The cold winter wind snaps at the outer shell of a sleeping bag on the sidewalk, a tent in a grassy park, a campsite deep in a ravine. It’s a grim scene you’ll find today not only in Toronto’s urban downtown but in far corners of the city, the suburbs down the highway, even increasingly in rural Ontario.
Homelessness, once considered an urban problem, is now a crisis spread across the provincial map — and one that has picked up momentum at a dizzying speed since Ontario’s last election. A landmark report released in January by the Association of Municipalities of Ontario showed that between 2022 and 2024, the province’s known homeless population shot up by 25 per cent to a whopping 81,515 people. That pressure has been obvious in Toronto, where the known homeless population has shot up by more than 1,700 people since early 2022, and hundreds more tents and makeshift camps have arisen.
