Homelessness up 44 per cent in Quebec since 2018 – Montreal | Globalnews.ca
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The number of homeless people in Quebec has risen 44 per cent since 2018, according to a report from the National Institute of Public Health of Quebec commissioned by the province’s Ministry of Health and Social Services.
“We can estimate, based on the available data, an increase of 2,523 people experiencing visible homelessness, or an increase of 44%,” the report states.
The report also states that homelessness has increased in all regions of the province, but in different proportions.
More than 60 per cent of people experiencing homelessness are in Montreal.
To collect data, the institute deployed hundreds of street workers and volunteers during the night of Oct. 11, 2022, in 13 regions of Quebec.
The report estimates that 10,000 people were homeless at the time of the survey.
The shortage of affordable housing and COVID-19 are the main causes identified in the report for the increase in homelessness.
The methodology has also improved since 2018.
The regions of Abitibi-Témiscamingue and Côte-Nord, as well as the municipalities of Gatineau, Trois-Rivières, Drummondville and Saint-Jérôme, have been added to the survey.
Homelessness affects Indigenous people more strongly, particularly in Montreal and in the Abitibi-Témiscamingue and Côte-Nord regions, the survey found.
The report indicates that Indigenous people experiencing homelessness are particularly present in outdoor places and emergency housing resources, and less in transitional housing and therapy centres.
A greater proportion of Indigenous people, the report states, have spent the entire year in a situation of homelessness.
Indigenous people are also twice as likely to “report that racism is linked to the loss of their last home.”
“Faced with these findings, we must ask ourselves questions about the structural issues, of a historical and social nature, surrounding Indigenous homelessness and other associated issues,” the report states. “It must be admitted that strategies to prevent both the shift into the homelessness that the complexity of the problems experienced are either insufficient, non-existent, or ineffective.”
Homelessness is also over-represented among people who have been placed in the past by the Youth Protection Department, people of sexual and gender diversity, and people who have been evicted from their housing.
© 2023 The Canadian Press
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