From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Marco Navarro-Genie

Canada’s homelessness crisis has intensified dramatically, with about 60,000 people homeless this Christmas and chronic homelessness becoming entrenched as shelters overflow and encampments spread. Policy failures in immigration, housing, monetary policy, shelters, harm reduction, and Indigenous governance have driven the crisis. Only reversing these policies can meaningfully address it.

Encampments that were meant to be temporary have become a permanent feature in our communities

As Canadians settle in for the holiday season, 60,000 people across this country will spend Christmas night in a tent, a doorway, or a shelter bed intended to be temporary. Some will have been there for months, perhaps years. The number has quadrupled in six years.

In October 2024, enumerators in 74 Canadian communities conducted the most comprehensive count of homelessness this country has attempted. They found 17,088 people sleeping without shelter on a single autumn night, and 4,982 of them living in encampments. The count excluded Quebec entirely. The real number is certainly higher.

In Ontario alone, homelessness increased 51 per cent between 2016 and 2024. Chronic homelessness has tripled. For the first time, more than half of all homelessness in that province is chronic. People are no longer moving through the system. They are becoming permanent fixtures within it.

Toronto’s homeless population more than doubled between April 2021 and October 2024, from 7,300 to 15,418. Tents now appear in places that were never seen a decade ago. The city has 9,594 people using its shelter system on any given night, yet 158 are turned away each evening because no beds are available.

Calgary recorded 436 homeless deaths in 2023, nearly double the previous year. The Ontario report projects that without significant policy changes, between 165,000 and 294,000 people could experience homelessness annually in that province alone by 2035.

The federal government announced in September 2024 that it would allocate $250 million over two years to address encampments. Ontario received $88 million for ten municipalities. The Association of Municipalities of Ontario calculated that ending chronic homelessness in their province would require $11 billion over ten years. The federal contribution represents less than one per cent of what is needed.

Yet the same federal government found $50 billion for automotive subsidies and battery plants. They borrow tonnes of money to help foreign car manufacturers with EVs, while tens of thousands are homeless. But money alone does not solve problems. Pouring billions into a bureaucratic system that has failed spectacularly without addressing the policies that created the crisis would be useless.

Five years ago, tent cities were virtually unknown in most Canadian communities. Recent policy choices fuelled it, and different choices can help unmake it.

Start with immigration policy. The federal government increased annual targets to over 500,000 without ensuring housing capacity existed. Between 2021 and 2024, refugees and asylum seekers experiencing chronic homelessness increased by 475 per cent. These are people invited to Canada under federal policy, then abandoned to municipal shelter systems already at capacity.

Then there is monetary policy. Pandemic spending drove inflation, which made housing unaffordable. Housing supply remains constrained by policy. Development charges, zoning restrictions, and approval processes spanning years prevent construction at the required scale. Municipal governments layer fees onto new developments, making projects uneconomical.

Shelter policy itself has become counterproductive. The average shelter stay increased from 39 days in 2015 to 56 days in 2022. There are no time limits, no requirements, no expectations. Meanwhile, restrictive rules around curfews, visitors, and pets drive 85 per cent of homeless people to avoid shelters entirely, preferring tents to institutional control.

The expansion of harm reduction programs has substituted enabling for treatment. Safe supply initiatives provide drugs to addicts without requiring participation in recovery programs. Sixty-one per cent cite substance use issues, yet the policy response is to make drug use safer rather than to make sobriety achievable. Treatment programs with accountability would serve dignity far better than an endless supply of free drugs.

Indigenous people account for 44.6 per cent of those experiencing chronic homelessness in Northern Ontario despite comprising less than three per cent of the general population. This overrepresentation is exacerbated by policies that fail to recognize Indigenous governance and self-determination as essential. Billions allocated to Indigenous communities are never scrutinized.

The question Canadians might ask this winter is whether charity can substitute for competent policy. The answer is empirically clear: it cannot. What is required before any meaningful solutions is a reversal of the policies that broke it.

Marco Navarro-Genie is vice-president of research at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and co-author with Barry Cooper of Canada’s COVID: The Story of a Pandemic Moral Panic (2023).

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By David Redman

Canada’s Defence Mobilization Plan blurs legal lines, endangers untrained civil servants, and bypasses provinces. The Plan raises serious questions about military overreach, readiness, and political motives behind rushed federal emergency planning.

The new defence plan looks simple on paper. The risks are anything but.

Canadians have grown used to bad news about the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF), but the newly revealed defence mobilization plan is in a category of its own.

After years of controversy over capability, morale, and leadership challenges, the military’s senior ranks now appear willing to back a plan that misunderstands emergency law, sidelines provincial authority, and proposes to place untrained civil servants in harm’s way.

The document is a Defence Mobilization Plan (DMP), normally an internal framework outlining how the military would expand or organize its forces in a major crisis.

The nine-page plan was dated May 30, 2025, but only reached public view when media outlets reported on it. One article reports that the plan would create a supplementary force made up of volunteer public servants from federal and provincial governments. Those who join this civil defence corps would face less restrictive age limits, lower fitness requirements, and only five days of training per year. In that time, volunteers would be expected to learn skills such as shooting, tactical movement, communicating, driving a truck, and flying a drone. They would receive medical coverage during training but not pensionable benefits.

The DMP was circulated to 20 senior commanders and admirals, including leaders at NORAD, NATO, special forces, and Cybercom. The lack of recorded objection can reasonably raise concerns about how thoroughly its implications were reviewed.

The legal context explains much of the reaction. The Emergencies Act places responsibility for public welfare and public order emergencies on the provinces and territories unless they request federal help. Emergency response is primarily a provincial role because provinces oversee policing, natural disaster management, and most front-line public services. Yet the DMP document seems to assume federal and military control in situations where the law does not allow it. That is a clear break from how the military is expected to operate.

The Emergency Management Act reinforces that civilian agencies lead domestic emergencies and the military is a force of last resort. Under the law, this means the CAF is deployed only after provincial and local systems have been exhausted or cannot respond. The Defence Mobilization Plan, however, presents the military as a routine responder, which does not match the legal structure that sets out federal and provincial roles.

Premiers have often turned to the military first during floods and fires, but those political habits do not remove the responsibility of senior military leaders to work within the law and respect their mandate.

Capacity is another issue. Combat-capable personnel take years to train, and the institution is already well below its authorized strength. Any task that diverts resources from readiness weakens national defence, yet the DMP proposes to assign the military new responsibilities and add a civilian component to meet them.

The suggestion that the military and its proposed civilian force should routinely respond to climate-related events is hard to square with the CAF’s defined role. It raises the question of whether this reflects policy misjudgment or an effort to apply military tools to problems that are normally handled by civilian systems.

The plan also treats hazards unrelated to warfighting as if the military is responsible for them. Every province and territory already has an emergency management organization that monitors hazards, coordinates responses and manages recovery. These systems use federal support when required, but the military becomes involved only when they are overwhelmed. If Canada wants to revive a 1950s-style civil defence model, major legislative changes would be needed. The document proceeds as if no such changes are required.

The DMP’s training assumptions deepen the concerns. Suggesting that tasks such as “shooting, moving, communicating, driving a truck and flying a drone” can be taught in a single five-day block does not reflect the standards of any modern military. These skills take time to learn and years to master.

The plan also appears aligned with the government’s desire to show quick progress toward NATO’s defence spending benchmark of two percent of GDP and eventually five percent. Its structure could allow civil servants’ pay and allowances to be counted toward defence spending.

Any civil servant who joins this proposed force would be placed in potentially hazardous situations with minimal training. For many Canadians, that level of risk will seem unreasonable.

The fact that the DMP circulated through senior military leadership without signs of resistance raises concerns about accountability at the highest levels. That the chief of the defence staff reconsidered the plan only after public criticism reinforces those concerns.

The Defence Mobilization Plan risks placing civil servants in danger through a structure that appears poorly conceived and operationally weak. The consequences for public trust and institutional credibility are becoming difficult to ignore.

David Redman had a distinguished military career before becoming the head of the Alberta Emergency Management Agency in 2004. He led the team in developing the 2005 Provincial Pandemic Influenza Plan. He retired in 2013. He writes here for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.