Published by CTV News on December 27, 2022
The true scale of homelessness is being grossly undercounted in the official estimates, experts say, leading to a chronic underfunding of programs designed to help unhoused people.
The most recent statistics of unhoused people nationwide are from 2016 in a Canadian Observatory on Homelessness report, which states more than 250,000 people in Canada experience homelessness in any given year.
According to a 2018 federal government report, on any given night across the country, 25,000 to 30,000 people do not have a place to call home.
But these numbers don’t tell the whole story because not every person experiencing homelessness gets counted.
“Homelessness is an increasingly visible humanitarian crisis and easy solutions have defied policymakers for decades,” Howard Koh, a professor of the practice of public health from Harvard University told CTVNews.ca in an interview. “We need a more unified and urgent collaboration in response to this crisis, and academia must be included among all sectors (must) step up and do more.”
*Image not owned by OAHS, from original CTV News article
