Waterloo Council endorses damning report on homelessness in Ontario

The numbers are heartbreaking and the estimated costs to solve the homelessness crisis in this province are staggering.

The report by the Association of Ontario Municipalities (AMO) is titled Municipalities Under Pressure: The Human and Financial Cost of Ontario’s Homelessness Crisis. It shows that 81,515 Ontarians experienced known homelessness in 2024. That’s a 25 per cent jump since 2022. To make matters worse, most advocates and experts agree that number is likely higher.

The report also shows that if left unchecked, the unhoused population could more than triple to over 294,000 people by 2035 — nearly the population of Windsor, Ont.

Waterloo Mayor, Dorothy McCabe was a guest on The Mike Farwell Show and said many of the issues brought up in the report are issues they are seeing on the ground. The overwhelming sentiment is that the province has abandoned its responsibility to deal with addiction and homelessness, foisting the burden onto the municipal property taxpayer.

“Municipalities are doing what we can. The property tax system was never set up or designed to deal with a complex social issue like homelessness or the opioid crisis. We need provincial help,” she said.

McCabe believes a provincial election is the perfect time to wave the flag of support for municipalities. She also added that reports like these are vital in the fight for upper governmental funding.

“That’s why a report like that is so important because data is data and facts are facts. So, we just have to keep putting that forward and telling the story and talking to our colleagues at the provincial and federal government to say, pay attention to this. This is a crisis, we need your support.”

Earlier this week, federal housing and infrastructure minister Nate Erskine-Smith was in Waterloo Region to announce federal transit funding. That announcement also came with a plan to provide $5.4 million over two years to cover operating and capital costs at the newly renovated women’s shelter on Frederick Street.

The funding is coming from the Unsheltered Homelessness and Encampment Initiative. McCabe says the funding is more than welcome but it’s too bad it won’t get the boost homelessness initiatives in other provinces have benefited from.

“My understanding is that across the country, that initiative was matched in other provinces by provincial governments and it wasn’t matched here. That could be because we’re in the middle of a provincial campaign, I don’t know.”

Waterloo City Council got a chance to look at the report this week and did vote to endorse it, along with several other municipalities in the province.