts are facts. So, we just have to keep putting that forward and telling the story and talking to our colleagues at the provincial and federal government to say, pay attention to this. This is a crisis, we need your support.”
A graph from the report displaying housing sorts throughout Canada.
Earlier this week, federal housing and infrastructure minister Nate Erskine-Smith was in Waterloo Area to announce federal transit funding. That announcement additionally got here with a plan to supply $5.4 million over two years to cowl working and capital prices on the newly renovated girls’s shelter on Frederick Avenue.
The funding is coming from the Unsheltered Homelessness and Encampment Initiative. McCabe says the funding is greater than welcome nevertheless it’s too dangerous it received’t get the increase homelessness initiatives in different provinces have benefited from.
“My understanding is that across the country, that initiative was matched in other provinces by provincial governments and it wasn’t matched here. That could be because we’re in the middle of a provincial campaign, I don’t know.”
Waterloo Metropolis Council received an opportunity to have a look at the report this week and did vote to endorse it, together with a number of different municipalities within the province.
