Homelessness is vastly underestimated in Canada, experts say

Experts say the true extent of homelessness is grossly underestimated in official estimates, leading to chronic underfunding of programs designed to help homeless people.

The most recent national homeless statistics are from 2016 in a Report from the Canadian Observatory on Homelessnesswhich indicates that more than 250,000 people in Canada are homeless in any given year.

According to a 2018 federal government report, on any given night across the country, 25,000 to 30,000 people don’t have a place to call home.

But these numbers don’t tell the whole story, as not all homeless people are counted.

“Homelessness is an increasingly visible humanitarian crisis and easy solutions have challenged policy makers for decades,” Howard Koh, professor of public health practice at Harvard University, told CTVNews.ca in a interview. “We need more unified and urgent collaboration in response to this crisis, and academia must be included among all sectors (must) step up and do more.”

Koh was the 14th Assistant Secretary for Health in the US Department of Health and Human Services after being appointed by then US President Barack Obama. Through his health care research, he noticed that researchers were neglecting people experiencing homelessness.

“We know there are a lot of borderline people who are at risk (of becoming homeless), he said. “If we identify these people better, especially through academic work, then by partnering with community leaders and at the state and federal level, maybe we can stop the suffering from moving forward.”

BUILDING TRUST WITH COMMUNITIES

To ensure that funding is streamlined into programs that will actually help homeless people, researchers must conduct counts or surveys of this population, a feat made difficult by the transient nature of the homeless population.

Hidden roaming is one of the reasons why researchers have difficulty developing research methods that cover all homeless people in Canada. The term refers to people who may be couch surfing or sleeping in cars, abandoned buildings, and other precarious housing situations, but may not be visible on the street.

People experiencing homelessness also tend to find themselves in vulnerable positions. Many have mental illnesses, addiction issues and have suffered traumatic events due to homelessness, making it difficult for investigators and researchers to build relationships with them.

“Historically, research has certainly taken a lot of the populations they can study, especially those who experience disadvantages,” said John Ecker, director of research and evaluation at the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness. to CTVNews.ca in a phone interview. “People don’t always report back to the communities they’ve engaged with, nor do they involve people in some of these research practices. It takes time, you can’t just get started.”

Before any sort of survey research, Ecker says consultation with the community and relationship building must take place. Understanding who they are as a person rather than a number on a list has the potential to re-engage in research.

“It’s important to provide some form of honorarium to people as well, to respect a person’s time and thoughts,” Ecker said.

Currently, most government agencies rely on point-in-time counts (PiT) to capture a picture of the number of people experiencing homelessness. This method relies on communities and volunteers to count on a single night every two years the number of homeless people on the streets.

Proponents say that while the PiT count is useful, it’s only a snapshot of the actual number, particularly because it’s geographically sensitive and only happens one night.

“I think there’s some pretty valid criticism on the point count,” Ecker said. “I know there have been efforts to try to enumerate hidden homelessness as part of some of these PiT counts, but that’s incredibly difficult, and certainly not the number of people at risk of homelessness- shelter in the community.”

When fewer homeless people participate in PiT counts, the less accurate the counts. Ecker says building trust with communities is extremely important and can increase the chances of participation.

“It depends if your community has emergency shelter,” Ecker said. “We know that with rural, remote and northern communities, these are often not emergency shelters. So this (PiT account) will not be feasible in these small communities.

Without standardization of PiT counts, the results will present different snapshots and will not be comparable, resulting in some people never being counted, further adding to the undercount.

Some municipalities go further and develop questionnaires to ask homeless people about their history, background and needs. Ecker says the surveys allow decision-makers to specifically understand which programs are working and not working through the lived experiences of people struggling with homelessness.

“We also speak often with staff members who might be providing those supports, as well as leadership personnel who are kind of supervising to get that full, holistic understanding of a program or the current situation,” Ecker said. . “Other times you want to bring people with the same background together in a chat room where they can get together and then brainstorm ideas with each other.”

ANOTHER WAY TO ESTIMATE

In 2019, British Columbia changed the way the province counts homelessness. Rather than relying on point-in-time counts, British Columbia has begun using data from several provincial ministries, including the Ministry of Social Development and Poverty Reduction, BC Housing and the Ministry of Health. Key data from shelters, income support programs and the Medical Services Plan client registry helped the government identify communities with housing shortages with up-to-date information.

The 2019 report featured rural communities with a high number of homeless people per capita, signaling to the government that preventive measures are needed.

This method of counting homelessness is one that public health researcher Stephenson Strobel and his team have tested in Ontario. He and his colleagues set out their findings in a report published by StatCan in January 2021.

“One of the concerns we had was that this population is so transient and so hard to track that if we did that, we would have a hard time tracking them,” Strobel explained.

This method was based on hospital emergency room data from the Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES), an independent institution funded by the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care. People without a home address entering an emergency department are given “XX” instead of their postcode. This allowed researchers to see when a specific person would move from one hospital to another.

Being able to collect data from all hospitals in a province, including rural and remote communities, allows the estimate to be more accurate than if volunteers visited a few municipalities selected for a PiT count, Strobel said.

“If you need, for example, very fast data, if you need an idea of ​​where homelessness will become an issue over the next couple of months, here’s how you would do it,” he said. -he explains.

Strobel says the entire project to quantify the number of homeless people in Ontario cost less than $10,000, which he says was mostly the cost of getting the data from the government.

“It can be done Canada-wide… You could get an estimate of the level of homelessness in Canada, tomorrow, if you wanted to, just do it,” Strobel said.

However, Strobel’s method is not without limitations. It obliges people without accommodation to report to a hospital, otherwise they will not be counted.

“The emergency department is one of the last places these people want to come because they’ve been there for six hours and the practitioners are missing them,” Strobel said of the stigma of homeless people in a health institution.

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Edited by Tom Yun

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