Northern Ontario leaders to meet over homelessness 'crisis'

When northern Ontario's municipal leaders gather for their annual general meetings this spring, they'll rally around ideas to solve what the region's think tank is calling a homelessness "crisis."

The Northwestern Ontario Municipal Association (NOMA) and the Federation Of Northern Ontario Municipalities (FONOM) will meet over conferences in April and May, respectively. City and town leaders will fine-tune a draft paper the Northern Policy Institute produced on homelessness and related social issues earlier this year.

NOMA president and Shuniah Mayor Wendy Landry agrees with the paper's contentions that these issues are not only serious across the region, but also that municipalities don't have the money or mandate to solve them without support from Ontario and Canada.

She hopes the meetings, the final report they will help produce, and subsequent lobbying efforts will help to produce a framework that will solve the underlying causes, permanently.

"What we hope to do is come up with solutions so we're working ourselves out of work, so that homelessness isn't a topic of discussion anymore; that there's solutions brought forward to deal with the systemic pieces that contribute to homelessness; and to have policies that are collaborative between ministries working together on the prevention of homelessness, mental health and addictions," she said. 

The paper recommends eight strategies that institute researchers say already align with the province's policy directives. Those include funding capital repairs and new builds focused on Housing First and Indigenous-focused programs, mandating mobile crisis units, and it calls for the province to help the medical professional shortage while building a Northern Mental Health and Addictions Centre of Excellence.

Waiting list for public housing

The region's challenges are stark. According to Northern Ontario Services Deliverer's Association (NOSDA), there are 8,400 northern Ontarians on waiting lists for public housing units, nearly as many as the 9,322 units that currently exist.

"There hasn't been much movement in terms of the individuals that are able to access this type of housing," said NPI research manager Rachel Rizzuto. "So across all the District Social Service Administration board areas, we see it's pretty stagnant for the past couple of years since 2016."

"So that can indicate to us that there isn't enough stock out there to in order to help people get into that community housing."

Cochrane, Nipissing, Kenora and Thunder Bay all have a higher homeless rate than Toronto and at least double that of Ottawa. Self-identified mental health and addiction issues among the homeless are far more prevalent than rates in the general population. Indigenous people are greatly over-represented among the homeless, with rates as high as 88 per cent recorded during a Point-In-Time count in Kenora.

Opioid deaths, hospitalizations rising

The steepening opioid crisis has demanded attention, beyond other addictions. While opioid-related deaths in Ontario nearly doubled from 2019 to 2020 to 14 per 100,000 people, every northern health unit reported figures far exceeding that average. Sudbury was the highest, with 53 deaths per 100,000 people.

All northern health units but Timiskaming experienced a "statistically significant" spike in opioid-related deaths over the pandemic's first year, and all health units experienced an increase in hospitalizations due to opiate use.

FONOM president and Temiskaming Shores Coun. Danny Whalen says he recognizes the serious impact of the opioid crisis but he insists that addressing it needs to be part of a holistic approach that includes the broader picture of intertwined social issues.

"We've been separating them [opiates] out for so long now, and we're saying we shouldn't be," he said. "If we're talking mental health and addiction, we shouldn't be excluding opioids because that's one of the major addictions. And yet we've always spoken about that separately for some reason."

Whalen led 23 northern Ontario representatives in a virtual call with provincial ministers at the Rural Ontario Municipal Association (ROMA) conference in January. Referencing the draft NPI report, he introduced each representative individually to illustrate the unity throughout the region on calls for action.

Having heard positive feedback from the Ontario government on the prospect of northern unity on policy, he's looking forward to ensuring the cities and towns of the region feel their nuanced concerns are included.

"These problems are not big city problems," he said. "So the smallest municipality that attends the FONOM conference gets the benefit of roundtables with their peers meeting town or township or large city so that they can say, 'here's my problem and I don't have the tools to deal with it' and they can get some input on what other people are doing."

NOMA will hold its conference from April 27 to 29 and FONOM will meet from May 9 to 11.