When local councillors and mayors descend on Ottawa next week for an annual municipal lobbying event, homelessness and growing social problems in Ontario’s towns and cities will be top of mind.
The Association of Municipalities of Ontario conference in Ottawa — set to run from Aug. 18-21 — is an annual opportunity for local leaders to bend the ear of Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s most senior ministers.
Pressure in recent weeks has grown from Ontario municipalities telling Queen’s Park the current system isn’t working, demanding a so-called new deal for property taxpayers and a top-to-bottom review of social and economic prosperity.
AMO executive director Brian Rosborough said addressing those issues will be a key focus of the conference.
“What success would look like is a commitment from the province that they want to work with — with AMO, with municipalities across the province — to take a look at how together we can make sure that we can safeguard the economic and social prosperity of this province,” he told Global News.
The tough-to-tackle advent and augmentation of homeless encampments in downtowns has come to symbolize how funding and distribution of responsibilities are failing Ontario’s most vulnerable.
Over the years, local leaders have complained that the provincial government has handed over services for them to deliver that were traditionally accepted to be responsibilities for Queen’s Park. Help for seniors, health and child care programs and, perhaps most controversially, housing have all fallen to municipal councils to administer to some degree.
“This is not a municipal focus,” Burlington Mayor Marianne Meed Ward told Global News.
“We deal with potholes and community centres and parks. But we are actually stepping into helping with supportive housing, with mental health, with addictions … but we’re subsidizing the province even on those programs.”
Meed Ward, who chairs Ontario’s Big City Mayors, is leading a call for the province to take a coordinated approach to tackling homelessness as a key symptom of wider issues.
“This is thousands of people living in the streets. There doesn’t seem to be any predictability of where these pop up or the magnitude of it,” she said.
The issue is one the Ford government is tracking.
Internal government briefing notes prepared in June show Queen’s Park estimates that roughly 59,100 people are homeless in Ontario, based on the number of people signed up to certain benefit programs. Between 41 and 65 per cent of those have been homeless for more than half a year.
The briefing notes, obtained by Global News using freedom of information laws, show that in October 2023 the province believed there were 2,500 people living in encampments across the province.
AMO estimated that there were 1,400 total encampments in 2023 in its own report.
“We’ve got a huge problem in our downtown areas, especially in northern Ontario where there’s four times the rate of homelessness, mental health and addictions,” Colin Best, AMO president, told Global News.
“Each community’s unique, we’ve got different challenges… but we also need to work together and say what works and what are best practices to maybe solve these problems and help everybody.”
AMO and many of its municipal delegates hope that a strong commitment from the province to tackle the social and economic causes of hardship will come next week when Ontario Premier Doug Ford speaks to the conference, along with his health, housing ministers and cabinet.
“We’re looking at a whole social review… saying that we’ve got to find a better way of doing this,” Best explained, adding there is flexibility on what that looks like.
Meed Ward said that from Ontario’s Big City Mayors, the cry will be simple: a new approach to housing and homelessness is urgent.
“This is our singular message for OBCM,” she said.
“We have asked for and received delegations with a number of ministers and that’s our ask: you have a role to play here, we have a humanitarian crisis unfolding on our streets, it touches upwards of 16 different ministries and you all have a role to play.”