Human Resources Committee on June 11th, 2026

[The Chair (Robert Morrissey (Egmont, Lib.)), Liberal, Bobby Morrissey]

Good morning, committee members. The clerk has advised me that we have a quorum, and the sound tests for those appearing virtually have been approved.

With that, I will begin the 42nd meeting of the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities.

Pursuant to the motion adopted on Monday, May 4, 2026, the committee is meeting on homelessness in Canada for the first hour and housing starts for the second hour.

Today's meeting is taking place in a hybrid format, pursuant to the Standing Orders. Members are attending remotely and in the room.

You have the option to participate in today's meeting in the official language of your choice. If you're in the room, please select the channel that gives you the proper interpretation for you. For those appearing virtually, please click on the globe icon at the bottom of your screen and choose the official language you wish to participate in. If there is an interruption in translation, please get my attention and we'll suspend while it is corrected. As I indicated, those appearing virtually have been tested, and the sound quality meets the requirements for translation.

For those in the room, please put your devices on silent—I'm including myself—and please refrain from tapping on the microphone boom in front of you. This is for the benefit and protection of our translators. As well, please wait until I recognize you by name before proceeding.

With that, we'll introduce the witnesses for the first hour. We had a minor change. On homelessness, from the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, we have Michelle Boileau, mayor of the City of Timmins. Appearing from Jasper Place Wellness Centre, we have Taylor Soroka, co-founder. From Réseau Solidarité Itinérance du Québec, we have Eric Edström, public and media affairs officer. Each witness has five minutes.

We'll begin with Madam Boileau.

[Michelle Boileau, Mayor, City of Timmins, Federation of Canadian Municipalities]

Thank you.

Good morning, Mr. Chair and members of the committee.

My name is Michelle Boileau. I am the mayor of the City of Timmins, in northern Ontario, and the chair of the standing committee on social economic development at the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, or FCM.

Thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today on behalf of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, which represents more than 2,000 municipalities and nearly 90% of the Canadian population.

I'm here to say that this study could not have come at a better time. All across Canada, large cities and small municipalities alike are facing a homelessness crisis that is growing in scale and complexity. Shelters are under pressure, encampments are multiplying and local services are being stretched to the limit.

The renewal of the national housing strategy is a critical opportunity to learn from experience and build on what is working. Municipalities are at the front line of this crisis, and we see its human impacts first-hand. These are our neighbours. Because we're rooted in our communities, we understand what is needed on the ground, but we cannot solve homelessness alone. We all have a part to play, and now is not the time to walk away.

Real and meaningful progress requires all orders of government pulling in the same direction to ensure our most vulnerable residents are not left behind. Provinces and territories oversee many of the health, social service and housing supports that people rely on. The federal government plays a critical leadership role through investments and national policy coordination. A renewed national housing strategy must be anchored in a housing first approach.

FCM welcomes federal investments to increase the supply of affordable non-market housing, but buildings alone, as we know, do not solve homelessness. Communities also need operating funding, alongside capital funding, so that supportive housing providers can deliver mental health supports, addiction services, outreach and case management.

We also need to move beyond a crisis response and embrace prevention. The most effective way to reduce homelessness is to keep people housed in the first place. Every day, Canadians are falling into homelessness more and more because of rising rents and economic pressures, but they are, above all, falling through system gaps.

Investments such as rent supplements, portable housing benefits and programs like the Canada housing benefit can prevent homelessness before it begins by helping low-income households remain stably housed. As we know, not only is prevention more humane, it is also far less costly than responding after someone has already lost their housing.

FCM's most urgent recommendation is to maintain and expand Reaching Home. It is the backbone of local homelessness responses across Canada, supporting shelters, outreach teams, housing stabilization services, indigenous-led initiatives, encampment responses, and the community organizations working every day to help people move from homelessness into housing, because they are helping people move through the continuum.

However, demand is growing much faster than available resources. Communities across Canada are being asked to respond to record levels of homelessness with funding that does not reflect the scale of today's challenge. The Parliamentary Budget Officer has identified an annual funding gap of approximately $3.5 billion in Canada's homelessness response system. Municipalities are making up that gap, and we see the consequences of that gap every day: shelters operating beyond capacity, growing encampments, overstretched outreach services and vulnerable Canadians unable to access the supports they need.

FCM is calling on Ottawa not only to renew Reaching Home, but also to make it a permanent and expanded pillar of Canada's homelessness response.

Municipalities are ready to work in partnership with the federal government to achieve results, but to do so, they need predictable, long-term funding. If we allow this program to expire and don't adapt it to the scale of the realities we're facing on the ground, the pressure on our communities will increase.

Let's not wait until we reach the point of no return. Homelessness is one of the main social challenges in Canada. Renewing Canada's national housing strategy presents a rare opportunity to strengthen partnerships between different levels of government, invest in homelessness prevention and expand solutions with a “housing first” approach.

Let's work together to ensure that everyone in Canada has access to safe and affordable housing.

FCM stands ready to work with the federal government, provinces, territories, indigenous partners and community organizations to achieve that goal.

I look forward to answering your questions.

Thank you. Meegwetch.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bobby Morrissey]

Thank you, Ms. Boileau.

Ms. Soroka, you have five minutes, please.

[Taylor Soroka, Co-Founder, Jasper Place Wellness Centre]

Thank you, Chair.

Good morning, members of the committee.

My name is Taylor Soroka. I'm the co-founder of the Jasper Place Wellness Centre here in Edmonton, Alberta, a community development organization I founded together with my father, Murray, who, regrettably, couldn't join us today. I know he would have liked to be here.

It's an honour to contribute to this committee study on homelessness in Canada. I thank you for the invitation.

I want to begin with a distinction that I believe is foundational to this study and to getting policy right. Homelessness is not complicated; it is complex, and that difference is costing lives.

Our organization works in a community that knows complexity up close. Edmonton is the city of champions, but we're also the frostbite capital of Canada, a city where temperatures fall to -30°C, and where people lose their fingers, their feet and, ultimately, their lives, not because of some abstract failure but because they had nowhere safe to go.

I know that complexity does not fit on a policy form. It does not communicate well to a frightened public watching encampments grow outside their windows, so we have done what humans do with things we cannot hold. We've named the most visible, most basic surface feature and called that the problem: no home—homeless. In collapsing that enormous human complexity into a single administrative category, we've named the symptom and lost sight of the patient.

The word “homeless” groups together residential school survivors and the person with a traumatic brain injury, the young woman who aged out of foster care at 18 with nowhere safe to go, the veteran, the man living with untreated bipolar disorder. What they share is one thing: no safe place to call their own. What they don't share is anything else. That's the complexity. It's not hard to understand. It's human.

The pace at which this crisis is growing has created a common misunderstanding. When people see encampments in their parks, or when they feel unsafe walking through their own neighbourhood, they conclude the solutions must not be working. I understand that, but the truth is the opposite. The research is not ambiguous: Housing first works and supportive housing works, but they are being outpaced. An outpaced solution looks identical to a failed one unless you know the numbers.

In Edmonton, the average wait time to access supportive housing is 512 days—512 days in the frostbite capital of Canada, in the city of champions. That wait exists because we have not built enough, but it's not only about supply. Too much of what we have built has been designed to scale rather than to the person, with large facilities where no one knows your name, never mind your story. For our neighbours living with the most complex needs—deep psychosis, severe mental illness, brain injury—that design feature is the most costly of all. They need the most from their housing: psychiatric care, clinical support and real intensity.

Housing is the foundational solution, always, but the supports inside it have to match the people it is for, and that's a real gap we're facing and one we have to build next. When we respond to the complexity of a human being with enforcement, encampment clearances and the removal of the visible signs of suffering rather than what it causes, we're not solving the problem. We're moving it. We're breaking the trust that makes intervention possible. We are choosing, in the language of my field, social control over social care. The data is consistent. It costs more, produces worse outcomes and makes the work of organizations like mine profoundly harder.

At the Jasper Place Wellness Centre, we fit in the gaps where systems fail people, and we do it through a design called a healing house. We start with the building, because the building itself is a solution. Housing is always the answer.

A healing house is, first and foremost, housing. Each one sits on a single city lot and has 12 self-contained units. The entire main floor is common space. It has a kitchen where residents can cook together, watch the Oilers, the best team in Canada, hold house meetings, do chores and access therapy and programming. The whole building is fully accessible. Research is clear that communities of eight to 12 people produce better outcomes for those navigating severe mental health and complex trauma. We built that finding into the walls.

On top of housing, you layer a program, and now you have an intervention. Programs come and go with funding cycles—that's the reality of this work—but when capital funding built a healing house, it built an essential infrastructure that stands for a lifetime. If the program ends, the building keeps housing people as affordable housing, supportive housing or whatever the community needs next. The investment is never lost.

For a federal government deciding where dollars go, I cannot overstate how important that distinction is. Two programs currently operate out of our healing houses today, each one built at an intersection where the system loses people.

Bridge healing sits between the emergency department and the street. When someone is discharged from an Edmonton hospital with nowhere to go, they come to us into a healing house with wraparound supports, including health care access, income navigation, housing assessments and connection to treatment. It costs $140 a day compared to upwards of $1,000 in hospital, and the outcome is a 76% reduction in health care utilization among participants. That number is not just a program result. It's proof of the housing first model that, if you stabilize someone first, if you start with housing, everything else changes.

Recovery and transition sit between detox and residential treatment, a gap that historically meant relapse. A person who completes detox is medically stable and has a confirmed intake date. We hold the stage. We keep the thread from breaking.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bobby Morrissey]

I'm sorry. Any points you missed, you can follow up on. You can capture those in response to questions, which I'm sure you'll get. Thank you for your opening statement.

We'll now conclude the witnesses' opening statements with Mr. Edström for five minutes.

[Eric Edström, Public and Media Affairs Officer, Réseau Solidarité Itinérance du Québec]

Good morning, Mr. Chair and honourable members of the committee.

Thank you for inviting the Réseau Solidarité Itinérance du Québec to appear before the committee today.

I have been closely following the work that has been done so far, and I welcome the attention that has already been paid to issues related to homelessness prevention. Given the limited time allotted to each witness, I decided to be efficient by trying to build on the views already expressed, while also addressing some of the questions already raised. This will allow the committee members to come up with new questions, as they see fit. I was inspired by the member for Brome—Missisquoi who is here today and who mentioned that he has so many more questions.

In response to the question as to whether greater flexibility and predictability in funding would enable organizations to allocate more resources to providing direct services rather than managing administration, we would say that removing the uncertainty surrounding funding stabilizes financial management and helps retain the expertise within organizations. The alternative is to terminate a contract or lose spaces if funding is not confirmed in a timely manner.

In response to the question as to whether prevention should be regarded as a social and economic investment, our answer is that it would benefit the entire population, because it would create a social environment more conducive to improved health and well-being and would ease pressure on public services. In addition, it would promote greater social and economic participation and prevent people from having to experience the trauma of homelessness, because we've failed to provide them with a stable environment or haven't been able to support them when they needed it. Beyond the monetary costs, this is a human investment that remains relevant.

In response to the question as to whether shelters create a vicious circle that traps people in homelessness and perpetuates their problems, we would argue that shelters are the last line of defence in a system that has failed in its duty towards vulnerable people. Shelters do not perpetuate homelessness. For many, they are the first step in a long journey of navigating a system of ill-adapted and poorly connected services, rebuilding their trust in others and in society, and rebuilding their own lives after seeing their basic needs and rights repeatedly violated while they were living on the street. Shelters respond to basic needs and offer a range of services that contribute to people's social, civic, housing and economic reintegration, among others. Relying on the family or the community to provide support ignores the underlying causes and solutions by denying collective responsibility. It actually creates hidden homelessness. We must protect and assert the fundamental right to adequate housing, which must be stable, safe, healthy and not overcrowded.

In response to the question as to where the main challenge lies with respect to current funding, whether it's the amount of funding available or how it's distributed and administered, we would say that both aspects need to be addressed. We need the funding allocated to the Reaching Home program to be increased in order to ensure an adequate level of service and reduce the pressure on organizations to seek additional funding. Since homelessness is so widespread, we need to reduce the gap between the designated communities and those yet to be established. We also need greater predictability and stability in how the program is managed. Announcements need to be made in advance, project proposals need to be made public for at least a month and at appropriate times, and a response needs to be provided within perhaps two months or less.

Finally, in response to the question as to whether the goal of Build Canada Homes to build affordable housing on a large scale is a practical solution that will reverse the trend, we would say that we have recently noticed a gradual shift from the term “social housing” to “affordable housing”, which is much more vague. Furthermore, there's a lot of catching up to do on social housing. It's important to build the housing the community needs, not the housing that developers want to build. If we've missed the mark when it comes to social housing in recent decades, we can't be expected to make up for it without the proper tools. There is a cultural difference between the Housing First program and the holistic approach we have implemented. I wouldn't go so far as to credit it with all the results, far from it, but Quebec must be doing something right with our holistic approach, given that the rise in homelessness since the pandemic has been slower in Quebec than elsewhere in Canada.

It's important not to focus only on bricks and mortar and leave the provinces to handle the bulk of the support. Certain aspects of Build Canada Homes remain somewhat opaque, which is why we hope the federal government will maintain some version of the tried and true Reaching Home program, for which agreements have already been signed. It should be improved with increased flexibility and predictability when it comes to funding, aspects that have been lacking until now.

You will receive our brief shortly, which includes tables based on the Fitzpatrick typology of homelessness, references to the holistic approach aligned with the existing system in our province, as well as our proposals, which you can take into account as you prepare your recommendations.

In the meantime, I urge the committee to continue to give a broad definition of homelessness prevention the increasing prominence it deserves in discussions, as we have done since the fourth États généraux de l'itinérance au Québec, held in November 2024.

The committee has heard it before. Witnesses from across Canada have confirmed that they are working hard and trying various strategies to reverse homelessness trends.

We need to maintain the flexibility required to adapt measures on the ground based on needs. There is room for innovation, but some tried-and-tested solutions are still working very well.

Thank you for your attention. I look forward to taking any questions you may have regarding my answers.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bobby Morrissey]

Thank you, Mr. Edström.

We will begin the first six-minute round with Ms. Falk.

[Rosemarie Falk, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster—Meadow Lake, SK]

Thank you very much, Chair.

I'd like to thank each of the witnesses for taking the time to be here and for sharing their expertise and knowledge.

Ms. Soroka, you're very close to where I am, even though you're in another province. I'm located in Lloydminster. There's a lot of transportation back and forth for a lot of people in my community and riding to Edmonton.

You talked about wraparound services without saying it and their importance. It's important that wraparound services be embedded not only in housing but, I would argue, in every area when we're looking at social services. Sometimes people just need that extra support to boost them up and help them out.

We have a great organization in Lloydminster. It's on the Alberta side of the border. We have our own issues when it comes to funding because we have some things that are physically located on the Alberta side and others on the Saskatchewan side. You have residents on either side and you have governments saying, “That's not our responsibility because that's not our citizen.” At the end of the day, homelessness and addiction know no bounds, and people need to be treated like people.

The organization that we have is called Residents in Recovery. It is a great model. It's people living together. It's accountability and community. It's that number that you talked about of eight to 10 people who are together and really helping each other out, which is important.

I just wanted to make a note of the importance of those wraparound services.

Throughout this study, we've heard testimony on the importance of prevention in reducing homelessness. I'm just wondering, based on your organization's experience, what prevention measures you believe are most effective in helping people avoid homelessness.

[Taylor Soroka]

Funding for individual participants or individual community members in providing rent supplements is the number one way we can prevent homelessness. That's direct funding. If someone gets sick and isn't working for two weeks out of the month, then they can still pay their rent.

It's that direct, clear and easy-to-access funding that can supplement someone's gap. We are all just a flicker away. We can all face gaps in our lives.

That's the best way.

[Rosemarie Falk, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster—Meadow Lake, SK]

That's for sure, yes. Any one of us can have an incident, tragedy or setback that can drastically change the trajectory of one's life.

Which level of government do you believe is best to address or administer that?

I heard earlier testimony—I want to say it was from the FCM—about locals being able to know what's going on in their community and that type of thing.

Sometimes I know from an Ottawa vantage point that Ottawa doesn't know best when it comes to communities, especially rural communities like my own. If you need to go to a doctor, that's a two-and-a-half-hour drive. If you don't have a car, if you don't have somebody who can drive you, how do you get to your specialist appointment? If you're paying for an ambulance, that's another cost that isn't necessarily covered.

Who would be the best to administer individual assistance, as you've suggested?

[Taylor Soroka]

I would agree that it should be local organizations in the community on the ground. Local organizations know the individuals by name who need that support. It allows the support to happen fast and in a way that is timely for their situation.

I will highlight, exactly as you said, that this includes the municipal, provincial and federal governments.

Health care access is a huge part of our homelessness crisis. You hit it on the head. Local, clear and to-the-person connection is how that money will move fastest and have the most impact.

[Rosemarie Falk, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster—Meadow Lake, SK]

When I had my social work experience, it was in a medical setting. We actually weren't permitted to discharge people without having a place for them to go. I don't know how that's changed since the increase of our homeless population. Since COVID and with the burden on our health care system, there just are not enough beds. There are not enough doctors. There are not enough nurses. There's not enough.

It's good to hear that you guys are positioned to be able to catch some of those people. If you're not, at the end of the day, they're just coming back. Especially in the wintertime when it does get cold, you're then trying to navigate the emergency room as an emergency room as opposed to a drop-in shelter. It's important that those gaps are being met. People aren't falling through the cracks, I guess. That's great to hear that you're doing that.

At what point in a person's housing instability is intervention most likely to be successful?

[Taylor Soroka]

That depends on every person, and they know best. The people I serve on a daily basis know when they need housing. They know when they need support, and they know what that support looks like. I do think that looks different for every person in terms of housing intervention. In my experience, every person I serve has known what they've needed. They have the agency to tell me exactly what that looks like. I just don't always have the tools to meet them and meet their need where they're at for the intervention.

[Rosemarie Falk, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster—Meadow Lake, SK]

Are you finding that there is a willingness by those who need services to ask for services, or are you finding that your organization has to go out and seek to find people?

[Taylor Soroka]

We have upwards of 100 people accessing our community centre throughout the day. Those are unique individuals, and they are coming to us. I will point out that our emergency departments in Edmonton and across Canada are inundated with people looking for support. It just might not be the right place. People are looking for help, always. They just might not find the right person to help them.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bobby Morrissey]

Thank you, Ms. Falk.

Next we have Monsieur Joseph for six minutes.

[Natilien Joseph, Liberal, Longueuil—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Through you, Mr. Chair, I'll go to Mr. Edström.

Welcome, Mr. Edström. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank you for your commitment to helping people in vulnerable situations.

My question for you is really quite short and simple.

During our discussions, you raised a point that I think deserves to be explored further. You said that, while greater predictability and flexibility in response to homelessness are essential, the phenomena of encampments must not become normalized or trivialized.

Can you elaborate on that?

[Eric Edström]

In the context of the fight against homelessness, year after year, and given what we are experiencing and the deteriorating situation, we have to keep an open mind and try not to manage spaces rather than people. We shouldn't start prioritizing the right to encampments over the right to housing, which should be broader and include these individuals.

Encampments exist. They are a reality. No one normally chooses to live in an encampment. It's usually supposed to be temporary, but it can sometimes drag on. However, these folks need to be reintegrated into society as soon as possible, and there are ways to help them. As the witnesses online were saying, some of these folks know this, but they're not always quite ready to be reintegrated into society at the exact time we reach them. However, the support system needs to be in place.

As for the folks living in encampments, there are some—and I emphasize the word “some”—who have substance abuse or mental health issues. When someone decides to seek help for an addiction, we have to respond right away. If we wait two or three weeks, the situation might deteriorate. The individual might continue to have contact with others and their substance use is likely to continue. When the person is ready for help, we need to be there to support them with a range of services available.

That's what matters. It's about having that range of services in place and being ready not only to support people when they want to get off the street, but also to prevent them from becoming homeless in the first place.

[Natilien Joseph, Liberal, Longueuil—Saint-Hubert, QC]

I'd like to delve into that a little more.

In your view, how can we strike a balance between the need to adapt our actions in the short term and the objective of preventing encampments from becoming permanently established?

[Eric Edström]

The camps exist. We can't start tolerating the intolerable. That is what happens eventually. We can't give up and tell ourselves that homeless encampments are a reality we have to live with. These camps exist because the people living there have fallen through the cracks in various ways.

We were talking about prevention. Everyone is one eviction, one workplace accident or one break-up away from potentially finding themselves on the streets, in a vulnerable position. We need multilayered support, which forms part of a broader strategy. In other words, if everyone has a decent income, there is less risk of ending up in this situation when life's uncertainties strike.

When people are going through a crisis, we need the means to reach out to them. It is always at turning points like these that a person's life changes. It costs far less in terms of effort and money to prevent someone from becoming homeless than to try to intervene once they are already in that situation.

[Natilien Joseph, Liberal, Longueuil—Saint-Hubert, QC]

My next question is about Build Canada Homes.

Do you feel that we are supporting the broad objectives of this organization, which aims to increase the supply of affordable housing?

In my area, in Longueuil, this has resulted in a project to build 1,055 homes, 40% of which will be off-market housing.

In your view, is off-market housing an important tool for prevention, in addition to the $1 billion in investment announced for supported housing and transitional housing?

[Eric Edström]

It is a supplement. However, as I said at the start, off-market housing, affordable housing and deferred affordable housing can mean different things. We know what social housing is; the definition is very clear, and it also meets a need. There's no doubt that building homes helps. We have some catching up to do in this area for all types of housing, but we still need to clarify what affordability actually means.

As I said, we welcome Build Canada Homes' investment projects. However, we need to see how they are implemented and what type of housing is being built. Is it aimed at families? Where are they being built? Is it exclusively on Crown land, or is it close to communities, as was the case in Longueuil?

It may be a good solution, but it's a major program. The devil is in the details. We need to see how it will be implemented and how it will be approached. We welcome a major investment in the fight against homelessness; it is very important. However, it's not just about building. Support is also crucial. Simply putting a roof over someone's head does not solve all their problems.

As someone said, when all you've known for some time is life on the streets, you might not feel at home in an apartment. All you want to do is go back to what you know. That's why it's important to have a multilayered support network for different situations.

[Natilien Joseph, Liberal, Longueuil—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Thank you. If I understand correctly, you need to have a support network.

Could you also explain what “support” means?

[Eric Edström]

There are all sorts of support services. As I was saying, it can be related to mental health, a decline in physical health, reintegrating into a community or developing social connections.

I'd draw a parallel with the health care system and hospital beds. If there aren't enough nurses or support staff, sometimes hospitals are forced to close down beds. This situation is somewhat similar. We have the housing, but we don't have everything needed for someone to feel at home there.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bobby Morrissey]

Thank you, Mr. Edström.

Thank you, Mr. Joseph.

Ms. Larouche, you have six minutes.