Ottawa Mission calls on federal government to boost aid for newcomers

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The Ottawa Mission says its current operations are “not sustainable” with the shelter well beyond its capacity and people sleeping on mats and in chairs.

Mission CEO Peter Tilley said Thursday that the shelter system was “in the midst of a gathering storm on many fronts,” brought on by mounting pressures from rising housing costs and high food prices, coupled with newcomers in need of emergency support.

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“We came out of the pandemic with optimism that things would be better,” Tilley said, but “within weeks, the beds were full, the mats were back down on the floor and we were at full capacity.”

Last summer, several Canadian cities reported “an influx of newcomers, asylum seekers and refugees” in need of emergency shelter. The Ottawa Mission’s annual report, released Thursday, said government support did not increase to meet the basic needs of those individuals.

“At The Ottawa Mission, which remains at over 100 per cent capacity, now clients sleep on chairs in its lounge overnight as they wait for a bed. The arrival of asylum seekers also has impacted the shelter’s meal program, clothing room, housing case managers, and other staff,” the report read. “This influx has placed an extraordinary strain on the homelessness continuum and is not sustainable.”

People are sleeping in chairs at the Mission, Tilley said, or they’re curled up on mats in the corners of the waiting room. And they’re hungry.

“It’s unbelievable pressure on an already burdened shelter system.”

The Mission called on the federal government to establish welcome centres for newcomers and to provide funding to Ottawa and other cities to support newcomers. The federal government gave cash to the City of Toronto when that city had a dramatic increase in asylum seekers last summer, the report said, but Ottawa has not received similar funding.

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The report also calls for the federal government to implement a homelessness prevention and housing benefit to support up to 385,000 households at risk of homelessness and to lift 50,000 people out of homelessness in order to reduce pressure on the country’s homelessness systems, to launch a “National Encampment Response Plan” by the summer, to implement all recommendations from the Auditor General of Canada’s 2022 report on the National Housing Strategy and to implement a grocer’s code of conduct.

The influx of newcomers, coupled with high housing costs and food insecurity, has brought Ottawa to “a tipping point where housing precarity and food insecurity are now so severe that the lives of millions of people are compromised by these conjoined factors,” the report read.

“The housing-food insecurity nexus is the result of policy choices made under economic and political systems that regard housing and food largely as for-profit commodities without sufficient provision for them as basic human needs and rights. All governments have a role to play in addressing the housing-food insecurity nexus.”

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Tilley said he also wanted to see the federal government make good on promises in the 2017 National Housing Strategy, a 10-year, $82-billion plan.

The strategy promised more than 130,000 new housing units and “protecting” nearly 350,000 community housing units, but “we see very little of that activity,” Tilley said, “which puts us in the mess we’re in today, with the number of people who can’t find housing.”

Currently, the average rent in Ottawa is about $2,000 a month, which is not attainable for many coming out of the shelter system, TIlley said, and there’s little in the way of available housing, let alone affordable options.

The number of asylum seekers arriving at the Mission has decreased since December, but “it is too soon to tell if this is a temporary reduction or longer-term trend,” the report said. “The shelter is still placing people in its lounge and turning others away due to a lack of available beds, and these numbers are not sustainable.”

At the same time, the Mission’s annual number of meals provided skyrocketed over the COVID-19 pandemic to more than one million meals in 2022–2023, the report said.

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The shelter’s food truck program, which began as a pandemic response, has grown from one truck, five stops and 500 meals per week in 2020 to two trucks, 35 stops across Ottawa and more than 7,000 meals per week.

The meals are served to “vulnerable people,” including children.

“Average daily meal numbers are even higher now due to unabated community hunger as well as increased occupancy levels at the shelter,” the report said.

Looking ahead to the federal budget on April 16, Tilley said he hoped the federal government would “do good on some commitments.”

Ontario should also “do what they can,” Tilley said, noting the province’s current rules only enforced rent control on properties built before 2018, which “puts a huge burden on people.”

He said the City of Ottawa, its council and other community organizations were “doing everything we can” locally, but “we need some activity and action at higher levels of government.”

Until then, he says, “we’ll continue to scramble, to keep a finger in the dike, put the Band-Aid on.”

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