Canadian Homelessness

It is unspeakably difficult to understand how a wealthy country like Canada with its boundless opportunities for people to become well educated to qualify for employment, to live peaceful, equality-protected lives, a country where universal health services should ensure that no one is assailed by health problems that would devastate a life, still has a problem, as yet unsolved and representing a real social failure, of homelessness.

A study recently released, the joint work of the Canadian Homelessness Research Network and the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness, has reached conclusions on a national scale, and one of them is that roughly 200,000 people in Canada qualify for the designation of 'homeless' in any given year. The cost to the economy in emergency hospital care, social welfare assistance and policing among others, totals $7-billion annually.

The reasons for someone becoming homeless are various; some driven by the disfunctionality brought on by alcoholism, by drug addiction, by mental illness, and by extreme poverty resulting from job loss. Most communities operate food banks to aid the working poor and those on social welfare unable to cope with the basic cost of living.

Every municipality in the country has its own projects for the provision of assisted housing, of social welfare of one kind or another geared to help people find their way during unfortunate personal life stresses. Homelessness should not be an issue. Yet it continues to blot the conscience of the nation by its pervasiveness.

Even though some experiments with providing homeless people with rent-free places of their own, along with visits by social welfare agents and community health workers, and exposure to potential employment opportunities has been proven to be effective, restoring people to their rightful place in society and in the process saving governments at various levels money, but these initiatives have not yet been fully institutionalized.

There still remain large numbers of homeless people living rough, taking haven in uncertain weather conditions from area social-welfare-and-church-operated shelters, and women and children living temporarily in domestic violence shelters. Statistics appear to state that on any given night an average of 30,000 people can be found in homeless or domestic violence shelters, sleeping outside or housed temporarily in prisons or hospitals.

It is further estimated that as many as 50,000 additional people can be thought of as the "hidden homeless", people who stay over temporarily with friends or families with nowhere else to go, dependent on the goodwill of friends and family, according to the State of Homelessness in Canada: 2013 conclusion.

"Those decisions on how to respond to homelessness need to be based on evidence, what we know that works, not just on ideas we pull out of a hat", stated the lead author of the report, Stephen Gaetz, director of the Canadian Homelessness Research Network.

Emergencies such as "homelessness" require urgent, practical attention. Too much discussion, too little action to solve the endemic problem persist.