Opinion: Quebec’s action plan for the homeless falls short

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Last week, the Quebec government announced its new action plan to combat homelessness: an investment of $ 280 million over five years, including $ 10 million for emergency and transitional housing for women. Taken at face value, this is great news. However, if we consider that women make up 23% of Montreal’s total homeless population , and that the pandemic has forced many women to live in precarious living conditions, and even homelessness, this budget is sufficient for the growing needs of this population.

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To give you an idea, at the Chez Doris Women’s Day Shelter, we welcomed nearly 900 unique homeless women during the last fiscal year, 24 percent of whom had never experienced homelessness in the past and they were new to Chez Doris. This is double our pre-COVID numbers. There are many women to help and (re) shelter.

There is a great need for emergency and transitional housing exclusively dedicated to women in Montreal. Often at risk of further victimization in mixed services, women represent only 35% of temporary accommodation users . Furthermore, according to Canada’s Employment and Social Development Shelter Capacity Report 2019, only 219 of the 1,901 emergency beds available in Quebec are reserved for women’s shelters, 177 of them in Montreal. To respond to this glaring lack of beds, various organizations have set out to develop new emergency and transitional shelter projects. To this end, Chez Doris will open a night shelter with 22 emergency beds by spring 2022. In addition, since December 2020, Chez Doris has been providing emergency night services operating in a block of 40 hotel rooms.

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But are 22 emergency beds enough for the nearly 900 homeless women who have walked through the doors of our day shelter in the past year? You don’t have to be a mathematician to see the discrepancy. Let’s take a closer look at the figures in the action plan. With a budget of $ 10 million, spread over five years, that generates $ 2 million per year to invest in emergency and transitional housing for women in Quebec. This amount will then be divided by municipality and then by organization. What will we have in the end? Almost nothing.

During the construction of our emergency night shelter, we have seen first-hand how much it costs to transform an existing building for its new purpose. From the cost of purchasing the building, renovating it per code, and eventual operating costs, this project only costs in excess of the annual investment of $ 2 million that the government is proposing to share with all emergency and transitional housing projects for women.

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We applaud the government’s desire for more emergency and transitional housing reserved for women. However, the budget proposed in the action plan does not consider the costs incurred for the operation and management of these services, nor the psychosocial services and follow-ups offered to these women, who often have serious mental health problems or have been victims of violence. or affected by drug addiction. Without adequate psychosocial support, many of the women who are placed in transitional housing run the risk of being on the streets again.

While we need more emergency and transitional housing for homeless women, we will not be able to solve the problem of women’s homelessness simply by providing housing without ancillary services. We must think of other solutions and approach this problem in a more holistic way. By investing in the prevention of homelessness and social inequalities that affect women, and in mental health services, we may find more solutions to end homelessness for women in Quebec.

Marina Boulos-Winton is the CEO of Chez Doris.