Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'd also like to acknowledge the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin people from which I am joining you this evening. I have the privilege to work and live here.
Mr. Chair and committee members, thank you for the invitation to speak with you today about the federal government's approach to preventing and addressing urban, rural and northern indigenous homelessness.
This evening I will provide a description of the Reaching Home program, a brief history of federal indigenous homelessness programming, and an overview of the current federal efforts to address indigenous homelessness, including in urban, rural and northern communities.
Reaching Home, Canada's homelessness strategy, is a community-based program aimed at preventing and reducing homelessness across Canada. Reaching Home replaced the homelessness partnering strategy in April 2019 and represents a $2.2-billion investment over 10 years to tackle homelessness.
Under Reaching Home, direct financial support is provided to community entities. These are organizations responsible for managing funding in their community or region according to homelessness needs and priorities.
Reaching Home supports the goals of the national housing strategy, in particular its objectives to assist the most vulnerable Canadians in maintaining safe, stable and affordable housing, and to reduce chronic homelessness in half by 2028. This is a goal that will be evolving along the lines expressed in the last Speech from the Throne.
To understand Reaching Home, it's useful to look to past federal homelessness programming. The overrepresentation of indigenous people in the homeless population has been known for some time, and significant investments have been made under federal homelessness programming to address this issue.
In 1999, the government launched the national homelessness initiative, and under this initiative it introduced an aboriginal homelessness stream. Dedicated funding was provided for the first time to indigenous organizations to provide programs and services that met the distinct needs of indigenous people experiencing or at risk of experiencing homelessness.
While the initial aboriginal homelessness stream only provided $8.1 million annually to eight cities across Canada, the funding was later increased to expand to other communities, and the annual total investment eventually reached $14.3 million. Budget 2016 then doubled the funding available under this stream to bring it to $28.7 million annually.
Since the launch of Reaching Home, financial support to reduce indigenous homelessness has expanded to 30 urban communities and seven regional areas, including a recent expansion to Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador.
Reaching Home recognizes that indigenous people are overrepresented in homelessness. That is why $413 million has been dedicated to address indigenous homelessness over nine years. Of this amount, the program is investing $261 million over nine years—approximately $29 million a year—through the existing indigenous homelessness stream to maintain the community-based approach and to help organizations provide culturally appropriate supports and services for all indigenous people in those communities.
In addition, as part of the Reaching Home program, a new funding envelope of $152 million over nine years was created for the development and implementation of distinction-based approaches to homelessness.
ESDC has been engaging with national indigenous organizations in alignment with the permanent bilateral mechanisms to ensure that funding meaningfully responds to the needs of first nations, Métis and Inuit. Our engagement efforts are focused on identifying homelessness-related priorities and concluding funding agreements to pursue distinctions-based approaches.
For the first time, funding for modern treaty holders that have provisions in their treaties related to health and social services is also being explored. ESDC has identified 20 modern treaty holders with these provisions, and engagement to establish homelessness funding agreements is at various stages.
I will also note that Reaching Home established a new territorial homelessness stream, with funding of $23 million over five years. While the territorial homelessness stream is not indigenous-specific, it does have a significant focus on indigenous homelessness, given the high proportion of indigenous peoples in these territories.
Further, Reaching Home has two other funding streams—the designated communities stream and the rural and remote homelessness stream—and these can also help provide supports and services to indigenous peoples.
While it is important to recognize that the investments have been increased over time and program improvements have been made, our work is clearly not done. In 2018, 30% of the homeless population in Canada identified as indigenous, while indigenous peoples account for roughly 5% of the total population.
The prevalence of indigenous homelessness and the overrepresentation of indigenous people within the homeless population are ongoing concerns. They are linked to the experience with colonialism, to intergenerational trauma, as well as to a number of other structural, systemic, individual or relational factors.
That is why we welcome this committee's interest in the issue of indigenous homelessness, particularly in the context of the recent Speech from the Throne commitment to ending chronic homelessness, because it will be imperative to prevent and address indigenous homelessness if we are to attain this ambitious goal.
I look forward to recommendations on how urban, rural and northern indigenous housing and homelessness can be addressed, and I will do my best to answer any questions you may have.
Thank you.