Canada is facing a major housing crisis, so why do we look down on those who fall between the cracks?
Illustration by Sage Blackwell.
Sit down on a BC Transit shuttle, take your headphones off, crane your head to the side, and you won’t need to wait long before hearing it: Fear of the homeless.
“Crackhead,” “Tweaker,” “Addict” — these are some of the (revealingly infantile) epithets that have seeped into our everyday discourse as a way of debasing the unhoused. The pervasiveness of this speech is a profoundly unsettling development: It should go without saying that these comments are cruel, but they also betray a lack of education about some of Canada’s most pressing structural problems.
When you insult the unhoused, you’re dismissing one of, if not the most urgent cause for their state of affairs: a lack of available housing. A Library of Parliament study from 2014 emphasized that “Housing First” policy is a remarkably effective salve for the broader mental health crisis behind homelessness, “as individuals with mental health or substance abuse problems in stable living conditions are less likely to make frequent, substantial … use of healthcare, social services, and criminal and judicial resources.”
Beyond revealing a lack of awareness regarding the housing crisis in Canada, being anti-homeless also displays a person’s desire to feel better about their own tenuous circumstances — easing their class and financial anxiety by diminishing others. Many Canadians, however, are only a missed cheque or two from being without shelter themselves. A 2022 report by Housing Statistics in Canada found that 12 per cent of Canadian households reported experiencing some form of prior homelessness.
Moreover, hatred for the unhoused intersects with oppressive structures impacting other marginalized groups in Canada. A 2024 report from the Aboriginal Housing Management Association on homelessness in B.C. stated that “there is a clear and constant overrepresentation of Indigenous people experiencing homelessness … particularly those with direct or generational experiences of residential schools.”
The Housing Statistics in Canada report also noted that 27.3 per cent — more than one in four — Indigenous households experienced some form of homelessness during their lifetime.
With such an abundance of public information on the causes and consequences of homelessness in Canada, offhand remarks about the supposed “unseemliness” of the unhoused should evoke the same disdain as other social faux pas, like refusing vaccinations, driving a hummer, or investing in weapons manufacturers — it is tactless, anti-social behaviour which disregards the increasingly violent circumstances homeless Canadians live in. In 2023, The Conversation reported that anti-homeless violence was on the rise, noting specific incidents of hate crimes by a group called the “White Gorillas” in Lethbridge, Alberta, which predominantly targeted unhoused Indigenous people..
When this hateful rhetoric is left to fester (unhoused people are still an unprotected class in Canada as of 2019, according to a study by Terry Skolnik in the Journal of Law & Equality) it gains steam in public forums. A recent Opinion piece in the Times Colonist features complaints about “downtown’s degraded physical appearance, rent-a-cops, merchandise in security showcases, economic viability” and so on.
The author of this piece dodged any and all discussion of the underlying structural issues, and the structural solutions required — decrying such analysis as “an abstracted social blamefest,” and instead asserting that “[the homeless] must all … be placed in involuntary care and protection, appropriate residential facilities that they cannot leave until and unless, after the shortest possible time, they show signs of recovery and success at self-management.”
Unlike this writer, I don’t think my fellow citizens should be forced into carceral circumstances for an issue outside of their control, and you shouldn’t either.
We know what the primary cause of homelessness is in Canada, and suggesting any solution besides the immediate provision of personal housing should make one feel ashamed. If you care about the well-being of your community, you care about everyone in that community. It’s time we all started demonstrating that fact.
