Thank you very much for the opportunity to be here this morning. My name is Sheldon Pollett. I represent an organization in St. John's, Newfoundland, called Choices for Youth. It's been in existence for about 25 years. We were created with the clergy of the Mount Cashel orphanage in St. John's. The reason I tell that story is when that happened, obviously tragic circumstances around that event with youth who required support didn't disappear along with that facility. For 25 years we focused on providing youth with choice and opportunity to effect the changes in their own lives.
Although I can talk about any number of things related to at-risk and homeless youth in this country and certainly in our province, what I want to talk about this morning is the growing conversation around how to prevent and end youth homelessness in Canada.
I'm also a part of A Way Home Canada, which is a new national coalition that was launched this past January. It's a collection of agencies and partners across the country working to end youth homelessness, which has also spawned A Way Home in the United States and some efforts on A Way in Europe around the same approach.
I want to talk this morning along the same lines of what I brought to the recent national housing strategy consultations around how the federal government can prioritize the creation of plans across this country to end youth homelessness. We live and work in a world, in communities, in provinces across this country, in a very fragmented systems approach to providing supports and services to at-risk youth at great expense to government at the same time for very poor outcomes. I can't stress that enough.
Although many of the policy areas governing the issues that come to bear on youth homelessness are governed by the provinces, how can the federal government play that role? The federal government has played a huge role in homeless partnering strategy over the last 15 years and now in the significant shift to housing first principles. For those of you who are not familiar with that language, it's a very simple concept: help someone with complex needs find a place to live and then do everything in your power to help them maintain a place to live.
Based on that principle, the federal government certainly has played a key role in seeing that approach, which is really a global approach at this point, being implemented in every community across the country receiving homelessness funding from the federal government.
Many of my colleagues and I would like to see a growing move toward provincial-level plans to end youth homelessness. Many groups like ours can be very innovative, very resourceful. We can draw on many partners from the private sector as well, but we cannot change the systems that dump young people into homelessness in the first place. These systems fundamentally have to change. The only way to do that is to have truly integrated public policy that weaves together both the policy implications and the funding investments that come to bear on that.
Some examples are the federal government's push toward a national housing strategy. For many years in this country, the federal government has been investing in crime prevention strategies, youth employment strategies, homelessness strategies. The shocking or not shocking thing about this is that you are all targeting the same young people with very distinct, separate, unaligned, unintegrated approaches.
In short, we're advocating federal prioritization of provincial-level plans around the issue of youth homelessness. Who does that involve? It involves health, justice, education, child welfare, income support, any system or policy that comes to bear on changing the outcomes for homeless and at-risk people.
Behind all this is a lot of work done by the Canadian Observatory On Homelessness in conjunction with A Way Home Canada that looks at.... Right now, we have what I call a system addicted to crisis. The only way and only time they know how to respond is in a crisis: emergency shelter, hospitalization, child apprehension, incarceration. Those are all exceptionally expensive crisis responses, which also come with very poor outcomes later in life.
The appropriate response at this point is to shrink the crisis response system. You're always going to need a crisis response system, just as someone is always going to break a leg in the middle of the night. You need an emergency room, but the trick is preventing people from ending up there in the first place and then, when they do, getting them out of there in a healthy way as quickly as possible. So with the shrinkage of the crisis response system, you increase the prevention work that you do around ending youth homelessness, and then you also up the housing and support options required to lead to good outcomes for young people later in life.
We all live in a world of limited resources for any number of key pieces of public policy. Everyone looks at the cost of investing now, but rarely do we have the conversation about the cost of doing nothing. I can tell you the cost of doing nothing, both in terms of human lives and in terms of finances, is exponentially higher. You look at what it costs to incarcerate someone, what it costs to apprehend a child. Doing nothing is invariably 10 times the financial cost of that.
If you look at our organization alone, you'll see that we serve a small city, but a growing number of young people in our city are facing homelessness or risk of homelessness. You'll see that 63% of the young people we see on a daily basis have past or current experience with the child welfare system, and 75% have past or current experience with the justice system. With regard to housing and stability, 70% are experiencing recurring homelessness, they're not in school, and they're not employed.
When I talk about integrated public policy, you have to understand that they live their lives. Those are not distinct young people showing up in each of those categories. They are the same young people showing up primarily in each and every one of those categories. So the policy and the system environment you need to respond to appropriately needs to reflect that. Right now and for many years, it has not.