Good afternoon, and thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today. My name is Tim Richter. I lead the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness. I'm happy to join you from Calgary.

Homelessness is a housing affordability problem. It's driven by high rent and low vacancy. It's not caused by mental illness or addiction. The surge in homelessness that we're seeing today, and the tent cities, as your study is discussing, are the result of the cost of living crisis. I'm going to discuss this with a bit of an analogy.

You know what I mean when I talk about musical chairs, right? In musical chairs, you get 10 kids around 10 chairs. Imagine that in this game, there's one little kid, a girl named Alice, who has a broken ankle. The music starts. They take a chair away, and the kids all sit down, except Alice. If you asked Alice, “Well, how come you're not in a chair?” She'd say, “Well, it's because I have a broken ankle, and I couldn't get to a chair fast enough.”

Is the issue that Alice is not in a chair because she has a broken ankle or because there aren't enough chairs? The fact is that there aren't enough chairs.

When we measure inflation using the consumer price index, unfortunately the CPI measures inflation based on a middle-income basket of goods. For low-income Canadians, 80% to 90% of their income goes to pay for food and housing costs, so for them the inflation rate isn't 2%, 3%, 4% or even 6%. It's tied to the cost of the two biggest ticket items that they have to pay for, food and housing. Now, depending where you live, we've been seeing food price increases of 10% a year and rent increases of over 20%. That's what low-income households are facing. That's their real inflation rate, and they have far less ability to absorb these increases.

Now imagine that you're struggling with a health issue. You don't have friends or family to rely on. You're in a low-income household. You don't have any spare income at the end of the month, or maybe you struggle with addiction or acute mental health concerns. When rents skyrocket and the availability of units decreases, low-income households or people with other needs end up forced out of their homes. Like Alice, they can't compete when there aren't enough affordable housing options or chairs.

I'm old enough to remember a day when mass homelessness like we see today didn't exist. The roots of our current homelessness crisis and the surge you see in tent cities, as you're talking about, are tied to the roots of our housing crisis. That began in 1980 with the federal withdrawal from incentives to support rental housing construction, followed by subsequent reductions in affordable social co-op housing investment through the 80s, and the elimination of federal affordable housing programs in 1995 and 1996.

As Steve could tell you in great detail about all of the housing programs between then and now, this is a problem that's over 40 years in the making. If we want to solve homelessness, we need to ensure that we have a healthy housing system, a system where there's affordability and choice from social housing to ownership. The whole system needs to be healthy. If the ownership system isn't working, isn't affordable, people stay in rentals. If the rental system isn't affordable, if there isn't a balanced market, the burden falls on the non-market, and people are pushed out the bottom.

To resolve these, we need a clear federal strategy to eliminate homelessness. Importantly, as the Auditor General has highlighted, we need to connect the housing strategy with the homelessness objective and the homelessness strategy. We need to have an approach that's grounded in cooperative federalism, and this is perhaps the greatest weakness in the federal government's approach today.

Solving homelessness requires a national strategy with an approach similar to a disaster response, where there's a plan and an agreement between the different levels of government on who does what within their different jurisdictions. If you imagine any natural disaster as it plays out, the local government leads; the community leads; and provincial and federal governments come in and support, right? That's key to the approach to ending homelessness.

The federal government's return to housing leadership with the national housing strategy and the new housing plan are welcome and long overdue. There's a lot in there that I think is really positive, and previous speakers have talked about it. It should be successful, I believe, if implemented well, in expanding rental and non-market housing construction, but that will take time.

In my mind, the Achilles heel of the housing plan and the housing strategy is the absence of federal-provincial-territorial coordination and collaboration. You could implement measures like the GST reduction or accelerated capital cost allowance, but if developmental charges eat up all of that freed-up space, you're no further ahead.

I'll leave you with three recommendations.

First, I would recommend a national strategy for the prevention and elimination of homelessness built in collaboration with the provinces and territories, with cities and experts as well, including people with lived experience, where municipal governments or community leaders lead the response to homelessness and other levels of government come in in their various areas of jurisdiction.

Just like when you're fixing your plumbing or your electricity, you need to turn off the water or electricity before you can fix the system, we really need a measure that's going to slow the flow of people into homelessness. The only way to do that in the short term is with a homelessness prevention and housing benefit, some form of income support in the short term to prevent people from becoming homeless.

Finally, create a true national housing accord with the provinces and territories that addresses the health of the whole housing system. It must include the creation of at least 655,000 units of social and affordable housing.

Thank you very much.