As a newcomer to Canada almost four years ago, I arrived carrying a tidy set of assumptions. Canada, after all, is a G7 country, a place that is known for stability, strong public institutions, and an ability to turn collective challenges into systems that work. It is a country that has contributed far beyond its population size, from medical breakthroughs like the discovery of insulin at the University of Toronto to iconic engineering exports like Canadarm, the robotics technology that supported NASA’s space shuttle missions for three decades.  

Canada’s reputation is not only built on invention and expertise. It is also built on the idea that public policy can be both practical and humane. Canada is a G7 member alongside the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan. It is a large country with a relatively small population, vast resources, and room to grow. Statistics Canada estimated Canada’s population at 41.7 million on July 1, 2025. The U.S. Census Bureau put the United States at 341.8 million as of July 1, 2025.  

That difference matters. Market size is not everything, but it shapes almost everything. A larger population can mean a larger labour force, a larger consumer base, and a deeper pool of taxpayers to support infrastructure, public services, and innovation. Total economic output is not mysterious mathematics. It is, in plain terms, the number of people engaged in an economy multiplied by how productive they are. The CIA World Factbook describes real GDP per capita as a way of comparing output per person. If this is accurate, scale then becomes straightforward. When a country has a large population and high per person productivity, it tends to have economic weight. The United States is the clearest example of how market size amplifies everything from domestic competition to investment, and from supply chains to public borrowing capacity.

Coming from Nigeria sharpened this point for me. Nigeria’s population in 2025 was listed by UNFPA at 237.5 million. Nigeria carries that population on a land area of about 923,768 square kilometres. To put that in perspective, Ontario alone is larger in total area, at about 1,076,395 square kilometres. That is the kind of comparison that makes you look at Canada’s scale differently. Canada’s total area is 9,984,670 square kilometres. This is not a small, landlocked country boxed in by geography. It is a breathtaking beauty of a country with the physical room to plan, build, and expand.

So, yes, I arrived expecting the housing system to reflect that kind of capacity.

Then life started.

My first encounter with Canada’s rental market was not a debate about supply curves or interest rates. It was a set of documents. Pay stubs. Bank statements. Credit history. References. Sometimes guarantors. This is normal screening in many places, and landlords have a right to protect themselves. Manitoba’s human rights guidance, for example, recognizes screening for ability to pay and income stability, while warning landlords against discriminatory criteria and blanket rules that undermine equal access. The point is not that screening exists. The point is what happens when screening becomes a wall.

Newcomers often arrive with savings, with education, with work ethic, and with urgency. What we do not always arrive with is Canadian credit history, Canadian rental history, or an employer who has already generated tidy pay stubs. That gap turns into instant penalty. And it is a strange penalty because it has little to do with actual risk and a lot to do with administrative comfort.

This matters because it reveals something deeper about how the system is designed. It is a system that works best for people who already have stable employment, stable paperwork, and stable history. That is much of the working and middle class. For people at the edges, and for people pushed to the edges by shocks, it is punishing.

I say this as someone who would later have the remarkable opportunity to work in the homeless-serving sector. It is one thing to hear the phrase “housing crisis” on the news. It is another to watch how fast a life can unravel when rent rises, wages lag, and support systems are fragmented.

The story Canada tells about itself is a story of fairness, order, and steady problem-solving. But housing reality many Canadians are living is closer to triage.

The crisis is visible, and it has been growing

Homelessness is difficult to measure precisely, partly because so much of it is hidden. Statistics Canada notes that on a single day in 2018, more than 25,216 people across 61 communities were counted as homeless, sheltered and unsheltered. By 2024, six years later, the federally supported Point-in-Time counts found nearly 60,000 people experiencing homelessness on a single night in 74 participating communities. The same federal report notes that Quebec did not participate in 2024, and that if homelessness there remained stable, adding Quebec’s prior counts would push that single-night figure above 67,000 across 87 communities.  

This is not an inconsequential fluctuation but a strong signal that should not be ignored.

At the same time, housing stress extends far beyond visible homelessness. CMHC reports that 10 percent of Canadian households were in core housing need in 2021. Among renters, it was 20 percent, and CMHC notes that most of those renter households were struggling due to affordability.  

So, if Canada’s response to homelessness is limited to emergency shelter capacity, it is responding far too late. It amounts to funding the last stage of a problem, and not interrupting the very path that leads there.

The “affordable housing” idea needs honesty

Canada has a definition problem. Not necessarily that of semantic, but of policy.

CMHC’s standard definition says housing is “affordable” if it costs less than 30 percent of a household’s before-tax income. Statistics Canada notes that the 30 percent threshold was adopted in 1986 as a measure tied to defining need for social housing.  

This threshold is widely used because it is simple. But simplicity is not always truth.

Thirty percent of income can mean radically different things depending on the income level. Thirty percent of a high income leaves room for food, transportation, childcare, medication, and savings. Thirty percent of a low income can still leave you choosing between rent and groceries. The measure also treats “before-tax income” as if after-tax reality is a detail. It is not.

Then there is another issue. “Affordable housing” is often used in public conversation to mean “below market,” as if “below market” is automatically affordable. In a market where rents have risen faster than wages, a unit can be below market and still be out of reach for a large share of renters.

If Canada wants to be serious, it has to stop treating affordability as a slogan and start treating it as a lived calculation. Housing has to be affordable in the context of actual incomes, real household budgets, and jurisdictional costs. Otherwise, we keep announcing “affordable” projects while the number of people who cannot afford housing continues to rise.

Homelessness is not a single story

Another habit that weakens policy is the urge to reduce homelessness to addiction alone. Addiction is real. It is also not the full story.

People lose housing after job loss. After illness. After family breakdown. After domestic violence. After aging out of care. After rent increases that quietly outrun wages. After a disability that turns work into instability. After a retirement income that was never designed for today’s market. These pathways are not theoretical. They are visible in every community that tracks inflow into homelessness. These are the very traumatic realities everyone working in the homeless-serving sector is confronted on a day-to-day basis.

The uncomfortable truth is that Canada’s safety net is not consistently built to catch people at the moment they start falling. Too often, it engages only after the fall has become severe, public, and expensive.

And expensive is not a metaphor. When homelessness becomes chronic, public systems pay through emergency health care, policing, and crisis interventions. The Mental Health Commission of Canada’s At Home/Chez Soi project, which studied Housing First across multiple cities, found that Housing First improves outcomes for people who are homeless and living with mental illness, and that it can make better use of public dollars, particularly for people with high service use.  

So the question is not whether supports work. The question is why supports are still treated as optional, slow, or secondary. Why?

Newcomers should not be scapegoated, the evidence is more nuanced than politics

It has become fashionable to blame newcomers for Canada’s housing strain. It is an easy narrative because it sounds like basic arithmetic. More people, more demand, higher prices.

But serious policy has to hold two truths at once.

First, it is true that immigration can add demand in the short term, especially in tight markets where supply cannot respond quickly. The Bank of Canada has also pointed out that the impact of immigration on shelter prices depends heavily on local supply conditions and the income profile of new arrivals.  

But it is also true that newcomers expand capacity. They fill labour shortages, including in construction and in the professions that make housing possible. The federal government has reported that immigrants account for 23 percent of general contractors and builders of residential buildings, and large shares of architects, civil engineers, and construction managers.  

The deeper point, however, is that immigration is not a housing plan. It cannot be treated as one. When governments increase population growth without matching it with aggressive supply, infrastructure, and supports, pressure rises. That failure is not the fault of the newcomer. It is a policy failure.

Canada’s own housing research increasingly describes the issue in those terms. CMHC has estimated that to restore affordability, housing starts would need to nearly double to roughly 430,000 to 480,000 units per year until 2035 to meet projected demand. That is the kind of statement that should end the culture-war conversation. It points to scale and speed.

What “doing better” looks like in practice

There is truly no single fix, and that is exactly why Canada needs a different style of action. The current approach often looks like a collection of programs that are individually defensible but collectively inadequate. It is like having many small pipes without enough water.

A serious approach begins with supply, but not supply as a blunt slogan. Supply that matches need means building deeply affordable homes, not only moderate rentals that still sit above what many can pay. It also means building supportive housing at a pace that reflects the level of need, because for many people, a lease alone is not enough. Supports are needed to maintain housing and those supports are not decoration. They are what make housing stable for people with complex health, mental health, and trauma realities. When Housing First works, it works because it places housing first and wraps supports around it, not because it simply relocates people from street to unit and hopes the rest sorts itself out.  

Doing better would also mean moving upstream. If 20 percent of renter households are in core housing need, and the issue is largely affordability, then homelessness prevention is not a niche program. It is a mainstream housing policy requirement. Prevention would therefore look like rent banks that are properly funded and easy to access. It would look like eviction prevention services that intervene early, before arrears become unmanageable. It would look like income supports that reflect the real cost of housing in each region, instead of forcing people to bridge impossible gaps month after month. It would look like tenancy supports that help people keep housing, not only find it.

It also requires reforming the “paperwork gate” that locks newcomers and other non-traditional applicants out of rentals. If landlords are screening for risk, then Canada should be offering tools that allow screening to be fair and evidence-based rather than crude and exclusionary. Manitoba’s human rights guidance already signals that screening must be applied in a way that avoids discriminatory effects. In practice, that principle can be strengthened by standardizing alternative ways to show ability to pay, and by creating landlord assurance mechanisms that reduce the incentive to choose only the easiest applicant. When the market is tight, landlords can be as conservative as they want. The system then rewards the safest paperwork, not the best tenant.

Then there is the affordability definition itself. As long as Canada relies heavily on a one-size 30 percent threshold, public debate will keep missing the moral centre of the issue. The 30 percent benchmark may still be useful as one indicator, but it cannot be the whole test of whether housing is actually affordable. Statistics Canada’s own note that this threshold was adopted decades ago should prompt a modern update in how affordability is assessed and how programs are designed. If the goal is stable housing, then the measure has to reflect the remaining income that households need to live.

Finally, doing better would require governments to treat housing as economic infrastructure, not only as social policy. Housing is the base layer that makes workforce participation possible. It anchors children in schools. It stabilizes health outcomes. It affects labour mobility. It shapes productivity. When Canada underbuilds and under-supports, it is not only producing homelessness. It is constraining its own economic capacity.

That is why the housing debate should stop being framed as compassion versus cost. The evidence from Housing First research shows that stable housing with supports can reduce pressure on expensive crisis systems, especially for people who are heavy users of emergency services. The moral argument and the economic argument point in the same direction.

A first-world test that Canada can still pass

Canada is not a failed state. It is not a country without resources. It is not a country without expertise. It is a country that, by its scale and wealth, should be capable of building a housing system that does not treat homelessness as a permanent feature of modern life. The real question is whether Canada is willing to act like a country that believes its own story.

In 2024, nearly 60,000 people were counted as homeless in one night across 74 communities, with federal reporting suggesting the true figure would be higher with full national participation. Winnipeg saw nearly 100 per cent increase in its own count in a space of two years. And these are very conservative estimates. These figures should not be filed away as a statistic. They should be treated as a national alarm.  How a society treats its most vulnerable people is not a sentimental test. It is a systems test. When too many people cannot access housing, or cannot keep it once they find it, something is wrong in the structure.

Canada can do better with housing supply and supports. Not by promising, not by rebranding, not by managing the crisis more efficiently, but by building and supporting at a scale that matches the reality on the ground. This beautiful country has the land. It has the institutions. It has the expertise. The remaining ingredient is the kind of urgency that turns knowledge into homes, and homes into stability without the noise of politics.

This article was written by Oraye St. Franklyn, a public affairs analyst based in Canada.