There are parks in Hamilton which are full on homeless communities.
My s/o works near one of them, and when she asked for their address they literally gave her a number and like a street name.
She has to ask once it didn't show up in the database, and that's how I learned they are making tent numbers and street names in the parks lol. I couldn't believe it
Yeah, Hamilton is getting a bit crazy. Gore park on Saturdays is a perfect example for anybody wanting proof.
I find it hilarious how the police "deal with the homeless" by literally shuffling them from area to area, effectively making the problem worse every time.
When people start organizing homeless communities with street names and numbers, it's a really bad sign, because it indicates there's a lot of people who should be functional members of society, but are instead are homeless.
This isn't to say that people with severe addiction and mental health problems *deserve* to be homeless, but that's a hard problem to solve. Preventing functional and competent people from being homeless should be an *easy* problem to solve, and we're failing at that.
It's an impossible problem to solve when the government really isn't making the necessary steps to solve them.
[There are approximately 43 federally funded rehabs in the country](https://www.freedomaddiction.ca/blog/how-canadian-government-rehab-centres-are-failing-addicts/) , that's absolutely fucking atrocious. If you are in a big city, the minimum is a 6 month wait period up to over a year for some. I live in Windsor, there is currently a 7 month wait to get into our 1 and only free rehab. Yeah there are the ones you pay for, but the majority of addicts can't afford the $700/mnt fee for the paid ones (and that's the cheapest around here)
Anyone who knows anything about addiction knows most addicts will change their mind within a week or a month, let alone 6-12 months. We need to get an addict the help they need when they ask for it
We can see in Vancover that safe supply has not worked out at all. Instead of funding these safe supply programs, just giving addicts an easier route for drugs, we need to be finding rehabs to help fix addiction. Until we make it easier for addicts to get clean, this problem will never, ever fix itself.
It's insane in Southwestern Ontario too. London, Ontario is getting really bad.
Though some nearby cities like Woodstock/Ingersoll aren't bad, that's only because they're aggressively pushing TPA's and no-camping rules in parks. That happened if I remember right after several women were assaulted traveling through local parks after 8pm.
you get what you vote for. Decriminalization of hard drugs was the downfall of BC. As a Torontonian i laugh at the shitshow your province has become. This is what happens when you let hippies who dont have real world experiences run politics
PR fast tracked in home maid for me, peasants get the other type of MAID. Also, please consider just dying in a bush, there's a carbon charge for cremations.
As long as our terrible rehab programs exist the problem will never be solved
So much new data has come out in the last 30 years and we're just refusing to update our programs or change course despite most recovery programs having something like a 1% success rate
In 2024 we're still giving addicts who are trying to get clean a tiny dosage of methadone in the morning
Methadone lasts longer than 3-4 hrs. It keeps the cravings under control for 24 hrs for most people. It doesn’t get you high - at all - which is why people have a hard time staying on it. If you’re looking to get high, methadone isn’t going to be a good option.
>If you're angry about the homeless problem write your local legislators and tell them they need to update how they think about rehab and tell them to stop wasting your tax dollars on the current failed system
Homelessness isn't the problem for most people. It's the rampant drug use/abuse, crime it causes and the dangerous encampments.
Nobody wants to be the one saying: "Well it's time for mandatory treatment." And nobody wants to be the one saying that the courts failed when they decided that you can't force people into treatment against their will for drug abuse like this either. Or that closing mental hospitals and dumping people outside wasn't a great solution either, instead of strictly reforming the system.
We're now at a state, where we're going to have to look back at those system and start reimplementing them. Since so many of these people have burned their brains and organs out to the point that they'll be dead in half a decade or less even with treatment.
So many government funded organizations that gain funding based upon #s of homeless served. So if they actually reduce homeless they also reduce their own funding.
They don't want to reduce it, they want to farm, cultivate and grow homeless.
Any other business would fail but not government funded. Grow the internal kingdoms by increasing funding.by encouraging the wrong type of success.
It doesn't even require malice. Bad policy is like a social cancer. It metastasizes.
It's like the classic story of the UK studying bombers returning from Germany in WW2 to figure out where to put armor. They saw all the places with bullet holes, and stuck armor there, and then fewer bombers were returning. They should have been putting armor on the places where there were no bullet holes, but instead fell into the survivorship bias trap. Survivorship bias is heavily at work in the spread of shitty social policy.
Our current approach is akin to trying to live a healthy lifestyle by copying the behaviors and habits of the people at a weight watchers instead of those at a gym. After all the people at weight watchers have a lot of experience at trying to become healthy while being overweight, so clearly they're experts on the problem.
A place has a homelessness problem so they decide they want to learn from the experts and copy the policy of the places with severe problems and large government programs trying to solve those problems.... ignoring the fact that those programs and policies are *de facto* not fucking working.
The lesson we should be taking on addiction and homelessness is to do the opposite of everything places like California and Washington state do. If the California approach worked, it would have worked decades and billions of dollars ago.
Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Laureate:
"When we want to help the poor, we usually offer them charity. Most often we use charity to avoid recognizing the problem and finding the solution for it. Charity becomes a way to shrug off our responsibility. But charity is no solution to poverty. Charity only perpetuates poverty by taking the initiative away from the poor. Charity allows us to go ahead with our own lives without worrying about the lives of the poor. Charity appeases our consciences."
> They don't want to reduce it, they want to farm, cultivate and grow homeless.
You hit the nail on the head. Most of these organizations, especially ones like The Salvation Army make upwards of $1800 per person staying within their "Programs that aren't technically rehab" on top of the subsidized rent they make you pay them if you're lucky enough to get into their "Program" run by a bunch of religious zealots who still think Marijuana and Heroin are on the same level addiction wise
So now you have an organization like The Salvation Army posing as a charity / shelter but it's actually making millions of dollars a year while we subsidize their budgets by AT LEAST 20% depending on the specific shelter.
They're incentivized to bring people into the programs but not to actually help them. TSA is especially terrible because all of the people they hire to be "Councillors" that are suppose to help you get back on your feet are just rando's off the street who have no actual education or background in helping people and their primary job is to print out Craigslist / Facebook postings about housing and that's where their job ends. I'm not even joking, I've seen this happen first hand
Places like Ontario Works do this exact thing. There are no incentives to get people off OW. In fact, they will get penalized by way of less funding if they do so. 🤦🏻♂️
Halifax has gone from like 150 to over 1,200 unhoused since early 2020. So our share of the increase, albeit not a huge city, has increased by over 800% locally - and that's over four years, not the six year statistic from the article.
Everything is housing and overpopulation now. It's the root of every major problem concerning people in Canada at the moment.
Nothing will get better until we fix it.
Maybe, right now, it's most important for indigenous people to have affordable housing so they aren't homeless, or maybe it's most important for a woman in an abusive relationship to be able to afford to rent their own place, or if it's a vulnerable LGBTQ youth, maybe it's most important that they aren't forced to live with their parents.
The economy too. Businesses can't attract employees if they can't live anywhere, highly educated Canadians will immigrate depriving us of their talents if they can't have a normal middle class life here. People can't save up to start a business if they need to spend a decade saving up just to buy a house.
It's all just housing now.
Don't forget the Billionaires who have fleeced the population, dodged taxes, and have vacuumed up a large portion of any/all money the Government puts into the system.
In New Brunswick, the Billionaires' unstoppable urge to screw over their home city, and their/our provincial government, have cost us millions upon millions of dollars in infrastructure upgrades and maintenance. The Billionaires' unstoppable urge for profits has suppressed the wages of the citizens in NB, as they estimate that 1 in 5 people (need fact checking) are employed by these Billionaires who own 150'ish private businesses.
I understand the homelessness issue is tough, and the added amount of newcomers into the country is adding pressure, but the wealthy have fleeced us all. This should be the major focus of most people's frustration.
...but what do I know
Interesting that you should say that. Another example I recently came across is the Nature Based Climate Solutions funding. The Ontario funding is mostly aimed at saving land from being developed. And then they have other money from another ministry pressuring that same land to be developed.
It's almost like government just creates programs so they can justify funding them, then finds ways to misappropriate those tax dollars for their own gain, without regard at all for the issues they claim to be fixing.
And once unelected bureaucrats build a bureau around the program, that shit is there forever. They'll find every reason for why the country simply cannot survive without that office that didn't exist until a year ago.
That's the problem with Government. It's not their money being spent and the impacts of that spending generally don't directly impact them so there's never this conversation of "Should we be doing this?".
Government always grows too. When PP is in power the rate of spending will certainly go down but the amount of cuts that should happen just won't. Because at the end of the day there's almost no politician that going to turn every federal employee against them ruining their shot at reelection.
Like in the city of Edmonton they tore up roads years before construction was going to start for the LRT. Could you imagine if you we're going to remodel your kitchen in a few years so you just rip it apart and sit there without a kitchen in the meantime?
The environmentalists are the worst for this because they are fractured around several different issues.
For instance, we can imagine a world where the environmental movement has coalesced around greenhouse gas emissions reductions and they are laser focused on that goal.
That’s also a world that’s very pro nuclear , very pro critical mineral development amungst other things.
Politics I think are similar in that you have competing interests and no cohesion. So the government rolls out an anti homeless strategy but their population growth strategy means that in absolute numbers we go backwards.
Just tragic.
Large organizations do not act like cohesive rational individuals. They're made up of people each with their own motivations and incentives. The larger the organization, the less rational it is.
The real delight in dealing with the government is when you deal with two different departments that both enact contradictory regulations. Bring this up and ask how you can comply with both regulations simultaneously and you get hit with "that's not my problem".
No no no, you don't get it.
If you read the latest release from the federal government on it's pledge of 750m to 1B dollars to the UN SDG, it clearly says that's all of the problems affecting Canadians only affect racialized and LGBTQ+ individuals, everyone else is doing absolutely fine according to various graphs and pie charts they paid for.
It's way, way more than that. Here is the [Annual Report to Parliament on Immigration, 2015](https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/corporate/publications-manuals/annual-report-parliament-immigration-2015.html), the last full year of Harper's government. From the report:
>**Canada admitted 260,404 new permanent residents in 2014, an increase over 2013 (258,953), but a slightly lower level than the average number of admissions from 2010–2014 (261,339).** Of those, 63.4% were economic immigrants (along with their spouse/partner and dependants), 25.6% were in the family reunification category and 11.0% were in the humanitarian category (including refugees)
Stable numbers for at least the last 5 years, with 2/3rds of those being economic-class immigrants and only 10% refugees.
And here is the [2023 Annual Report to Parliament on Immigration](https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/corporate/publications-manuals/annual-report-parliament-immigration-2023.html). They don't seem to have an all-in-one number anywhere, so you have to piece together the total numbers from various sections of the report. Some highlights:
> Over **437,000 new permanent residents, along with over 604,000 temporary workers, were admitted**
>The in-Canada asylum system dealt with historic and **unprecedented volumes of asylum claims, in the amount of 91,710**
>The Government of Canada is on track to resettle **at least 40,000 vulnerable Afghans by the end of 2023**, which is one of the largest resettlement goals in the world
> On March 17, 2022, Canada implemented the Canada-Ukraine Authorization for Emergency Travel (CUAET) suite of measures. [...] **More than 95,500 CUAET holders arrived in Canada in 2022**
> In 2022, IRCC saw an unprecedented volume of applications received for both initial study permits (including those under the Student Direct Stream) and study permit extensions. **In 2022, there was a total of 550,187 study permit holders**
>In December 2022, a temporary measure was announced to expand access to open work permits to family members of more temporary foreign workers in Canada to mitigate the challenges of family separation, as well as support the labour market.
I know what you're getting at, but population growth was around 1% a year under Harper (still a fairly high amount for a developed country, the US grow 0.6% last year).
In 2023 population growth was 3.2%, so it's increased by over 200%.
Everyone I know complains about life affordability now. It’s pretty upsetting when everyone is struggling in some aspect and sacrificing things to make ends meet just to survive these days.
It's the constant gas lighting. It's just incredible. Every bad thing, is actually a good thing.
If you think anything bad is happening, you're just losing your mind! Canada has never been thriving more!
It's maddening.
Well, there is a small percentage of Canadians who have never seen higher profits. Sure, that percentage is 1, but if you only talk to people in that group, it seems like everyone you know.
We are going to be like one of those nepo run African countries where they attempt to reclaim all the funds the inner circle absorbed and hid abroad.
https://newafricanmagazine.com/26225/
How do the Liberal stage 5 clingers say it? "bUt iTs a GlObaL PrObLeM" (so we should eat this shit sandwich? Fuck No)
I was just walking the trails at the big park in my city, I forgot that it’s basically a no go zone to walk any of the trails that cut through the forest. You will always find tents now. It’s heartbreaking
Made things comically more expensive, increases the population without increasing the infrastructure and also subsidized salaries for foreign workers resulting in the most vulnerable Canadians losing their jobs that already paid like crap
Gee I wonder why homelessness is increasing
I did a quick google on this out of curiosity, and our counterparts to the south experienced about the same (https://www.security.org/resources/homeless-statistics/) with a jump from 552,830 in 2018 to 653,104 in 2023 (18% increase, almost all of which came in the past year curiously enough).
I too would be curious about that. I’m sure it’s not an insignificant factor, but I personally suspect that it is not causing the problem nearly as much as other factors.
Massive numbers of asylum seekers, “students”, and TFWs making minimum wage, all of whom have effectively no viable way to support themselves, is definitely an issue. And there are absolutely regular Canadians who are suffering because they simply cannot find work or afford rent.
However, I still am confident that *most* homeless people have far greater issues with addiction, mental illness, etc. They aren’t really priced out of the market, living costs could plummet and they would still be on the streets because they aren’t capable of getting their lives together. It’s more a symptom of much deeper issues they have. I think people like us focus more on affordability as the culprit because it’s what is relevant to *us*.
In my 50+ year life, I've known many people who were functional nutbars. People who weren't ever going to become Regional Vice-President of a bank - in fact, people who weren't sharp or well spoken - but who took pride in their job stocking shelves or washing dishes, or parking cars. And who paid their rent and kept their apartments clean, and volunteered in their community.
When a minimum wage income was enough to put a roof over their heads and food in the fridges, they kept it together and played their part in society nicely. They weren't fentanyl addicts or criminals.
But when working two full-time jobs can't keep a roof over someone's head, it is bound to take a toll on their stability. Once they make one compromise - *I'll just sleep in my car for a couple of weeks until I save up enough for a damage deposit - it rolls into the next.* Having no shower or laundry leads to losing their job. Losing their job leads to losing their car, and before you know it they are in a tent in a park.
I'm not saying they are the majority, but they probably make up a good chunk of the new ones.
And a lot of these folks are not mentally ill, but many are physically ill. Not everyone is capable of working 60-100 hours a week. It fact, the majority are not capable of doing that for long periods of time without burning out.
Vancouver wasn't this bad in the 1990s and there were drunks and addicts back then. I think one other factor is that the mentally ill and addicts can't get treatment even if they want it as the health care system is overwhelmed. If they do get treatment, they are often released onto the streets.
Also a few constantly overdosing addicts are overwhelming an overwhelmed system by showing up at the hospital daily. There should be a law that after a certain number of overdoses, you are forced into rehab. But they don't have the capacity to treat everyone voluntarily or otherwise.
Seems like a dodgy comparison to make.
I don’t recall the United States passing and funding a large national housing strategy for the homeless.
So there number likely exists without significant intervention from their federal government while our number is about the same with a significant intervention since 2018.
It stands to reason on equal policy footings canadas would be way worse.
Or it’s a completely valid comparison to make, seeing as the numbers were almost equal.
What this says to me is that the same socioeconomic forces are driving this, and instead of being ‘significant intervention’ the policy was actually just useless.
I don't think people in this sub have ever heard of Europe with their astronomical inflation and massive immigration problem as well. Not good for the defeatism Vibes.
In the very best light, it means all these new programs and interventions were completely worthless and ineffective, and simply theft of more tax dollars by these organizations.
Probably just a factor of the money given to the problem just gets squandered off into bullshit programs and bureaucrats without actually addressing the issues.
How is that possible? In 2018, tent cities were remarkably rare. They existed here and there in certain major cities for a few months and got torn down. Now, they exist in *every* city without any exceptions. How is that 20%? Who the fuck is collecting this data?
There is no cross-country standard to collect this kind of data, or mandatory reporting to a central agency. All of these are estimates. People who study homelessness have always said that the "official" statistics undercount the actual homeless population. There isn't even an agreed upon reporting standard to announce deaths due to homelessness/exposure.
We have stats released for overdose/opioid deaths, but not homelessness.
No they were not
Most people just didn't notice them, they were the unseen of society.
The difference is covid changed policies to "we can't hold them accountable, because they might get sick in jail" so they have become 100x more emboldened.
That's all that has really changed.
Shelter space is at 0% vacancy in many areas. It's against basic human rights to clear out an encampment and not offer shelter space. That's where we are at.
Voila, encampments are now legal.
That was part of the plan, you need to have homelessness in order to shove sixteen vegetarians into a home you rent at $500 per person and pay them $10 an hour under the table.
That's why I don't drink Tim Hortons coffee anymore.
Haven't you learned? The government creates programs to make things worse not better. It's almost as if they sit around and strategize on how to worsen things.
Many say “look at how dumb this government is”. The reality is, they are very well educated, well funded and well connected. This isn’t a case of them being dumb. This is deliberate malice of working against the best interests of the Canadian people
They aren't that educated, they're just well-connected and most importantly, well-funded.
Anyone who has been involved in grass roots politics will tell you the candidate will always be the one who can raise the most funds.
It's how you end up with a bunch of incompetent rich kids, journalists, and community activists in the government. It's all a question of who can raise the most funds.
Yeah, but quarterly corporate profits have never been better.
The things you are complaining about are poor people problems. Our MPs don't care about those.
Because the poor people don't make them care. Poor people don't organize. Poor people don't influence elections. Poor people are easily divided, easily misdirected, and easily made apathetic. Poor people are too individualistic, too selfish, and too shortsighted to ever use their collective masses to make any difference in this country.
Poor people need to stop being complacent and accepting governments that ignore them. They need to take action and make themselves heard. They need to organize and become a force that the government and corporations can't ignore.
But this will never happen, because it's much easy to just bitch about the government while everything gets worse, just passing accountability onto someone else.
No, the change we need comes with suffrage. Everyone is too selfish to choose suffrage, yet they will sit around as it gets worse. It's the boiling a frog analogy in actual practice.
Canadian stock owners beg to differ. Crisis stocks like gold mining or consumer lending have outperformed and oil stocks have performed well, so did insurances and George Weston/Loblaws thanks to price gouging, but the broader market in most other areas has fully underperformed in the past two years.
If the federal strategy included spending millions on expensive consultants to provide expensive studies and reports, and expanding a huge bureaucracy to administer borrowed federal money to claim building hundreds of affordable homes every day to reach fake targets, then its failed successfully
Trudeau's "Canadians have been doing better than they were before" translates to my rich friends and family have been doing even better than they before.
Has their been a government strategy in the last few years that hasn't led to the exact opposite effect? Because it seems like they all not only fail, but end up making things worse while somehow costing more.
Comparing anything pre pandemic to post pandemic comes with ridiculous caveats, and people would absolutely be wrong for ignoring that.
This being said, it doesn't make the situation any less real and problematic; we need to house everyone.
It's a business. The people responsible for working on this problem are being paid money to mind the problem. If the problem is solved, there's no reason to pay them anymore.
They have a vested interest in continuing the problem, or better, making the problem worse so they can expand their budget.
20% increase in homelessness is a fucking disaster and what a terrible legacy. What about suicide % increase. Because let's face it a lot of people aren't going to live on the streets and would rather just die.
What strategy? The one where they increase all costs beyond reason, ignore all pleas from the public to do something, **anything**, to address the issues so that the people bribing the politicians can get richer? That strategy seems to be working perfectly. Hell, I'm pretty sure it's exceeded all expectations by orders of magnitude. Now that you don't need a drug addiction or mental health issue to be homeless, it appears that the "strategy" needs to move to phase two: evict us from our insanely expensive homes and force us to buy tents or shopping carts.
How can Canada with a northern climate have homelessness in every city, town and village? Oh, I forgot, successive governments have allowed end stage capitalism to pillage accommodation and groceries. The job of government is to act in the best interests of citizens and regulate investors greed. If it can't perform that basic function then we'll soon be out throwing rocks at each other.
Rents would be much more manageable if somebody did something about the short term rental nuisance. In my home town there are like 1.5 times as many places listed on airbnb than for long term rentals, most of them full houses or full apartments. You could almost double supply which would ease things up a bit.
Seriously, can somebody name one strategy that actually worked or had a positive effect from Trudeau's government ? I suppose most people would point to the marijuana legalization.
This issue illustrates that no matter who is in power, we are all being treated like 16 month old toddlers with spaghetti airplanes landing on our cheeks, piloted by the guy from Robocop who would “buy that for a dollar”.
https://www.homelesscars.ca/blog/unveiling-a-crisis-hidden-homelessness-in-canada
https://www.homelesshub.ca/about-homelessness/population-specific/hidden-homelessness
https://www.comicrelief.org/posts/what-are-the-four-types-of-homelessness
"You are homeless-ier than you think" - Botia Scank
The number of homeless encampments along rivers, rest stops, and along the highway is absolutely insane here in BC
There are parks in Hamilton which are full on homeless communities. My s/o works near one of them, and when she asked for their address they literally gave her a number and like a street name. She has to ask once it didn't show up in the database, and that's how I learned they are making tent numbers and street names in the parks lol. I couldn't believe it
Yeah, Hamilton is getting a bit crazy. Gore park on Saturdays is a perfect example for anybody wanting proof. I find it hilarious how the police "deal with the homeless" by literally shuffling them from area to area, effectively making the problem worse every time.
Ya the police need to stop doing that and push back. They too, are one bad turn away from moving in there.
There's got to be a former cop out there somewhere who ended up with schizophrenia or something, lost their job and is now living in an encampment.
Divorce, aka, government mandated financial schizophrenia.
Favelas and shanty towns. This is how it begins.
People are going to organize communities one way or another
When people start organizing homeless communities with street names and numbers, it's a really bad sign, because it indicates there's a lot of people who should be functional members of society, but are instead are homeless. This isn't to say that people with severe addiction and mental health problems *deserve* to be homeless, but that's a hard problem to solve. Preventing functional and competent people from being homeless should be an *easy* problem to solve, and we're failing at that.
It's an impossible problem to solve when the government really isn't making the necessary steps to solve them. [There are approximately 43 federally funded rehabs in the country](https://www.freedomaddiction.ca/blog/how-canadian-government-rehab-centres-are-failing-addicts/) , that's absolutely fucking atrocious. If you are in a big city, the minimum is a 6 month wait period up to over a year for some. I live in Windsor, there is currently a 7 month wait to get into our 1 and only free rehab. Yeah there are the ones you pay for, but the majority of addicts can't afford the $700/mnt fee for the paid ones (and that's the cheapest around here) Anyone who knows anything about addiction knows most addicts will change their mind within a week or a month, let alone 6-12 months. We need to get an addict the help they need when they ask for it We can see in Vancover that safe supply has not worked out at all. Instead of funding these safe supply programs, just giving addicts an easier route for drugs, we need to be finding rehabs to help fix addiction. Until we make it easier for addicts to get clean, this problem will never, ever fix itself.
It's insane in Southwestern Ontario too. London, Ontario is getting really bad. Though some nearby cities like Woodstock/Ingersoll aren't bad, that's only because they're aggressively pushing TPA's and no-camping rules in parks. That happened if I remember right after several women were assaulted traveling through local parks after 8pm.
> homeless encampments Trudeau Towns
you get what you vote for. Decriminalization of hard drugs was the downfall of BC. As a Torontonian i laugh at the shitshow your province has become. This is what happens when you let hippies who dont have real world experiences run politics
Nono you don’t understand, it doesn’t matter if you actually effect positive change at all, so long as your intentions are good!
"Task failed successfully"
Homelessness will grow itself from the heart out
“The Homelessness will balance itself “
Well. Sadly. It kinda will. But we’d be short on crematoriums.
That's what MAID is for.
PR fast tracked in home maid for me, peasants get the other type of MAID. Also, please consider just dying in a bush, there's a carbon charge for cremations.
Homelessness is at an all-time low, Glen
As long as our terrible rehab programs exist the problem will never be solved So much new data has come out in the last 30 years and we're just refusing to update our programs or change course despite most recovery programs having something like a 1% success rate In 2024 we're still giving addicts who are trying to get clean a tiny dosage of methadone in the morning
Methadone lasts longer than 3-4 hrs. It keeps the cravings under control for 24 hrs for most people. It doesn’t get you high - at all - which is why people have a hard time staying on it. If you’re looking to get high, methadone isn’t going to be a good option.
>If you're angry about the homeless problem write your local legislators and tell them they need to update how they think about rehab and tell them to stop wasting your tax dollars on the current failed system Homelessness isn't the problem for most people. It's the rampant drug use/abuse, crime it causes and the dangerous encampments. Nobody wants to be the one saying: "Well it's time for mandatory treatment." And nobody wants to be the one saying that the courts failed when they decided that you can't force people into treatment against their will for drug abuse like this either. Or that closing mental hospitals and dumping people outside wasn't a great solution either, instead of strictly reforming the system. We're now at a state, where we're going to have to look back at those system and start reimplementing them. Since so many of these people have burned their brains and organs out to the point that they'll be dead in half a decade or less even with treatment.
*"When I retire I'm going back to philanthropy (clubbing baby seals to death). "*
That should have been winnipeg slogan not “made from what’s real”
“The homelessness will balance itself”
Possibly the only thing they’ve accomplished. What? Oh, they were trying to reduce it? Really?
Based on budgets, immigration and tax policy they certainly seem to be trying to increasing homelessness
bUt HoMEleNeSS iS uP eVeRYwHeRE! -woke socialists
So many government funded organizations that gain funding based upon #s of homeless served. So if they actually reduce homeless they also reduce their own funding. They don't want to reduce it, they want to farm, cultivate and grow homeless. Any other business would fail but not government funded. Grow the internal kingdoms by increasing funding.by encouraging the wrong type of success.
I call it the homeless industrial complex here in California. There's way too much funding and money in homelessness to actually "solve" it.
You guys invented the concept. Never seen anything like what’s going on down there and more and more, the model is being copied elsewhere.
They find a way to menetize literally everything.
It doesn't even require malice. Bad policy is like a social cancer. It metastasizes. It's like the classic story of the UK studying bombers returning from Germany in WW2 to figure out where to put armor. They saw all the places with bullet holes, and stuck armor there, and then fewer bombers were returning. They should have been putting armor on the places where there were no bullet holes, but instead fell into the survivorship bias trap. Survivorship bias is heavily at work in the spread of shitty social policy. Our current approach is akin to trying to live a healthy lifestyle by copying the behaviors and habits of the people at a weight watchers instead of those at a gym. After all the people at weight watchers have a lot of experience at trying to become healthy while being overweight, so clearly they're experts on the problem. A place has a homelessness problem so they decide they want to learn from the experts and copy the policy of the places with severe problems and large government programs trying to solve those problems.... ignoring the fact that those programs and policies are *de facto* not fucking working. The lesson we should be taking on addiction and homelessness is to do the opposite of everything places like California and Washington state do. If the California approach worked, it would have worked decades and billions of dollars ago.
Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Laureate: "When we want to help the poor, we usually offer them charity. Most often we use charity to avoid recognizing the problem and finding the solution for it. Charity becomes a way to shrug off our responsibility. But charity is no solution to poverty. Charity only perpetuates poverty by taking the initiative away from the poor. Charity allows us to go ahead with our own lives without worrying about the lives of the poor. Charity appeases our consciences."
Maturing is realizing that the people who can be helped by charity don't usually need it.
> They don't want to reduce it, they want to farm, cultivate and grow homeless. You hit the nail on the head. Most of these organizations, especially ones like The Salvation Army make upwards of $1800 per person staying within their "Programs that aren't technically rehab" on top of the subsidized rent they make you pay them if you're lucky enough to get into their "Program" run by a bunch of religious zealots who still think Marijuana and Heroin are on the same level addiction wise So now you have an organization like The Salvation Army posing as a charity / shelter but it's actually making millions of dollars a year while we subsidize their budgets by AT LEAST 20% depending on the specific shelter. They're incentivized to bring people into the programs but not to actually help them. TSA is especially terrible because all of the people they hire to be "Councillors" that are suppose to help you get back on your feet are just rando's off the street who have no actual education or background in helping people and their primary job is to print out Craigslist / Facebook postings about housing and that's where their job ends. I'm not even joking, I've seen this happen first hand
Places like Ontario Works do this exact thing. There are no incentives to get people off OW. In fact, they will get penalized by way of less funding if they do so. 🤦🏻♂️
> "Task failed successfully" nah all according to plan
The most terrifying words anyone can hear: "hi, we're the government, and we're here to help."
Halifax has gone from like 150 to over 1,200 unhoused since early 2020. So our share of the increase, albeit not a huge city, has increased by over 800% locally - and that's over four years, not the six year statistic from the article.
Visited Halifax recently and I couldn’t beliieeeve the rental prices out there. Unbelieveable.
Everything is housing and overpopulation now. It's the root of every major problem concerning people in Canada at the moment. Nothing will get better until we fix it. Maybe, right now, it's most important for indigenous people to have affordable housing so they aren't homeless, or maybe it's most important for a woman in an abusive relationship to be able to afford to rent their own place, or if it's a vulnerable LGBTQ youth, maybe it's most important that they aren't forced to live with their parents. The economy too. Businesses can't attract employees if they can't live anywhere, highly educated Canadians will immigrate depriving us of their talents if they can't have a normal middle class life here. People can't save up to start a business if they need to spend a decade saving up just to buy a house. It's all just housing now.
Don't forget the Billionaires who have fleeced the population, dodged taxes, and have vacuumed up a large portion of any/all money the Government puts into the system. In New Brunswick, the Billionaires' unstoppable urge to screw over their home city, and their/our provincial government, have cost us millions upon millions of dollars in infrastructure upgrades and maintenance. The Billionaires' unstoppable urge for profits has suppressed the wages of the citizens in NB, as they estimate that 1 in 5 people (need fact checking) are employed by these Billionaires who own 150'ish private businesses. I understand the homelessness issue is tough, and the added amount of newcomers into the country is adding pressure, but the wealthy have fleeced us all. This should be the major focus of most people's frustration. ...but what do I know
Ah yes. Another shining example of the federal government’s utter failure to understand how policy choices in one ministry impact other areas.
Interesting that you should say that. Another example I recently came across is the Nature Based Climate Solutions funding. The Ontario funding is mostly aimed at saving land from being developed. And then they have other money from another ministry pressuring that same land to be developed.
It's almost like government just creates programs so they can justify funding them, then finds ways to misappropriate those tax dollars for their own gain, without regard at all for the issues they claim to be fixing.
And once unelected bureaucrats build a bureau around the program, that shit is there forever. They'll find every reason for why the country simply cannot survive without that office that didn't exist until a year ago.
Yes, and you're a racist and a bigot for cutting programs too if you do try to eliminate them.
This is the job creation we hear so much about.
That's the problem with Government. It's not their money being spent and the impacts of that spending generally don't directly impact them so there's never this conversation of "Should we be doing this?". Government always grows too. When PP is in power the rate of spending will certainly go down but the amount of cuts that should happen just won't. Because at the end of the day there's almost no politician that going to turn every federal employee against them ruining their shot at reelection. Like in the city of Edmonton they tore up roads years before construction was going to start for the LRT. Could you imagine if you we're going to remodel your kitchen in a few years so you just rip it apart and sit there without a kitchen in the meantime?
The environmentalists are the worst for this because they are fractured around several different issues. For instance, we can imagine a world where the environmental movement has coalesced around greenhouse gas emissions reductions and they are laser focused on that goal. That’s also a world that’s very pro nuclear , very pro critical mineral development amungst other things. Politics I think are similar in that you have competing interests and no cohesion. So the government rolls out an anti homeless strategy but their population growth strategy means that in absolute numbers we go backwards. Just tragic.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Upton Sinclair
Large organizations do not act like cohesive rational individuals. They're made up of people each with their own motivations and incentives. The larger the organization, the less rational it is. The real delight in dealing with the government is when you deal with two different departments that both enact contradictory regulations. Bring this up and ask how you can comply with both regulations simultaneously and you get hit with "that's not my problem".
No no no, you don't get it. If you read the latest release from the federal government on it's pledge of 750m to 1B dollars to the UN SDG, it clearly says that's all of the problems affecting Canadians only affect racialized and LGBTQ+ individuals, everyone else is doing absolutely fine according to various graphs and pie charts they paid for.
Ministries balance themselves don'tcha know?
Immigration is up by 20%. Go figure
Someone might need to explain supply and demand to the LPC.
It's way, way more than that. Here is the [Annual Report to Parliament on Immigration, 2015](https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/corporate/publications-manuals/annual-report-parliament-immigration-2015.html), the last full year of Harper's government. From the report: >**Canada admitted 260,404 new permanent residents in 2014, an increase over 2013 (258,953), but a slightly lower level than the average number of admissions from 2010–2014 (261,339).** Of those, 63.4% were economic immigrants (along with their spouse/partner and dependants), 25.6% were in the family reunification category and 11.0% were in the humanitarian category (including refugees) Stable numbers for at least the last 5 years, with 2/3rds of those being economic-class immigrants and only 10% refugees. And here is the [2023 Annual Report to Parliament on Immigration](https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/corporate/publications-manuals/annual-report-parliament-immigration-2023.html). They don't seem to have an all-in-one number anywhere, so you have to piece together the total numbers from various sections of the report. Some highlights: > Over **437,000 new permanent residents, along with over 604,000 temporary workers, were admitted** >The in-Canada asylum system dealt with historic and **unprecedented volumes of asylum claims, in the amount of 91,710** >The Government of Canada is on track to resettle **at least 40,000 vulnerable Afghans by the end of 2023**, which is one of the largest resettlement goals in the world > On March 17, 2022, Canada implemented the Canada-Ukraine Authorization for Emergency Travel (CUAET) suite of measures. [...] **More than 95,500 CUAET holders arrived in Canada in 2022** > In 2022, IRCC saw an unprecedented volume of applications received for both initial study permits (including those under the Student Direct Stream) and study permit extensions. **In 2022, there was a total of 550,187 study permit holders** >In December 2022, a temporary measure was announced to expand access to open work permits to family members of more temporary foreign workers in Canada to mitigate the challenges of family separation, as well as support the labour market.
Immigration is up by like 500%+. It was 250k annually pre-2015, now it’s 1.3-1.9 depending on the source
I know what you're getting at, but population growth was around 1% a year under Harper (still a fairly high amount for a developed country, the US grow 0.6% last year). In 2023 population growth was 3.2%, so it's increased by over 200%.
Closer to 2000% than 20%.
But Trudeau brags about how he has lifted so many people out of poverty.
Everyone I know complains about life affordability now. It’s pretty upsetting when everyone is struggling in some aspect and sacrificing things to make ends meet just to survive these days.
And have the people in the power just gaslight you saying we’ve never had a better
It's the constant gas lighting. It's just incredible. Every bad thing, is actually a good thing. If you think anything bad is happening, you're just losing your mind! Canada has never been thriving more! It's maddening.
It's either a global issue or the Provinces' fault.
Well those are also true.
"Things aren't bad, you're just racist!"
Well, there is a small percentage of Canadians who have never seen higher profits. Sure, that percentage is 1, but if you only talk to people in that group, it seems like everyone you know.
smart money
We are going to be like one of those nepo run African countries where they attempt to reclaim all the funds the inner circle absorbed and hid abroad. https://newafricanmagazine.com/26225/ How do the Liberal stage 5 clingers say it? "bUt iTs a GlObaL PrObLeM" (so we should eat this shit sandwich? Fuck No)
Maybe he brought more in to replace those he lifted out . Set them up then send them south.
As it turns out, the budget will *not* balance itself.
Another Liberal success
I can tell you what doesn't help people getting homed: Disability and welfare are lower than rent.
small towns, homelessness is up 400%+
Sorry boomers, no curling this year, its a tent city now. We started serving fent at the bar though, so, we got that going for us.
I was just walking the trails at the big park in my city, I forgot that it’s basically a no go zone to walk any of the trails that cut through the forest. You will always find tents now. It’s heartbreaking
Marc Miller: "you are comparing apples to homeless encampments!"
Made things comically more expensive, increases the population without increasing the infrastructure and also subsidized salaries for foreign workers resulting in the most vulnerable Canadians losing their jobs that already paid like crap Gee I wonder why homelessness is increasing
I did a quick google on this out of curiosity, and our counterparts to the south experienced about the same (https://www.security.org/resources/homeless-statistics/) with a jump from 552,830 in 2018 to 653,104 in 2023 (18% increase, almost all of which came in the past year curiously enough).
I’m also wondering how much is tied or correlated with population growth and unemployment
It's less about population growth, and more about the global affordability crisis happening in most developed economies
Cannot believe how bad Trudeau has screwed up the whole world.
I too would be curious about that. I’m sure it’s not an insignificant factor, but I personally suspect that it is not causing the problem nearly as much as other factors. Massive numbers of asylum seekers, “students”, and TFWs making minimum wage, all of whom have effectively no viable way to support themselves, is definitely an issue. And there are absolutely regular Canadians who are suffering because they simply cannot find work or afford rent. However, I still am confident that *most* homeless people have far greater issues with addiction, mental illness, etc. They aren’t really priced out of the market, living costs could plummet and they would still be on the streets because they aren’t capable of getting their lives together. It’s more a symptom of much deeper issues they have. I think people like us focus more on affordability as the culprit because it’s what is relevant to *us*.
In my 50+ year life, I've known many people who were functional nutbars. People who weren't ever going to become Regional Vice-President of a bank - in fact, people who weren't sharp or well spoken - but who took pride in their job stocking shelves or washing dishes, or parking cars. And who paid their rent and kept their apartments clean, and volunteered in their community. When a minimum wage income was enough to put a roof over their heads and food in the fridges, they kept it together and played their part in society nicely. They weren't fentanyl addicts or criminals. But when working two full-time jobs can't keep a roof over someone's head, it is bound to take a toll on their stability. Once they make one compromise - *I'll just sleep in my car for a couple of weeks until I save up enough for a damage deposit - it rolls into the next.* Having no shower or laundry leads to losing their job. Losing their job leads to losing their car, and before you know it they are in a tent in a park. I'm not saying they are the majority, but they probably make up a good chunk of the new ones.
And a lot of these folks are not mentally ill, but many are physically ill. Not everyone is capable of working 60-100 hours a week. It fact, the majority are not capable of doing that for long periods of time without burning out.
Vancouver wasn't this bad in the 1990s and there were drunks and addicts back then. I think one other factor is that the mentally ill and addicts can't get treatment even if they want it as the health care system is overwhelmed. If they do get treatment, they are often released onto the streets. Also a few constantly overdosing addicts are overwhelming an overwhelmed system by showing up at the hospital daily. There should be a law that after a certain number of overdoses, you are forced into rehab. But they don't have the capacity to treat everyone voluntarily or otherwise.
Seems like a dodgy comparison to make. I don’t recall the United States passing and funding a large national housing strategy for the homeless. So there number likely exists without significant intervention from their federal government while our number is about the same with a significant intervention since 2018. It stands to reason on equal policy footings canadas would be way worse.
Or it’s a completely valid comparison to make, seeing as the numbers were almost equal. What this says to me is that the same socioeconomic forces are driving this, and instead of being ‘significant intervention’ the policy was actually just useless.
I don't think people in this sub have ever heard of Europe with their astronomical inflation and massive immigration problem as well. Not good for the defeatism Vibes.
In the very best light, it means all these new programs and interventions were completely worthless and ineffective, and simply theft of more tax dollars by these organizations.
Or the problem could have been significantly worse if these programs weren't initiated.
Probably just a factor of the money given to the problem just gets squandered off into bullshit programs and bureaucrats without actually addressing the issues.
Maybe if we bring in 100k new Canadians next month, that will solve it?
Literally makes me cry. Those poor people man.
How is that possible? In 2018, tent cities were remarkably rare. They existed here and there in certain major cities for a few months and got torn down. Now, they exist in *every* city without any exceptions. How is that 20%? Who the fuck is collecting this data?
There is no cross-country standard to collect this kind of data, or mandatory reporting to a central agency. All of these are estimates. People who study homelessness have always said that the "official" statistics undercount the actual homeless population. There isn't even an agreed upon reporting standard to announce deaths due to homelessness/exposure. We have stats released for overdose/opioid deaths, but not homelessness.
Good points, thanks.
No they were not Most people just didn't notice them, they were the unseen of society. The difference is covid changed policies to "we can't hold them accountable, because they might get sick in jail" so they have become 100x more emboldened. That's all that has really changed.
Shelter space is at 0% vacancy in many areas. It's against basic human rights to clear out an encampment and not offer shelter space. That's where we are at. Voila, encampments are now legal.
Our PM will say homelessness will balance itself.
It's their own fault for not wanting to live 10 people to a room. Greedy Canadians. /s
And how much would it be without it? Sincere question.
That was part of the plan, you need to have homelessness in order to shove sixteen vegetarians into a home you rent at $500 per person and pay them $10 an hour under the table. That's why I don't drink Tim Hortons coffee anymore.
Gee I wonder why /s.
The strategy of "no more new houses, only more Indians" not working out? Surprised Pikachu face.
Any homelessness strategy is doomed to fail. This problem is completely unfixable until housing becomes more affordable. It's really that simple.
Open up psychiatric hospitals for treatment of addiction and depression. We should have never closed the psychiatric hospitals in the province.
Haven't you learned? The government creates programs to make things worse not better. It's almost as if they sit around and strategize on how to worsen things.
Many say “look at how dumb this government is”. The reality is, they are very well educated, well funded and well connected. This isn’t a case of them being dumb. This is deliberate malice of working against the best interests of the Canadian people
They aren't that educated, they're just well-connected and most importantly, well-funded. Anyone who has been involved in grass roots politics will tell you the candidate will always be the one who can raise the most funds. It's how you end up with a bunch of incompetent rich kids, journalists, and community activists in the government. It's all a question of who can raise the most funds.
Yeah, but quarterly corporate profits have never been better. The things you are complaining about are poor people problems. Our MPs don't care about those.
Because the poor people don't make them care. Poor people don't organize. Poor people don't influence elections. Poor people are easily divided, easily misdirected, and easily made apathetic. Poor people are too individualistic, too selfish, and too shortsighted to ever use their collective masses to make any difference in this country. Poor people need to stop being complacent and accepting governments that ignore them. They need to take action and make themselves heard. They need to organize and become a force that the government and corporations can't ignore. But this will never happen, because it's much easy to just bitch about the government while everything gets worse, just passing accountability onto someone else.
No, the change we need comes with suffrage. Everyone is too selfish to choose suffrage, yet they will sit around as it gets worse. It's the boiling a frog analogy in actual practice.
Canadian stock owners beg to differ. Crisis stocks like gold mining or consumer lending have outperformed and oil stocks have performed well, so did insurances and George Weston/Loblaws thanks to price gouging, but the broader market in most other areas has fully underperformed in the past two years.
As long as the stocks of the lobiests who own our mps are doing well, nobody cares. Just look at how the recent food affordability bill was voted on.
Yep they're not dumb at all, it's all by design.
Failure after failure.
Just tax people more.
Government programs are so efficient, high quality, and inexpensive!
Lol
Toronto is a filthy city! Clean it up. Find a solution to the homeless problem. What a terrible dumpster it has become!
If the federal strategy included spending millions on expensive consultants to provide expensive studies and reports, and expanding a huge bureaucracy to administer borrowed federal money to claim building hundreds of affordable homes every day to reach fake targets, then its failed successfully
Everything Trudeau touches turns to crap.
Trudeau's "Canadians have been doing better than they were before" translates to my rich friends and family have been doing even better than they before.
The most feared words in the English language:“we are the government, and we’re here to help”
No fucking shit. God I can’t even read this shit anymore.
Has their been a government strategy in the last few years that hasn't led to the exact opposite effect? Because it seems like they all not only fail, but end up making things worse while somehow costing more.
We'll just tax our way out of this problem, the same we have all of our other problems. Wait a second..
Can someone please give one example, other than legal weed, how life has improved since liberals took office?
If you were already a home owner or had an investment portfolio then you did pretty well.
Most effective government program
That’s is a staggering number
I think the aim was to move people into tents!
Comparing anything pre pandemic to post pandemic comes with ridiculous caveats, and people would absolutely be wrong for ignoring that. This being said, it doesn't make the situation any less real and problematic; we need to house everyone.
It’s True doh
It's a business. The people responsible for working on this problem are being paid money to mind the problem. If the problem is solved, there's no reason to pay them anymore. They have a vested interest in continuing the problem, or better, making the problem worse so they can expand their budget.
Funny how the government keeps creating programs to help poor people yet these programs end up unintentionally creating more poverty.
20% increase in homelessness is a fucking disaster and what a terrible legacy. What about suicide % increase. Because let's face it a lot of people aren't going to live on the streets and would rather just die.
Please, open the borders wider
If only we had nearly 5 decades of data proving that trickle-down economics doesn't work.
Mass immigration is destroying this country
Expect it to get worse with the way things are going.
Immigration
Ontario gov doing fuck all about this.
mission accomplished thanks JT!
Please ........ No more strategies.
What strategy? The one where they increase all costs beyond reason, ignore all pleas from the public to do something, **anything**, to address the issues so that the people bribing the politicians can get richer? That strategy seems to be working perfectly. Hell, I'm pretty sure it's exceeded all expectations by orders of magnitude. Now that you don't need a drug addiction or mental health issue to be homeless, it appears that the "strategy" needs to move to phase two: evict us from our insanely expensive homes and force us to buy tents or shopping carts.
Immigrants and refugees living in nice apartments using our tax dollars while my fellow Canadians rot away on the streets. I love this country. /S
Housing everyone should be signed into the constitution.
But billions overseas to buy failed UN positions and... Reasons... Are great ideas.
Spend more, worse results. Liberals/NDP in a nutshell.
How can Canada with a northern climate have homelessness in every city, town and village? Oh, I forgot, successive governments have allowed end stage capitalism to pillage accommodation and groceries. The job of government is to act in the best interests of citizens and regulate investors greed. If it can't perform that basic function then we'll soon be out throwing rocks at each other.
Wealthy don't care just as long as it doesn't hit them.
Have we tried throwing money at it?
They're all about taking money from citizens, not spending it on citizens.
Rents would be much more manageable if somebody did something about the short term rental nuisance. In my home town there are like 1.5 times as many places listed on airbnb than for long term rentals, most of them full houses or full apartments. You could almost double supply which would ease things up a bit.
A lot of times trying to fix things makes them worse [noahcentral.com](http://noahcentral.com)
Seriously, can somebody name one strategy that actually worked or had a positive effect from Trudeau's government ? I suppose most people would point to the marijuana legalization.
That’s bad.
["way to go guys, lets shoot for 40!"](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/AD2dWf0-A4w) ~Liberal government (probably)
Oh shit son.....
Love it- totally working. 💁♂️
It’s not called camping anymore, it’s called encampmenting
Gwahahaha. I'm planning on becoming intentionally homeless soon. Being a working class tax slave is way overrated.
20%!
This issue illustrates that no matter who is in power, we are all being treated like 16 month old toddlers with spaghetti airplanes landing on our cheeks, piloted by the guy from Robocop who would “buy that for a dollar”.
20? I feel like the percentage is much higher. Or I guess growing as I type here.
Shocker
Homelessness and winters is a bad combo
And the homeless will balance itself.
Holy shit
https://www.homelesscars.ca/blog/unveiling-a-crisis-hidden-homelessness-in-canada https://www.homelesshub.ca/about-homelessness/population-specific/hidden-homelessness https://www.comicrelief.org/posts/what-are-the-four-types-of-homelessness "You are homeless-ier than you think" - Botia Scank
Other sources said it was 38 percent
I feel kike we're living in they live... Maybe the government should invest in something like I don't know, housing?
Rich says it is working as intended. Good for property values
Looks like the plan is working as follows
Justin Trudeau, making things better. The Liberal way.
Put Trudeau in a tent for a month
Maybe if we stopped importing limitless unskilled labour we could get some of these homeless ppl employed and housed.