Canada doesn’t lack the knowledge, tools, or capacity to end homelessness. What we’re missing is a strategy. Despite significant federal spending, homelessness has worsened, unsheltered homelessness is surging, and more people are on the brink of losing their home. On the ground across the country, communities, workers, and organizations are doing their best with limited resources to respond to encampments, overcrowded shelters, and insufficient pathways to get people into housing.

The expiring National Housing Strategy had an ambitious agenda but did not articulate a plan for preventing, reducing, or ending homelessness. Reaching Home, the federal government’s homelessness program, has been an important tool for the communities it supports. But it’s a program operating without a national strategy, clearly defined approach, or agreed-upon targets for reducing homelessness.

Homelessness lives and is solved at the local level and senior governments have an important role to play by creating the policy and investment conditions for local systems to succeed. A well-defined strategy would provide a framework for collaboration with other levels of government and enable more strategic investment and policy decisions to accelerate Canada’s progress toward ending homelessness.

As part of the next national housing strategy, the federal government has an opportunity to implement a federal homelessness strategy that prevents homelessness and provides rapid, visible and meaningful reductions in homelessness across the country, anchored by a strengthened Reaching Home program, a renewed and re-imagined Canada Housing Benefit, coordination with housing policy, and alignment between other levels of government through a Canada Housing Accord.

National Homelessness Strategy

Rather than a static plan, Canada needs a dynamic, adaptive strategy on homelessness that leans on proven approaches to end homelessness to achieve rapid, meaningful, and visible community-level homelessness reductions.

The initial strategy should establish and clearly articulate a narrow set of goals that can be measured and understood by the public and decision-makers, including shared reduction targets and identified priorities (e.g. reducing chronic and unsheltered homelessness). To support achieving these goals, the strategy needs to ensure:

1. Coordination: FPT agreement on shared homelessness reduction outcomes, articulated in the Canada Housing Accord, with clear roles, responsibilities, and accountability mechanisms. This would include a federal leadership and convening role and provincial/ territorial responsibility for health, social services, and supportive housing operations.
2. Data modernization and accountability: To measure progress and shift approaches where needed, the strategy should include a pan-Canadian homelessness data framework, with consistent definitions, real-time by-name data infrastructure, modernized technology, and regular public reporting on outcomes.
3. Strong community homelessness response systems: A strengthened Reaching Home program that enables strong community homeless response systems, where local communities lead on delivering reductions, with support from federal and provincial governments.
4. Deeply affordable and supportive housing supply: Ensuring NHS housing programs and Build Canada Homes are explicitly aligned with homelessness reduction outcomes, by ensuring housing that is affordable to the lowest income households.
5. Income supports: Re-imagining the Canada Housing Benefit to provide targeted income assistance for people at risk of or experiencing homelessness to prevent homelessness homelessness through targeted support to households at imminent risk of eviction. This measure alone could reduce homelessness by over 60% in communities across the country.

Rooted in these strategy elements, the community-level progress that fuels national reductions takes an operating system that includes:

• By-name, real-time data that helps coordinate the local response, prevents homelessness and streamlines movement of people to the housing and supports they need.
• Coordinated and collective action, where all service providers and intersecting systems work together to prevent homelessness whenever possible and rapidly connect people that do become homeless to the housing and supports they need.
• Reduction through improvement, where the community homelessness response system uses data to track progress, test improvements, and adapt swiftly – continuously improving and innovating so homelessness rarely happens, is brief when it does, and doesn’t happen again to people who experience it.

Leveraging Reaching Home to Accelerate Homelessness Reduction

Reaching Home: Canada’s Homelessness Strategy provides funding to communities across Canada to deliver coordinated local responses, shelter services, housing placements, by-name data, and system coordination. Its existing setup makes it an ideal vehicle for a new homelessness strategy, but its role should focus on building community-level leadership and capacity – supporting high-performing, housing-focused local systems capable of continuous improvement towards homelessness reduction targets.

A stronger Reaching Home should be focused on:

• A clear national goal: Reaching Home should be explicitly oriented toward achieving measurable, community-level reductions in chronic, unsheltered, and veteran homelessness.
• An aligned national approach: Reaching Home should support an aligned national approach to preventing and reducing homelessness, outlined in a federal homelessness strategy and coordinated with provinces through a Canada Housing Accord.
• Expanded reach and increased resources: Reaching Home should be at least doubled in scale to approximately $800 million per year, to allow more communities to participate, to increase funding for Urban, Rural and Northern Indigenous homelessness, to expand support to rural and remote communities, and reflect the ambition of a renewed, outcome-focused mandate to end homelessness. Provincial participation should be negotiated through the next national housing strategy and Canada Housing Accord negotiation framework. Further, a refined Reaching Home should include a veteran homelessness program modelled on the US Department of Housing and Urban Development Veteran Affairs Supportive Housing (VASH) program that reduced veteran homelessness in the US by more than 50%.
• A reduction-focused funding structure that can build strong local systems:
  • Base funding: Minimum of 5 years of operational funding so communities can run a strong homeless system. Importantly, this funding needs to allow for the flexibility needed to support testing new ideas and continuous improvement.
  • System leadership and improvement funding: Build the operational capacity needed to run homelessness response like a system. This would fund the system leadership role through the Community Entity, enabling strong data quality and analytics, system improvement tracking, communication, strengthened community leadership, and continuous improvement.
  • Outcome incentives: Community Entities that demonstrate measurable reductions in homelessness – and progress towards community-identified conditions to end homelessness – should be rewarded with additional funding.
• An expanded Homelessness Reduction Innovation Fund (HRIF): An expanded HRIF would be used as a pathfinder for homelessness reduction, allowing the government to simultaneously and quickly achieve population level reductions in homelessness while showing communities how to use data driven continuous improvement to reduce homelessness, build coordinated homelessness response systems and spread effective practices across communities.
• Alignment with supply: Reaching Home community entities should be explicit partners in the delivery of Build Canada Homes and other federal investments, ensuring that federally funded units are prioritized for people experiencing homelessness.
• A shelter transformation fund: Establish a national fund that enables emergency shelters to adopt housing-focused operating models. This fund would support transformation of the necessary organizational, workforce, and infrastructure elements to shift emergency shelters to housing-focused interventions.

The federal government has a unique opportunity to establish a national homelessness strategy that clearly sets out its goals, priorities, and approach. With the renewal of the National Housing Strategy, a homelessness strategy is the necessary framework to help the federal government to shift from crisis management to meaningful and lasting homelessness reductions.