Above photo: A homeless man in Toronto. Ashton Emanuel/Flickr.
Homelessness and poverty are the predictable products of austerity, precarious work, and a housing system built for profit.
We are now living in a period when poverty, homelessness, and social abandonment have reached crisis levels and the need for a united working-class challenge to this state of affairs is more important than ever.
The official discourse in our society is geared to the proposition that poverty and homelessness stem from personal failings, if not moral dereliction. This assumption is shared by both right-wing and more liberal commentators, even if it is expressed by them in significantly different terms.
The right-wingers simply condemn the poor as the architects of their own misfortune and seek to impose the full burden of austerity measures on them, backed up, of course, by generous doses of aggressive policing and prison sentences.
The kindlier liberals want to address poverty and make society more equitable but they still see things primarily in terms of maladjusted poor people who need to be saved. An unhoused woman who was a member of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP), with which I was an organizer for 28 years, once told me jokingly that she couldn’t possibly find housing because she had 10 social workers who depended on her for their livelihoods.
Personal troubles and public issues
If you were to ask people to identify the main factors that lead to homelessness, it is highly likely that mental health issues and addiction would figure prominently in the list of suggested causes. Politicians and the corporate media promote these notions tirelessly; however, they don’t actually hold up under scrutiny.
There is unquestionably a very significant correlation between the experience of homelessness and mental health and addiction issues. The Homeless Hub informs us that 30-40 percent of those experiencing homelessness have a mental illness and that 20-25 percent of people experiencing homelessness “suffer from concurrent disorders” including severe mental illness and addictions.
It is worth noting, however, that the Canadian Mental Health Association has found that “in any given year, one in five people in Canada are living with a mental illness,” and that “by age 40, about half of Canada’s population will have or have had a mental illness, and in their lifetime.”
That’s an awful lot of people with mental health issues who remain housed and it gives us reason to pause and reconsider.
On June 14, CBC News reported a staggering 77 percent increase in homelessness in Durham Region, to the east of Toronto, in the previous eight months. That’s an astounding figure, though it fits into a country-wide pattern of homelessness spinning out of control over the last few years.
According to the Regeneration Outreach Community, “The number of unhoused people increased by 20 percent between 2018 and 2020-2022 among 67 communities that [participated in] a Point-in-Time (PiT) Count, which means it’s a ‘one-day snapshot’ of a community’s unhoused population.”
It seems implausible that mental health issues and addiction problems have increased in Durham Region by anything like 77 percent so it is reasonable to suspect other major factors are at work that should be explored.
At the risk of stating the obvious, I would suggest the main reason people experience homelessness is a lack of housing that they can afford to live in. If we can accept this theory then we might want to consider the possibility that there have been some forces at work which have made housing less attainable and harder to hang onto as rates of homelessness have risen. There is no dearth of evidence on this score.
First of all, on the income side, as the United Food and Commercial Workers union (UFCW) website points out, “more than half of all workers in Hamilton and Toronto—two of Canada’s most populous cities—are precariously employed, meaning they work in temporary, contract, or part-time jobs that are poorly paid, insecure, and cannot support a household… precarious employment has grown by almost 50 percent over the last 20 years, which has left many workers without the job security, benefits, and vacation pay that often come with full-time employment.”
This growth in the precariously employed segment of the workforce certainly means very large numbers of employed workers are at risk of homelessness but it also translates into a situation where greater and greater numbers of people with jobs are actually becoming unhoused. The Homeless Hub reports that homeless shelters across the country are finding this to be case. In Toronto, 20 percent of shelter residents are employed and that rises to 23 percent in Vancouver.
Social cutbacks
The connection between rising homelessness and austerity-driven social cutbacks—particularly the degrading of income support systems—is as clear as can be. I was an OCAP organizer in 1995, when the Ontario government cut social assistance rates by 21.6 percent and lowered the monthly payment for a “single employable” to $520 a month. At the time, this was a hugely shocking measure but the steep decline in the spending power of social assistance has continued ever since.
In the beginning of 2024, SocialCommons.ca pointed out that “Mike Harris lowered OW [Ontario Works] rates to $520 a month in October 1995—a 21.6 percent drop—but even if rates had been raised with inflation from that multi decade low, they would now stand at $940 a month—literally $207 higher than $733.”
That means that two years ago social assistance rates would have had to have been raised by 28 percent to bring them back to where they stood in the wake of the most brutal austerity regimes in Canadian history. Meanwhile, the City of Toronto reveals that the average market rent for a “bachelor” apartment in that city stands at $1,499 a month, with the “affordable” rent pegged at $1,199.
The impossible arithmetic I point to with regard to rental payments reflects another key factor that is driving the crisis of homelessness. The provision of housing in Canada has always been subjected to capitalist market forces; however, the present period, in which limited governmental regulation and intervention—including the provision of social housing—have been cast aside and things are entirely in the hands of developers, investors and parasitic speculators, is considerably more brutal.
We should also recognize that homelessness is only the far edge of a broader proliferation of poverty. For every person who is condemned to the streets or forced into a shelter, thousands more must skimp on other basic necessities in order to keep a roof over their heads.
The scale of the intensifying poverty crisis is readily apparent and well-documented. In October 2025, Future of Good reported: “More than 2.2 million people turned to food banks in Canada in March alone, the highest recorded number ever, according to Food Bank Canada’s 2025 Hunger Count.” This key indicator of growing hardship and outright social abandonment is grim and a warning needs to be sounded on its implications.
Today, we are facing a federal austerity operation, in the form of the Carney government, that is likely to outdo the Liberal regimes of the 1990s. Undoubtedly, provincial and municipal governments across Canada will chart the same course. The explosion of poverty and homelessness that we are seeing has to be understood and addressed from this vantage point.
Poverty in our wealthy society should not only be regarded as a monstrous social injustice. It also poses a threat to all workers and should be challenged by the entire labour movement. As public services and the workers who deliver them come under attack and as employers look to impose the burden of the present trade crisis on workers and communities, we must understand poverty and homelessness in this context.
We need to ask ourselves what it means, in the face of a gathering attack by employers and governments, that levels of desperation continue to spiral. A huge swath of working-class people is barely surviving in situations of precarious employment, forced to take any job and any wage no matter the deplorable conditions. Many of these people hand over the money they need for groceries to corporate landlords that demand exorbitant rents from them. Growing numbers are even being pushed into despairing conditions of outright destitution, where the only serious state response to their situation comes in the form of police persecution.
Going back to the dawn of capitalism and the horrors of the Poor Laws and the workhouses, poverty has always been used to strengthen the hand of the employers and undermine the ability of workers to organize. This applies acutely to the present situation.
For trade unions, poverty, and homelessness aren’t matters of social commentary or moral outrage. They are part of a broader attack on all working-class people and must be resisted and combatted by a united movement that defends its historic gains but leaves no one behind.
This is the message I will deliver when I speak to a gathering of Unifor trade union members in early July dedicated to the question of homelessness.
John Clarke is a writer and retired organizer for the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP). Follow his tweets at @JohnOCAP and blog at johnclarkeblog.com.
