It was 90 minutes of stark realities for a federal NDP leadership hopeful that visited Sudbury this week, after a group of invited housing service managers shone a sobering light on the homelessness crisis in Greater Sudbury.
Edmonton–Strathcona MP and federal NDP leadership candidate Heather McPherson came to the Nickel City at the request of Carol Hughes, the now-retired MP for Algoma–Manitoulin–Kapuskasing.
For starters, an influx of people who are working while homeless, homeless for the first time, or seniors, now 34 people who are 60 and up are homeless in Sudbury. Those are facts from Raymond Landry, co-ordinator of Housing Services for the Homelessness Network.
He told McPherson that pre-pandemic in 2019, his organization could house “eight to ten people a month.” But now? “We’ve only housed eight people this year.”
Evie Ali of the Go-Give Project echoed Landry’s perspective. “Approximately three years ago, when we first started, we were able to serve about 80 individuals on the streets of our community,” she said, specifying that number refers to people outside of the shelter systems, housing, transitional housing, hospital, jail, and other institutions.
Now, the number of clients they serve is 320.
“This is just in the core of the city,” she told McPherson, noting that number would go up if they added those living rough in the outskirts of Greater Sudbury.
It’s a total that Landry agrees with, noting the recent Point in Time count, a provincially legislated survey of people who are homeless, lists 505 people. “That is a 40-per-cent increase since the 2021 count,” said Landry.
The latest By-Name list, the city’s list of people in need of urgent housing, shows that in September, 275 people were actively homeless and in need of a place.
According to both Landry and city staff, that means a two-and-a-half year wait for rent-geared-to-income, social (or public) housing for those currently on the streets, and five years for anyone who has a place, however poor the conditions.
Landry said that some of the only spaces they have found for their clients have conditions he described as “beyond diabolical.”
From around the table, it’s clear that from a service-provider perspective, there isn’t enough capacity at shelters, there isn’t enough housing, and from the looks of it, the housing that is being built may not suit the needs.
Current plans are a ‘drop of water in an ocean of need’
“My question is, who are governments for? They're certainly not for the poor: no government is there for the poor,” Landry told the NDP leadership hopeful. “Our provincial government doesn't believe or invest in people, the rates of OW (Ontario Works employment supplement) certainly attest to that.”
Landry said the stagnant rates of the income supplements in Ontario, OW and the Ontario Disability Support Program, unchanged in decades, make it impossible for someone to exit the cycle of poverty.
“There's no way for them to get out of that situation, and if one super individual makes it out of there on their own, it's one out of the multiple thousands that are on OW in Ontario these days,” he told McPherson. “It takes a superhuman-effort to get out of poverty and there has been no significant investments from the province and federally. They’ve been drops of water in an ocean of need.”
The federal government recently set a goal to create 40,000 affordable housing units through its Affordable Housing Fund (AHF) program, part of the larger National Housing Strategy. Not an annual target, but rather a cumulative goal, but it’s the definition of affordable that Landry feels is problematic.
The Homelessness Network maintains a list of apartment vacancies that are at affordable rates for their clients and according to that list, a room with shared kitchen, bath and common areas is a minimum of $800. A bachelor in Sudbury, on the low end, is $1,000. A one-bedroom apartment nets a minimum of $1,300. Only shared accommodations are currently available, he told McPherson.
Affordable is defined two ways: rent-gear-to-income, which sees no more than 30 per cent of their income is charged in rent; or the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s definition, affordable means 80 per cent of median market rate.
With rough math, that means a CMHC-affordable bachelor apartment in Sudbury would still be $800.
But the Ontario Works (OW) employment income supplement only pays $730 per month (for a single adult) and the Ontario Disability Support Program pays around $1,200.
The money for rent just isn’t there, “especially if you want to eat,” said Landry.
He offered McPherson an example, pointing to federal investments that, in his opinion, fall short of need.
“So there's a 347-apartment project being built in Sudbury, Project Manitou,” he said, referring to the building that can be seen growing over the downtown skyline.
Of its 347 units, 105 will be classified as affordable, 80 per cent of the median market rate.
“Nobody that's on the street right now will be housed in that new building, because even on ODSP or OW, nobody from the streets is going to find a home in the new building,” said Landry.
When asked about the funding, Landry told her it was the federal government.
The project’s total estimated cost is $110 million, which includes $73 million from the federal government (through the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation), $8 million from Wolofsky and a $29-million bank loan.
The $73-million consists of $3 million in funding and $70 million as a repayable loan.
Three hots and a cot, cash for keys, racism and renovictions
And it’s not just a lack of investment in housing that is the issue, a lack of investment in reserve infrastructure in Ontario is causing a deluge of people in need coming to urban centres, said Louise Jocko, housing outreach at N’Swakamok Friendship Centre.
“There is no housing investment on reserve so folks come here and there’s none here either,” she said. And even though the statistical population of Indigenous people in Northern Ontario is six per cent, she approximates about 70 per cent of the services users at the Elgin Street Mission are First Nation.
The city's shelters are at capacity every night, with only 95 official shelter beds and 64 drop-in spaces available.
“We still have about 300 individuals that are not accessing or able to access those services, in addition to the barriers that come with that, and some of the biggest barriers are centered around addiction and mental health,” said Ali.
Though still only at half capacity, the Lorraine Street Transitional housing unit is showing promise, said the roundtable, but it’s been difficult to find ideal candidates “in a population that struggles with mental health,” said Ali.
“I had a gentleman that we were trying to get in last week, he met all the criteria, did the intake and everything. And guess what? He has a restraining order against another resident, so now he no longer will be accepted into that program,” she told McPherson.
“And we have a number of people that won't be able to access that (Lorraine Street) due to other barriers, whether that be intercommunity politics or that they are not necessarily equipped to deal with the acutely elevated mental health risks that we have here in Sudbury. And those have gotten worse.”
And while Go-Give does its best to take in all who come to their centre, Ali said there are “at least six individuals that have no access to any other services across the community,” including at the Elgin Street Mission and city shelters. They are people who’ve been banned from an organization due to their conduct, which is often out of their control. She said they try to work with the hospital and police, but there is little to be done.
“The best thing that happens for them, unfortunately, is they get picked up and go to jail for a little bit, here and there, and then, you know, they have a roof over their head and three meals for a little while.”
But, as Cory Roslyn, formerly of the Elizabeth Fry Society and now executive director at United Way mentioned, the jail is now triple- and quadruple-bunking inmates due to overcrowding.
The City of Greater Sudbury has stated they are working for more transitional housing and in an October interview with Sudbury.com, city CAO Shari Lichterman said the city needs at least two facilities similar to Lorraine Street, alongside more affordable housing, including subsidized housing.
Two business cases that deal with supportive housing will be presented to council for the next budget deliberation in December.
Then, there are the more nefarious actors: unscrupulous landlords and building owners looking to make a profit.
Jocko told McPherson that with her Indigenous clients, if she is lucky enough to find a place for them, “some landlords see Indigenous and it's a flat out, ‘No’.”
All at the table agreed that some landlords won’t even consider any client that is working with a social organization like theirs, or on an income supplement.
Then, there’s a scheme called ‘Cash for Keys.’
Ali explained to McPherson that “it's worth more to the landlord to pay somebody a solid sum of cash to leave the property than to deal with them long-term and have them potentially not pay the rent,” she said. “They're offering big sums of money — $5,000 to $10,000 — for people to leave so that they can re-rent that same apartment at twice the price.”
Ali said that anyone not currently educated on the housing market may think that’s a lot of money, “but that's not even sustainable for three months of a market rental.”
Less talk, more action
More specifically, it was a call for less talk and more action from political leaders.
“We talk and we talk and we talk, so what's actually going to happen? What's actually going to happen,”Jocko asked McPherson.”We need something concrete, an action to help the homelessness crisis. We need to stop talking and actually doing.”
McPherson told her “I think the first step is declaring a State of Emergency for housing so that we have the resources to the scale we need. It has to be scale.”
According to the participants in the roundtable, it will need to be large-scale investment, as the problem in Sudbury is only getting worse.
McPherson also spoke with the media ahead of the roundtable on Nov. 24. We asked what can the federal government do for the issues largely under the provincial purview, like housing and health care?
“The federal government has an awful lot of tools at their disposal that this government is not using,” she said. “Absolutely, the jurisdiction of housing is municipal, provincial and federal, but because the federal dollars flow from the federal government, the strings are attached, and the ability to include strings on how that money is spent, how we determine what gets built, is really important.
“Big developers don't produce the kind of housing that we need,” she told Sudbury.com of plans to include public-private partnerships in affordable housing planning.
“We need to change that, and that involves building more homes, making sure there's more access to housing, as well as ensuring that the housing that we build is affordable.”
She said there needs to be a renewed focus on housing investments, similar to the government's actions after the Second World War
“Blaming immigrants or new Canadians for a housing crisis that is squarely on the shoulders of Liberal and Conservative governments who have not invested in housing for decades is dangerous and disappointing,” she said.
The federal NDP will select their next leader at their convention in Winnipeg, held from March 27-29, 2026.
Jenny Lamothe is a reporter with Sudbury.com, covering vulnerable and marginalized populations, as well as housing issues and the justice system.