A few months ago, I had an experience that is probably more and more common across Toronto. I encountered a homeless person. The reader may scoff and think, well, no kidding. Sure. But the point here isn’t that there was a homeless person in Toronto. It was that there was a homeless person in a part of Toronto where you wouldn’t expect. My encounter was entirely civil and a bit awkward for us both. The person did not, to me, seem to be someone who’d been without shelter for a long time. If I hadn’t found him sleeping in the ATM area of a bank branch — the outer doors to the public remain unlocked, and the inner doors into the branch are locked after business hours — I wouldn’t have been able to tell or even guess that the man was homeless. I startled him when I stepped inside, planning to deposit a cheque I’d forgotten to deal with earlier. He startled me, too. I asked him whether he needed help, and he politely declined, mumbling something about a weird few days. He lay back down and turned over. I left him be.
I’ve been thinking about that encounter lately. Again, the issue isn’t that homelessness is new in Toronto. It’s that it’s now in places it typically hadn’t been. Sometimes you see it in little encounters like mine. Other times you only glimpse it through the trees when you notice that a tent has popped up in an isolated area that didn’t have any tents before. I jotted down a note in my columnist’s notebook in the spring to take some time to follow up on this and try to get an updated picture of the homeless situation in Toronto and also Ontario. I knew it was going to take me a while to do that, as I had some family obligations to juggle, and I wanted to really set aside some time and do it right. But the response I received to the first few quick preliminary emails I fired off to experts was pretty blunt: it’s a problem that is much worse than it was even a few years ago, it’s a problem that’s getting worse fast, and the composition of the homeless community is changing. It ain’t the same problem it was five years ago. It will be worse and more complicated five years from now, if we don’t turn things around.
Last week, The Trilliumreported that it had obtained internal Ontario government documents that contained a pretty shocking figure. The Trillium says that the government has reached an estimate for the homeless population of Ontario, pegging it at a remarkable 234,000. I confess I don’t think I’d ever thought about what I’d expected that number to be, but its being a bit shy of a quarter million left me stunned.
The Trillium report breaks down what numbers it can; it also acknowledges that it can’t provide all the answers, as the document it obtained doesn’t contain a full breakdown of the numbers. I would guess that the 234,000 includes people who meet the definition of homeless but aren’t living on the streets or in shelters. In my earlier research on homelessness, as obsolete and out of date as it may be becoming as this crisis evolves, one thing that I was told repeatedly by the experts is that visible homeless — the tents under the Gardiner, the tents in isolated industrial areas, the park encampments, the people sleeping on street corners and in bank lobbies — is the tip of the iceberg. Many homeless people are able to couch surf with friends and family or have some cash on hand that lets them ride it out in motels for a time. The ones who burn through their financial resources before stabilizing their life circumstances and the ones with no family and friends to fall back on are the ones who end up on the streets or in shelters. That’s a lot of people — and a growing volume of people — but still a minority of the total population.
There are some specific issues that have driven that number up in recent years. Toronto has received many migrants and refugees, in line with geopolitical chaos all over the world. The cost-of-living crisis at home, inflation, and higher interest rates have all been rocket fuel for homelessness. Addiction and mental-health issues are always major problems, and the apparent post-COVID (maybe mid-COVID?) collapse in state capacity of Canadian governments right across the board can’t be helping much. We are in a deep hole here, and all the evidence — my random anecdotal encounters and observations and what data we have —points to its getting worse. There is no real indication that that is going to stop any time soon.
There are a few words in that last graph that I chose very carefully: “what data we have.” It seems to me that a major issue for us right now is that we don’t really have a good sense of what the problem looks like. We know what parts of it look like. It looks like people sleeping in bank lobbies and tents in parks. But I’m not really sure that anyone in Ontario or Toronto or Canada or what-have-you really has a full grasp of what we’re up against. The Trillium’s article does credible work starting to draw some boundaries around the size of the problem, but there’s still more that we don’t know than we do.
It’s an old and all-too-easy lament in my line of work, mind you. Canada is awful at collecting and organizing data, and it’s even worse at making what data we have freely accessible in convenient forms. I’ve written about that before, and I have no doubt that I will again. This is a great example of what that problem looks like in the real world. We all know we have a major challenge here. But beyond that, no one seems to have many ideas.
More to come on this. Stay tuned.
Donate