Gary Gladstone
Chair, Intentional Community Consortium
Opening remarks
Good morning, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. Thank you for inviting me to appear today—
Meeting 44 · June 18, 2026 · 08:16–10:44 (2h 28m)
45-17 witnesses · 134 interventions · 17,980 words
The House of Commons human resources committee met to study homelessness in Canada. Seven witnesses appeared: Gary Gladstone, chair of the Intentional Community Consortium; Annie Savage, director of Réseau d'aide aux personnes seules et itinérantes de Montréal; Krystyna Lloyd, chief executive officer of the Safe Haven Foundation of Canada; Jason Miles, a lived experience advocate appearing as an individual; Sarah Vandal, executive director of Zone Libre Memphrémagog; Andrew Boozary, executive director of the Gattuso Centre for Social Medicine, appearing as an individual; and Earl Thiessen, executive director of the Oxford House Foundation of Canada.
Gary Gladstone said that 13% to 15% of shelter residents have a developmental disability, that about 80% of those experience chronic homelessness, and that the problem is not just a lack of housing but a lack of the right housing with supports. He recommended that people with developmental disabilities remain an explicit priority in the national housing strategy 2.0, with a commitment to create at least 3,000 additional supportive homes by 2031, a dedicated $1-billion funding stream over five years, and that Build Canada Homes support portfolio-based delivery models and require B3 fire code and universal accessibility standards.
Annie Savage argued that the fight against homelessness cannot be reduced to a housing strategy and requires a comprehensive response addressing social determinants, community care and stable intervention. She said that under the Reaching Home program, 204 high-priority projects in Montreal totalling over $304 million were submitted but only 69 were funded, and she called for five-year funding agreements indexed annually, more flexibility in funding streams, and dedicated resources for emergency shelter spaces separate from ongoing service funding.
Krystyna Lloyd described the Safe Haven Foundation's foyer model, which integrates housing with life skills, education and employment coaching for girls and young women aged 14 to 26, with no time limits on stays. She said prevention remains one of the least funded areas of Canada's homelessness response and called for investment in early intervention, incentives for organizations to provide depth of care over breadth of care, and support for proven models to share resources across the country.
Jason Miles, drawing on six years of homelessness and addiction, said that housing, mental health and addiction must not be treated as separate systems and that housing should be the foundation, not a reward for recovery. He called for a single, transparent pathway into housing, supportive housing scaled across the full spectrum of need, and a change in the public conversation to reduce fear and misinformation about supportive housing.
Sarah Vandal said that rural communities like Memphrémagog face the same challenges as urban centres but with fewer specialized resources, and that her organization's mobile warming centre logged 462 visits and over 2,310 interventions in one winter. She reported that changes to Reaching Home funding left her organization unable to participate in the call for proposals, leading to the closure of local services, and recommended better recognition of rural expertise, stable and predictable funding for local services, and regional consultation spaces that bring together urban and rural stakeholders.
Andrew Boozary said that people who are chronically unhoused live half as long as the general public, that health care costs for them are sevenfold to eightfold higher, and that the average life expectancy of chronically unhoused women in Toronto is 36 years. He cited preliminary results from the Dunn House social medicine model showing a 79% reduction in hospital bed days and a 62% reduction in emergency department visits, and he urged the committee to read the Scotiabank report calling for a doubling of the social housing supply in Canada.
Earl Thiessen described a pre-treatment recovery housing model he created in Calgary that provides a stable, substance-free environment for people after medical detox while they wait for a residential treatment bed. He said that from 16 beds, 231 people went safely to residential treatment last year, and that the model is being expanded to Edmonton with provincial funding; he noted that all current funding comes from the province and that he will be reaching out to the federal government for support.
During the question period, members asked about the importance of relationship in healing, the need for integrated systems and clearer pathways into housing, and the role of provinces in providing wraparound supports. One member apologized for an earlier partisan exchange with a witness, and another member put a motion on notice calling for the committee to recommend that the government evaluate current approaches and prioritize investments with measurable outcomes in treatment, recovery, housing stability and collaboration across all levels of government. No procedural debate, motions or votes were concluded during the meeting.
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Gary Gladstone
Chair, Intentional Community Consortium
Opening remarks
Good morning, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. Thank you for inviting me to appear today—
Annie Savage
Director, Réseau d'aide aux personnes seules et itinérantes de Montréal
Opening remarks
Thank you, Mr. Chair. Members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to participate in your study. My name is Annie Savage. I am here on behalf of Réseau d'aide aux personnes seules et itinérantes de Montréal, or RAPSIM for short. We are an umbrella organization that brings together 99 agencies working to prevent and reduce homelessness in Montreal. RAPSIM's main message today is simple: The fight against homelessness can't be reduced to a housing strategy. It requires a comprehensive response, one that addresses housing, social determinants, community care and stable community-based intervention all at the same time. The federal government must significantly increase its homelessness investments. Further to the Reaching Home call for proposals for 2026‑28 funding, more than 204 high-priority projects in Montreal, totalling over $304 million, were submitted for consideration. The funding requested was nearly four times what was available. Just 69 projects were renewed and funded. Because of this underfunding, supports were cut, and the toll on the ground is significant. Homelessness groups need funding agreements that cover at least five years, so they can improve…
Krystyna Lloyd
Chief Executive Officer, Safe Haven Foundation of Canada
Opening remarks
Chair and members of the committee, hello and thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today. While I'm here in my capacity as CEO of the Safe Haven Foundation of Canada, what I also bring with me is a unique combination of relevant professional and personal experience. Over the course of my career, I have led community investment initiatives for one of Canada's leading energy providers. I have worked alongside indigenous communities advancing their own visions for self-determination, and I have served as a consultant supporting community initiatives at every level of government. Equally important is my lived experience. As a young person, at the age of 16, I left an unstable home and experienced what we now describe as hidden homelessness. Eventually, I was able to access the people and resources that allowed me to reclaim my future and ultimately sit before you today with a deep understanding of the pathways that lead to homelessness, the systems that exist around it and, most importantly, the programs that prevent it. There is no question that Canada is facing a housing and homelessness crisis. You will hear that reality reflected in the testimony of every witness…
Jason Miles
Lived Experience Advocate, As an Individual
Opening remarks
Good morning, everyone. My name is Jason Miles. I'm here to speak about homelessness and housing in Canada. I'm also here today as someone who is now housed and more than two and a half years free from my addiction. I know I'm one of the lucky ones. There was a time when I truly did not believe I would ever be able to say that again. I spent approximately six years homeless on the streets of Toronto, living with severe mental health struggles, physical health issues and an addiction that completely took over my life. During that time, my life became a cycle of trying to survive. I went through repeated attempts to get help, moments of recovery that didn't last, time in and out of jail, and periods when I was actively using and unable to break free from it. I experienced multiple overdoses and serious injuries, and more than once I came very close to not waking up again. There were moments when I did not think I would make it through another night. The hardest part is that I did not go through that alone. My family and friends went through it too. Often, people who loved me had no idea where I was or if I was even alive. Sometimes the only time they would hear anything was…
Sarah Vandal
Executive Director, Zone Libre Memphrémagog
Opening remarks
Mr. Chair, members of the committee, thank you for inviting me to testify today as part of your study on homelessness in Canada. I am the executive director of Zone Libre Memphrémagog, a community-based organization located in a very vulnerable neighbourhood in Magog. Although our primary mission is addiction prevention and harm reduction, we must recognize that our living environment is an important gateway for people living with issues of addiction, mental health, housing insecurity or homelessness. This proximity enables us to observe, every day, the close ties that exist between these various realities and to develop on-the-ground expertise based on direct support for these people. We can also foster partnerships with community, institutional and municipal partners, as well as with police forces, all while contributing to better coordination of interventions in our area. In the Memphrémagog RCM, we have no organization whose specific mission is homelessness intervention. However, over the past several years, we have seen a significant increase in housing insecurity and homelessness, both visible and hidden. Like many rural communities, our area faces the same challenges as…
Andrew Boozary
Executive Director, Gattuso Centre for Social Medicine, As an Individual
Opening remarks
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and thank you to the committee for this opportunity to be able to present today. I want to commend the committee for centring the voices of lived experience in the expertise of designing some of the solutions in responding to the housing crisis. I approach this testimony as a physician who has predominantly worked with unhoused patients over the past 10 years. I'm the executive director of the Gattuso Centre for Social Medicine and a researcher at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto. My thesis, and the thesis that I believe we have all shared and heard today, is that we need to have a more expansive view of the housing crisis as an economic, social and health crisis. In making the argument for housing as a health crisis, I would like to point to some of the data that I believe is incredibly damning for us as a country, one of the leading OECD countries. We know that people who are chronically unhoused live half as long as the general public. That is 20, 30 or 40 birthdays and birth years that are lost. If any drug could restore 10 to 20 life years, you would think that all funders would be tripping over themselves…
Earl Thiessen
Executive Director, Oxford House Foundation of Canada
Opening remarks
Thank you. First off, congratulations, Jason, on your healing journey. Thank you for this opportunity to come back and for welcoming me with the other panellists. My name is Earl Thiessen. I am the executive director of the Oxford House Foundation. More importantly, I'm also an alumnus of our program. I'm here to provide my experience on homelessness and addiction and the effects of both. For me, this means healing. My unresolved childhood trauma eventually led me to the streets and to being homeless for seven years. My unwillingness to face my demons and my use of alcohol and drugs as an emotional response to my childhood trauma was so powerful. The shame of being sexually abused is so intense that many men and women lose their lives to addiction or suicide, refusing to speak about it. We gain knowledge when teaching through words and actions. We heal the same way. The first time I talked about my sexual abuse was while I was in treatment and doing my step five with a female elder. I cried for two and a half hours, telling her about my childhood trauma. I walked out of her room a different man. I had held that trauma in for 25 years. I only told my dad about it a few years…