Human Resources Committee on June 11th, 2026

[The Chair, Liberal, Bobby Morrissey]

Thank you, Ms. Larouche.

Mr. Bailey, you have five minutes please.

[Burton Bailey, Conservative, Red Deer, AB]

Thank you, Chair.

Ms. Soroka, across Canada, homelessness is often accompanied by other issues, such as drug addiction. The opioid crisis is affecting everyone. Edmonton has seen hundreds of deaths among the homeless population. Opioid-related fatalities remain high.

In your experience at Jasper Place, what percentage of your clients need structural addiction treatment or recovery support before or concurrent with housing?

[Taylor Soroka]

None of them need it before housing. Housing is the foundational aspect that empowers and acts as the conduit to recovery. As an example, I have many clients who go into detox programs, but once they finish their medical-grade detox, they have nowhere safe to go. How do you remain safe and sober in an environment that made you start using substances in the first place?

We have to start with housing, because if someone leaves detox, they need a safe, sober place to stay. Housing is always the first step and the conduit to all of the other recovery-based solutions that we need.

[Burton Bailey, Conservative, Red Deer, AB]

I'm a big proponent of the Alberta recovery model. I believe in recovery, not enabling.

My question is about the housing first model. Without accountability or treatment for addictions, it led to higher rates of relapse and injury. It's exactly what you're saying.

I'm wondering if there needs to be a different form of transitional housing that occurs after detox, but before they go into more temporary housing. Would you agree with that statement?

[Taylor Soroka]

I would agree that we need spaces for people to exist while they navigate the scheme of life.

I run a program called recovery in transition, which holds people while they wait for that long-term recovery bed to become available. Even though we're currently very recovery-focused in Alberta, it can still be upwards of 10 weeks to actually access the long-term recovery program that can help someone have a new path for life.

You are right. We need those transitional spaces for people to exist, be safe, remain sober and incorporate tools that provide them the strength to not return to use. That is even just as simple as having someone to build a relationship with who gets to know their name and their story.

[Burton Bailey, Conservative, Red Deer, AB]

I really like the model of small groups of people, like Oxford House or 8 Pillars, but I wanted to ask you about healing house.

I sit on the health committee. The fact that you have medical beds.... That is something I feel every homeless shelter needs to incorporate in their model. It saves taxpayer money. However, I was shocked to hear that you're receiving only $140 a day for someone who is discharged.

How do you get those people? Do you get them from the navigation and support centres or do you get them directly from a doctor?

[Taylor Soroka]

They come directly from the five emergency departments in Edmonton. The only referral pathway is a social worker in the emergency department.

[Burton Bailey, Conservative, Red Deer, AB]

Are there any federal regulation barriers currently preventing your work or the work of other organizations like yours, and how could removing red tape on housing construction and treatment beds accelerate progress? That's that magic wand.

[Taylor Soroka]

Yes. Truly, finding organizations that work on the main level, connecting with people and funding them directly for those community-based solutions is the number one approach that will enable...and be a conduit to things moving faster.

[Burton Bailey, Conservative, Red Deer, AB]

The Auditor General and the Parliamentary Budget Officer have noted weak accountability and poor outcomes under Reaching Home, despite hundreds of millions of dollars in new funding.

Are there any accountability reforms that would strengthen integrity in public spending?

[Taylor Soroka]

I agree with some of the other presenters today. If we could have shared definitions across Canada, it would increase accountability to actual proven outcomes. Currently, none of the programs I operate fully align with the true philosophies of the programs we're saying we're operating, like housing first. It's tough.

[Burton Bailey, Conservative, Red Deer, AB]

I'd like to thank all of the witnesses for joining us today. On my summer tour, I'm going to call and see if you have time to welcome me and take me for a tour. I'd like to learn a lot more. Thank you.

Thank you, Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bobby Morrissey]

Thank you Mr. Bailey.

There was really good testimony given during this hour.

We'll conclude with Ms. Harrison for five minutes.

[Emma Harrison, Liberal, Peterborough, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Good morning to all of the witnesses. Thank you for the incredibly thoughtful testimony you've given so far.

The riding I represent is Peterborough.

My husband is a paramedic. I've seen how his job has so drastically changed from when he started to now. During the election, I asked him what the most challenging thing about his job was when he's responding to calls about the people who are unhoused in the riding. They get to know them and they know their story because the situation happens frequently. They're picking up the same person over and over again. He said the hardest thing is knowing there's nothing else he can do except drop them off at the emergency department, and more often than not, they don't even go in. They just walk away.

Ms. Boileau, how is your municipality coordinating with housing providers, shelters, health services and indigenous partners to create a more integrated homelessness response system?

[Michelle Boileau]

That's one area where we've seen the most progress, despite limited resources and increasing rates of homelessness. They're rates with which we can't keep up, given the resources we're receiving.

As I was saying, one thing we have managed to do very successfully is coordinate between community partners. Whether you want to consider it a legacy of the COVID pandemic or a crisis response and just a necessity, we've been coordinating much better and trying to break down the silos between community partners.

We're seeing collaboration between services with the mobile crisis response team, where you have a partnership between the Timmins Police Service and the Timmins and District Hospital. We have our indigenous-led outreach services that work in partnership with our social service administration board's housing service team. We have the fire keeper patrol, which is a great example of peer-led support and navigation support.

At this time, I would say, again, this is where there is a gap. This is very much community-led work being done. Quite honestly, we all came together to the table to collaborate on an application for a HART hub here in Ontario, which is the homelessness and addiction recovery treatment hubs model. The province has decided to put all its eggs into that basket. We were forced to get together and work together.

Unfortunately, we weren't recipients of one of the HART hub funding announcements here in Timmins, but we haven't left the table. We're staying at the table together, and we keep working towards a long-lasting solution.

[Emma Harrison, Liberal, Peterborough, ON]

In Peterborough, we were very lucky. We were the recipient of a HART hub. It's an incredible model. The success of it is going to be incredible. We feel so very fortunate to be recipients of that.

I think all of you have mentioned the Reaching Home program. I'd love to know more of what you'd like to see moving forward in the next iteration of that program. That is for any of the witnesses.

[Michelle Boileau]

If I may, since I still have my microphone on, I'll start. I agree with the testimony of the other two witnesses who spoke today.

The FCM supports the maintenance of Reaching Home. It's essential that we maintain Reaching Home, but that we continue to enhance it. At the very least, we need to index it to inflation. Especially that flexibility that Mr. Edström spoke so well to, as well as the predictability.... We need longer-term agreements.

I know the question was asked about whether or not we're actually delivering positive outcomes. As long as governments continue to expect municipalities and service providers to keep delivering outcomes within election cycles, we're never going to deliver the outcomes we're actually looking for. We need 10-year agreements and long-term agreements. We're in this for the long term. We're in this as long as there's homelessness. We need to have that predictability in the funding that's coming so that we can make sound operational decisions.

[Emma Harrison, Liberal, Peterborough, ON]

Mr. Edström, would you like to speak to the Reaching Home program and elaborate further on what you'd like to see?

[Eric Edström]

We're in it for the long term, baby. I heard that.

We have done the same thing for maybe 40-plus years. We need to address it on a longer term to be able to change it. We need to not despair and to keep fighting. That's the problem with the encampments and things like that. You don't have to think they have to be there or they will still be there in 10 or 20 years.

We said long-term flexibility and put in a little more money. We need indexation, at least, because every year it's not indexed, we are actually cutting corners and having to make hard decisions.

About the people who have addiction problems and are relapsing, relapse is part of the process, so trust the process.

That's all I have to say.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bobby Morrissey]

Thank you, Ms. Harrison.

Thank you, Madam Boileau, Madam Soroka and Mr. Edström, for your testimony today.

The committee will suspend while we transition to the next hour.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bobby Morrissey]

I call the meeting back to order.

Committee members, we will begin the second hour of today's committee hearing. We will move to our study on housing starts.

I would like to welcome our witnesses this morning. Both are appearing in the room.

We have Dr. Carolyn Whitzman, senior housing researcher at the University of Toronto's school of cities.

Welcome, Dr. Whitzman. You've been at this committee before.

From Rental Housing Canada, we have Tony Irwin, president and chief executive officer.

Welcome.

Each of you has up to five minutes for an opening statement.

We'll begin with Dr. Whitzman.

[Carolyn Whitzman, Senior Housing Researcher, University of Toronto School of Cities, As an Individual]

Thank you, Chair.

Good morning, everyone.

Thank you for having me here.

I'm going to start with three things, not magic wands, that might matter.

First, the next national housing strategy should create targets for affordable market and non-market housing completions, not starts. That builds on some of the testimony you heard in the last hour.

Second, the next national housing strategy should adopt one definition of affordable housing for all of its programs, and that should be based on an area's median household income bands. Middle-income people need different interventions from low-income people.

Third, the federal government should adopt programs to achieve targets of 200,000 new or acquired affordable non-market homes being developed per year, with half of these being deeply affordable for very low- to low-income households, towards an eventual goal of 20% of all housing stock being non-market.

I have written a book called Home Truths: Fixing Canada's Housing Crisis and I've done some recent work for the federal housing advocate on a rights-based approach to housing needs.

I want to start with the title of this particular hearing. We should be measuring housing completions, not starts, because people can't live on a construction site, and there are too many stalled projects in Canada. That's something my colleague would definitely agree with.

Despite greater federal engagement in housing policy since the 2017 national housing strategy, construction trends simply do not match the urgency of the moment. The CMHC stopped tracking completions from 2023 to 2025, but there were fewer housing starts in 2025 than there were in 2022, and there were fewer housing completions in 2022 than there were 50 years earlier, in 1972, when Canada had half the population it does today and families were larger.

The national housing strategy has provided over $110 billion in financial support, mostly for market developers, over the last eight years, but less than 10% of their housing completion targets have been met. Only 3% of the only 18,000 rental homes completed under the $55-billion apartment construction loan program since 2017 have been affordable to the low-income households most likely to be in housing need, and these were mostly studio apartments, which are unsuitable to couples and families.

What's even worse than poor housing completions is worsening housing outcomes. I think you heard that in the last hour. By any measure, such as middle-income home ownership affordability, low-income tenant affordability or homelessness, Canada is in the midst of a housing crisis. Canada's median multiple for home ownership is now almost two times the affordable cost. It's three times the affordable cost in Toronto and four times in Vancouver.

Trying to bring house prices down to half or a quarter of what they are in a short period of time, like a decade, is a recipe for economic disaster, and it certainly won't lead to more than doubling housing supply, as the CMHC recommends. For instance, in Toronto, where condo prices have fallen 18% since 2022 and sales volumes have dropped 95% from 2021, there were no new condo projects registered in the first quarter of 2026.

The national housing strategy's two headline targets were to reduce core housing need by 530,000 households and to reduce chronic homelessness by 50%, but the Parliamentary Budget Officer projects that housing need will have increased from 1.7 million households in 2016 to 2.6 million households in the 2026 census. Chronic homelessness doubled from 2018 to 2022.

There is only one way to address those basic needs: Invest in non-market and limited dividend affordable housing.

There are three things that the federal government needs to do.

Focus finance on the needs of most Canadians. The federal government should limit its low-interest financing to projects that are 100% affordable to the majority of Canadians. Very low-income to median-income households are 60% of households and 100% of those in unaffordable housing. That means rents of no more than $2,500 per month nationally and ownership homes that cost no more than $254,000. It would be less in Gander, where incomes are lower, and more in Victoria, where incomes are higher.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bobby Morrissey]

Dr. Whitzman, can you wrap it up, please?

[Carolyn Whitzman]

I can. I will end with one line: Let's build on what works and stop financing what doesn't work.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bobby Morrissey]

Thank you, Dr. Whitzman.

Mr. Irwin, you have five minutes or less.