Ending Homelessness in Canada: The Case for Homelessness Prevention

by James Hughes

More Canadians than ever lack a home. Almost every town and city now has homeless residents. Municipalities scramble to provide shelters, and local politicians debate whether to take action to end sleeping on vacant land and in parks.



Ending Homelessness in Canada gets at the root causes of homelessness and the solutions and practices that can be employed to end it. Contributors involved in working to end homelessness address the key factors producing homelessness and describe a wide range of innovative measures to halt the flow. 



The  

                                         

Cécile Arbaud is the executive director of Dans La Rue an organization dedicated to assisting youth experiencing homelessness. She lives in Montreal, QC.



Robert Byers is the president and CEO of Namerind Housing Corporation, a provider of affordable housing to the Indigenous community. He lives in Regina, SK.



Art Campbell is the regional director of Reintegration and Social Inclusion for YMCA Quebec. He lives in Montreal, QC.



Erin Dej is an associate professor in the Department of Criminology at Wilfrid Laurier University. She lives in Cambridge, Ontario.



Pearl Eliadis is an associate professor (professional) at the Max Bell school of Public Policy and a human rights lawyer. She is based in Montreal, QC.



Stephen Gaetz is the director of the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness and a professor at York University. He lives in Colborne, ON.



Eric Latimer is a research scientist at the Douglas Mental Health University Institute and a professor in the department of psychiatry at McGill university. He lives in Montreal, QC.



Georges Ohana is the director of Homelessness prevention and research at the Old Brewery Mission, the largest organization serving homeless people in Quebec. He lives and works in the great Montreal Area of Quebec.



Marie McGregor Pitawanakwat works within the Women's National Housing & Homelessness Network. She lives in Toronto, Ontario.



Michael L. Rice is the Chair of the First Nations Market Housing Fund which is an Indigenous directed organization promoting home ownership for First Nations people across Canada. He is Kanien’kehà:ka (Mohawk) of the Bear Clan and resides in Kahnawake.





Kaitlin Schwan is the executive director of the Women’s National Housing & Homelessness Network. She lives in Toronto, ON.

184 pages, Paperback

Published March 19, 2024

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Josiah Coolen · Rating 4 out of 5]

a helpful read, some chapters better than others, couple instances where authors contradicted other principles that had already been laid out in the book

ch 7 was easily the most thought provoking. provided a really helpful timeline explicitly linking colonization to high rates of homelessness for indigenous ppl/loss of opportunity for agency/independence/self sufficiency

[Carolyn Whitzman · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’d highly recommend this book to anyone interested in what can be done to end homelessness in Canada. The contributions by Indigenous activist Marie McGregor Pitawanakwat and housing/ service provider Robert Byers were particularly good, tackling the impacts of land dispossession and underfunding respectively. While there are chapters on addressing mental illness, violence against women, youth in care, etc, the common thread is that you can’t prevent homelessness without adequate housing with care. This preventing homelessness starts with mainstreaming it within housing policy, a process that is only now starting to occur.

[Samuel Massicotte · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has some great content and some less great content. I started enthousiastically reading it, as I wanted to learn more about homelessness and the ways to solve it. There are some important flaws with this book. The first major flaw I noticed were grammar mistakes. I spotted a couple of them during my reading. Clearly this book had been unduly rushed through publishing without a careful read. A second flaw is a lack of explanation of the structure of the book. We are thrown into specific chapters but the main structure of the work is never explained well. There should be a preface, I did not expect there to be multiple authors. These authors often disagree, sometimes when it comes to minor policy changes, others on more important viewpoints. I found, and was somewhat disappointed by, the heavy politics of some authors. It gave me the impression that the appearances of supporting social justice was more important than actual concrete solutions and policy measures. Vague claims such as « we must end homelessness by ending transphobia and homophobia » need to be more detailed or explained. You must convince the reader of your point as much as outlining your views. In addition, there was almost no mention of actually solving current homelessness, only on the prevention measures. The book is about ending homelessness, but never explains in detail how this can only be done through prevention. Why is it impossible to help our current homeless? Yes, we must close the tap, but what about the water that’s in the bathtup? Why are there no policy measures proposed to help them get off the street specifically? It’s taken for granted that the reader can understand, but that has to be demonstrated.
Indeed, this book takes a lot of positions for granted without explaining it to the reader. The authors are often disparate, which reflects a common theme of the book:
There is no centralized system for dealing with homelessness. There are community centres, there are nonprofit organizations, but the government, while funding these organizations, has not involved themselves or created any institutions for dealing with homelessness. They leave the work to nonprofits, which makes it chaotic. A bunch of little programs but no unified direction.
But this work has elucidated much still for me.