Homelessness and Poverty- It does exist in PEI

There is a serious need for a homeless shelter in Summerside. The topic has been discussed for years with voluntary organizations within the Summerside area. Below is a sampling of some research on homelessness I conducted for a graduate course about 3 years ago. It is a shaved down version of a 25 paper I wrote called, "Government Paradigm, Partnerships, and Homelessness in Canada".
Homelessness continues to grow at vast rates across Canada, not just in large urban centres, but in the rural areas of the country. Many attempts from the voluntary and municipal levels have been made to address this complex issue, but what is needed to tackle this issue is for all sectors (voluntary and public) to stop “passing the buck”, develop partnerships, and work with private industry to develop affordable housing strategies and job creation programs across the country. There is a massive misconception in the public regarding homelessness.
“The Government of Canada’s actions and lack of action leading to, and failing to prevent, morbidity and death, violates the moral and ethical codes of the nation’s religions, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and federal and provincial human rights codes. We now call on international human rights law for assistance in the struggle to force Canadian federal and provincial governments to take action to end this fundamental human rights abuse.” (Toronto Disaster Relief Committee, 1999)
Who Are Canada’s Homeless?
Homelessness implies more than the absence of a house or apartment. Homelessness produces profound social dislocation and is associated with the absence of a role in the community, privacy and security. Homeless people lack a base from which to work, go to school, receive training, sustain social contacts, receive social services, and provide and receive nurture. (Begin, 1996)
The First Annual Toronto Report Card on Homelessness 2000 defined homelessness to include people who:
Live on the street
Stay in emergency shelters
Spend more of their income on rent or live in overcrowded conditions, and are at serious risk of becoming homeless.
Municipal Government
In many instances, municipalities believe that they are being forced to deal with the negative consequences of provincial/territorial and federal policy changes and budget cuts, but lack the resources to adequately address these increasingly difficult problems.
(Federation of Canadian Municipalities, 2004)
In 2001, 80 percent of Canadians lived in urban communities, with 64 percent concentrated in the country’s 27 cities with a population of 100,000 or more. Fifty-one percent of the population lived in four urban areas: the Golden Horseshoe in southern Ontario; Greater Montreal; British Columbia’s Lower Mainland and southern Vancouver Island; and the Calgary- Edmonton corridor. Between 1996 and 2001, the combined population grew by 7.6 percent, compared with 0.5 percent for the rest of the country. It must also be noted that the cities in these regions, along with others, are home to increasingly ethnically diverse populations. (Seidle, 2002)
Low and modest income families in Toronto and Vancouver are increasingly unable to afford their basic needs. This inability is having a measurable impact on homelessness among families. While the largest group using the City of Toronto’s emergency shelter system remains single men, admissions of youth, couples, and single-parent and two-parent families are growing at a faster rate than those of singles, according to the City’s Community and Neighborhood Services Department. A 2003 survey of 20 Canadian municipalities collected information on the emergency shelters now in place to address homelessness. In the case of Toronto, approximately one-third of the city’s 80 emergency shelters are now devoted to single-parent or two-parent families experiencing homelessness. In Vancouver, fewer than 30 percent of shelters serve single men exclusively. These changing demographics pose new challenges to municipal service providers, as the needs of families are significantly different than those of single men. (Federation of Canadian Municipalities, 2004 p.2)
There are various forms of partnerships that can be used for homelessness projects and taking a community approach to action. It is important to distinguish between formal structures in which a number of actors participate and where structures have been dictated in large part by a “higher” authority and those that have developed spontaneously ending up in either a formal or non-formal arrangement. (Bryant, 1991)
Intergovernmental Partnerships – These partnerships involve linkages between different levels of government. In the context of developing community projects, such as homelessness initiatives, senior levels of government still have a role to play because they have an interest in the efficiency and effectiveness with which public funds are spent, and they have broader collective interests that they may wish to see addressed in the community/program development process.
Inter-municipal Partnerships- These take on many forms, ranging from municipalities operating within imposed institutional structures, to formal structures for cooperation where each municipality can opt out, to informal arrangements or somewhat more formal but ad hoc arrangements, frequently dealing with cooperation on a particular activity or issue. Inter-municipal cooperation is essential in any community projects.
Public/private partnerships- Arrangements between public and private sector interests are becoming more common in today’s society. In some cases, this reflects the real benefits that private sector interests will derive from a particular development as well as community spin-offs. Private developers could stand to gain by partnering for affordable housing projects.
Partnerships outside the formal sector – The important role of groups and individuals working together in partnerships or as teams within the community but fall outside the formal public sector of local or regional municipal government need to be recognized. While such partnerships and teams might work without any formal involvement of the municipalities, there is every reason to encourage communication and liaison between them and the municipality or whatever formal structure has been put in place to initiate and plan for community projects.