It is estimated that more than 235,000 Canadians will experience homelessness in any one year. The same research indicates that 35,000 Canadians will be homeless, either chronically or temporarily, on any given night.
As much media attention as it receives, Victoria’s tent city is only the barely visible symptom of a much more extensive malaise.
According to research by the Mental Health Commission, a national advisory group funded by Health Canada, more than 500,000 people with various degrees of mental illness live in what the commission defines as “poor” or inadequate housing.
Health and mental health, says the commission, are both negatively influenced by a set of individual, economic and social factors, including poverty, housing and community supports.
But it is the lack of safe housing that takes the greater toll on health, mental health and quality of life. It can, suggests the commission, significantly reduce a person’s life expectancy and affect any chances of moving out of poverty, engaging in employment, even fostering social networks.
By contrast, access to affordable and secure housing has been shown to improve health and well-being, reduce stress and provide a foundation for recovery for those experiencing mental-health problems.
The percentage of Canadians living with mental illness who need access to safe, affordable housing is almost double the need in the general population. Not only is housing needed, but housing stability and access to individualized services and supports is vital to health recovery, especially for people who have longer-term experiences of homelessness.
Why the interest of a retired superintendent of schools in this? Because if I learned anything from 37 years in public education, both in classrooms and in the head office, it was that denying the existence of a problem or hoping that somehow it will solve itself or just go away accomplishes nothing.
Maybe that’s why, over the years, I developed an interest in research about finding solutions to systemic problems — problems that are far larger than the symptomatic event right in front of you, which is more often than not simply the surface indicator that something far deeper is wrong.
The kind of numbers quoted above certainly indicate that Victoria’s tent city is a symptom of a national systemic problem in need of more than Band-Aid solutions. A first step to solving most problems, systemic or immediate, is to categorize the problem in terms of severity and priority — to triage that problem but then understand that, if something systemic is not fixed, you’ll be doing the same short-term fix again, and soon. No real progress there.
Part of that process is taking into account the broader impact of the associated incidents and their frequency of occurrence. Victoria’s first responders have been clear in expressing their concerns about the safety of the campers, but in the case of the recent judicial decision about the tent city, we might have seen a complete lack of understanding about broader neighbourhood impact, much less the systemic source of the problem.
If we believe that tent city is the crisis, decision-makers needed to understand, first hand, that they were dealing with a systemic failure, not just a one-off event, and some questions need to be asked and answered. Those responses should come from those, provincially and federally, who have both the authority and wherewithal to address the problem beyond expressions of empathy and concern.
Ironically, according to a research paper by the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness, homelessness alone costs the Canadian economy more than $7 billion a year. In other words, it costs more to ignore the Canadian housing problem than it would to fix it.
While the government of Canada invests about $119 million annually to address homelessness through the Homelessness Partnering Strategy (provinces and municipalities also invest), by not investing adequately in housing for the poorest Canadians, costs of health care, justice and other taxpayer-funded services increase exponentially.
And those numbers lead us straight to the most important question of all — what is the long-term impact of not resolving the immediate problem?
The answer to that question, if there is one, goes far beyond the dollar cost of just cleaning up the tent-city campsite and appeasing the neighbours.
Geoff Johnson is a retired
superintendent of schools.
