The Ford government says its data was botched — so how many people are homeless in Ontario?

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article originally appeared on The Trillium, a Village Media website devoted exclusively to covering provincial politics at Queen’s ParkOntario has a homelessness problem.

A bad one. But the Ford government now says it’s not as bad as the “unofficial estimate” of homelessness — 234,000 people, or about 1.5 per cent of the population — recorded in an internal government document.

“The 234,000 number does not represent the number of people experiencing homelessness in Ontario,” wrote Justine Teplycky, spokesperson for Municipal Affairs and Housing Minister Paul Calandra, in an email last week. 

Various opposition and municipal politicians seized on the figure earlier this month after The Trillium reported that it was contained within the transition binder the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing prepared for its new associate minister a couple months ago.

At least one more key data point in the binder — that 59,100 recipients of a pair of the province’s main social support payments were homeless in April — was also inaccurate, according to Teplycky. Its inclusion was “due to an error,” she said, adding that actually 31,642 Ontario Works (OW) and Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) recipients received the payments while experiencing homelessness that month.

The Trillium had twice requested further information on those statistics from the housing minister’s spokespeople the week before the story was published. It was only after the uproar that the office issued a statement saying they were inaccurate.

The housing minister’s office hasn’t explained how the “unofficial estimate” of almost a quarter million in the binder was reached, nor has it provided a different estimate of Ontario’s homeless population. Instead, Teplycky said the number of people experiencing homelessness in Ontario is “significantly lower” than 234,000, and that Statistics Canada data suggests about 156,000 households in the province spend enough of their income to be considered “at risk” of becoming homeless. There were 2.6 people in the average Ontario household in 2021.

Data gathered from handfuls of other sources, including other levels of government, third-party groups, experts and their research, suggests anywhere from tens of thousands to a low six-figure total number of people have experienced some type of homelessness in Ontario within the last year.

Available data aligns indicating homelessness has worsened in the province, compared to several years ago. Ahead of last week’s Association of Municipalities of Ontario (AMO) conference, mayors of the province’s biggest cities described the issue as critical and a top concern they planned to raise to Premier Doug Ford’s cabinet ministers.

In general, the scale of the homelessness problem is challenging to measure, according to experts on the issue.

Even the most visible and severe ways people experience homelessness — like sleeping outside or in emergency shelters — is challenging to properly gauge.

Many go-to ways governments collect data can’t be applied to homelessness. For example, household-based surveys — such as the Canadian census — can not, by nature, yield reliable information about homelessness.

Of the ways that homelessness data is collected, each “has different strengths and limitations,” said Abe Oudshoorn, a Western University researcher and managing editor of the International Journal on Homelessness.

Counting the number of people receiving OW and ODSP payments who are homeless “is going to underestimate” the scope of homelessness, Oudshoorn said, as it leaves out anyone experiencing it and not receiving those support payments. According to Teplycky, 31,816 OW/ODSP beneficiaries experienced homelessness in June, 174 more than those who did in April.

Most large cities and towns in Ontario track how many people use emergency shelters in their communities. Across Ontario, shelters can accommodate slightly over 20,000 people each night. Nowadays, they tend to be at capacity or close to it most nights. These tallies can’t get the full picture because they don’t account for anyone sleeping in parks, alleyways, on sidewalks, or elsewhere.

In a report published in July, AMO said Ontario municipalities it surveyed observed at least 1,400 homeless encampments in the province last year. These encampments would have included anywhere between a single person to upwards of 100 people apiece, according to information in the association’s report.

In another report published five years ago, AMO estimated that 90,000 people in Ontario experienced visible homelessness of some kind in 2019.

One increasingly popular way governments in Canada try to measure how many people experience homelessness at one time is through point-in-time counts. They tend to be done by municipal staff, volunteers, and sometimes with support from other levels of government or organizations. A typical point-in-time count consists of surveying people in shelters, sleeping outside, or temporarily living in transitional housing spaces to produce a tally of the number of homeless people and collect other data about their circumstances.

The Canadian government has coordinated three nationally scoped point-in-time counts, including in 2016, 2018, and across 2020 to 2022. Its most recent count had to incorporate communities’ counts over a wider range of dates because of pandemic challenges.

Twenty-five of Ontario’s biggest cities, towns and regions participated in the latest national point-in-time count. They found “a total of 15,776 people … to be experiencing homelessness on a given night,” a spokesperson of the Department of Housing, Infrastructure and Communities of Canada said in an email.

The federal government’s report on its latest national point-in-time count found “the overall number of people experiencing homelessness increased by 20 per cent” in the 67 communities that participated in its 2020 to 2022 count, compared to its 2018 tally. Most of the same Ontario cities, towns, and regions took part in both.

Point-in-time counts can be “great, depending on what time they’re done,” Oudshoorn said, but they, too, can’t capture the scope of the issue at a provincial level.

Take, for example, that AMO’s report on encampments from 2023 said they had been found “in all types of communities, including urban, small town, rural, and northern Ontario.” Meanwhile, very few of Ontario’s small or rural municipalities had been amongst the 25 that participated in the federal government’s latest national point-in-time counts.

Data gathered for a 2022 research paper on rural homelessness in Canada suggests thousands more people are homeless on any given night in Ontario’s small, remote and northern communities.

Point-in-time tallies also limit the picture of homelessness to that of any given day, whereas governments tend to measure the extent of the issue based on the number of people experiencing it within a longer period, like a year.

Oudshoorn said information collected through point-in-time counts could be strengthened by comparing it with homelessness data collected through other means. “And we haven’t done that,” he said.

“The feds have been talking about linking point-in-time data, tax data, (and) shelter data, and they’re trialling that in Calgary, but it’s not done right now,” Oudshoorn added.

A different tack researchers have taken to try to estimate the prevalence of homelessness in Ontario is by using health-care system data indicative of patients’ housing status. Their 2019-published peer-reviewed study on a decade’s worth of data estimated about 59,974 people experienced homelessness in Ontario in 2016, a 67.3 per cent increase from 2007.

Cheryl Forchuk, one of the researchers who worked on the health-care-based data homelessness study, wrote in an email that its findings are “also going to underestimate (the homelessness population) given that not all touch the health-care sector in a year.”

If the trend in their study’s findings was coupled with other available data about the increased escalation of homelessness in Ontario, it would suggest that well over 100,000 people in the province now experience homelessness in a year.

“(It) does suggest numbers not far off the ‘Ontario’ estimate, particularly factoring not all touch health care,” Forchuk wrote in her email last week.

Another obstacle to accurately measuring homelessness is the debate around what, exactly, constitutes homelessness. “It’s of course a contentious area because it’s political in nature how we scale a problem like this,” Oudshoorn said. “The challenge is, of course, who counts?”

Statistics Canada found from surveys in 2018 and 2021 that four times as many Canadians have experienced “hidden homelessness” in their lifetime than have utilized shelters or been completely unsheltered. Hidden homelessness refers to people who are without their own housing but temporarily have somewhere to live, such as by couch-surfing.

In its 2021 audit on homelessness, Ontario’s auditor general wrote that, “Most of the work being done to tackle homelessness is city-specific and, as a result, there exists a patchwork of collected data, making it difficult to systemically understand the state of homelessness in Ontario.” 

In a follow-up report published last December, the auditor general noted the provincial government had implemented three of its seven recommendations from 2021 about improving data limitations, was working on another, and had made little or no progress on three.

One of the provincial government’s focuses related to homelessness “is on better measuring homelessness and information on the needs of people experiencing homelessness to help connect them to services and supports,” the transition binder given to the associate housing minister in June said. One way it listed trying to achieve this is through 47 municipal service managers’ use of by-name lists, described as “a real-time list of people experiencing homelessness in a community.”

Last October, the 47 service managers reported to the province that 2,500 people were living in encampments in Ontario, the binder said.

In a statement, Tim Richter, president and CEO of the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness, said it “isn’t surprising to anyone working to solve homelessness” that Ontario’s government doesn’t have a strong grasp on the scale of the issue in the province.

“Governments right across the country don't do a good job of measuring one of our biggest social and economic problems,” Richter added.

Following the COVID-19 pandemic, these municipal service managers “highlighted the continued need for funding to … respond to the increasingly complex needs of those experiencing homelessness and shelter capacity pressures resulting in homelessness encampments,” adds the binder.

Municipal service managers are also “responsible for the administration and delivery of community housing, including managing applications and centralized waitlists for rent-geared-to-income assistance in their respective areas,” the housing minister’s spokesperson said.

Rent-geared-to-income (RGI) housing programs provide tenants subsidized rent based on what they make, typically adjusting it to 30 per cent of their income. The associate housing minister’s transition binder said 184,400 households receive RGI assistance in Ontario. Nearly as many households — 176,804 — are waiting to receive RGI support, according to both the transition binder and minister’s office.

Waits to enter supportive housing that include embedded services like counselling, mental health, or addictions support, can also last years, according to the binder. It said 70,000 supportive housing spaces are currently utilized in Ontario, and tens of thousands more are needed.

According to Teplycky, the housing minister’s spokesperson, three provincial ministries have been working together to improve the supportive housing system, including by making it less difficult to access.

Despite steps the provincial government has taken, Oudshoorn said a “frustration” of his is that it’s “absent” in addressing homelessness, compared to efforts made by municipalities and the federal government.

“I think all you have to do is look at our parks to know that this is a crisis issue and we need all three orders of government … equally committed to solving this issue,” he said.