I agree with everything the previous speaker said. We obviously need data to be able to see as clearly as possible the challenges we are facing and to be able to find good solutions.
But the fundamental problem with homelessness is the whole debate about what is and what is not a proper count. A few years ago, the City of Montreal counted about 3,000 homeless people in Montreal. However, that is not what we are seeing on the ground. They only counted people who, at a given time or on a specific day of the year, were on the street, period. They did not take into account all the strategies that people who are homeless or experiencing homelessness use, such as sleeping sometimes here and sometimes there. For example, I think of women who have become homeless because they can no longer afford a place to live, but who avoid sleeping on a park bench by all sorts of means. They are no less homeless, but they are never counted as such.
This means that the way in which the number of homeless people is determined is a fundamental problem. I feel that, if the count considered those strategies, we would come up with a much higher number than we had imagined.
The problems of homelessness among indigenous people have been relatively well documented in Quebec, particularly in Montreal and Gatineau, as well as in some other cities.
In the case of racialized people, there have been some clues, but no counts. Therefore, I am not in a position to tell you whether or not the technique currently in use is adequate or not. We can see, particularly in Montreal, that more and more racialized people are on the streets. This is a relatively recent trend, I would say, but I'm not sure whether their proportion is higher than that of the general population. I'm not able to tell you that.
In any case, I would like to stress that, from the outset, the method needs to be reviewed, because it gives us what I would call a false sense of comfort about what is really happening in cities.