What Doug Ford’s government gets wrong about Ontario’s homelessness crisis — and why it’s a problem

When Ontario’s new associate housing minister assumed the role this summer, he was given an internal document briefing him on the housing crisis. That document included a staggering figure the government now concedes is false — an “unofficial” estimate that nearly a quarter of a million Ontarians are homeless. 
The 234,000-person “unofficial” estimate is repeated twice in the footnotes of the transition documents prepared for MPP Vijay Thanigasalam in June. First reported by the Trillium, it’s a figure that bewildered experts — if true, it would suggest more than 95 per cent of Ontario’s homeless population is either living outside Toronto or off the radar, as the city’s own count in June sat at 10,627 people. 
Now, as the province walks back from its estimate, experts are stressing that elected officials need to know how bad the housing crisis truly is in order to solve it. 
“If you have a major problem and you want to address it, then you need to be able to track how bad it is — to see if it’s getting better or worse, and if what you’re doing is working or not,” said Stephen Hwang, director of Unity Health’s MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions.
The suggestion that 234,000 Ontarians could be homeless ignited outrage last week, with opposing politicians accusing the government of allowing the problem to explode from an estimated 21,000 people in 2018, according to a provincial Auditor General’s report.
“It is quite simply terrible that 234,000 Ontarians are homeless. That number is NINE times higher than the Auditor General’s earlier estimate,” MPP Jessica Bell, the NDP housing critic, wrote on X last week.
Pressed for detail on how the province reached that figure, the housing ministry has confirmed to the Star the count had combined homelessness tallies with other data, such as 150,000-plus households who reported to Statistics Canada spending more than half their income on housing. 
“The 234,000 number does not represent he number of people experiencing homelessness in Ontario, which is significantly lower,” spokesperson Justine Teplycky confirmed, pointing to a much smaller, more official count of those receiving social assistance payments while facing homelessness — 31,816 people as of June. Teplycky’s statement did not account for the number of people who are homeless but not receiving social assistance payments, which a Toronto-based street survey from 2021 indicates is around 42 per cent. 
Hwang was among those mystified by the province’s 234,000-person estimate — describing it as “extraordinarily high,” with all data he’d seen suggesting the population was in the tens, not hundreds, of thousands.
That wasn’t to say the problem was less urgent or hadn’t been expanding, he cautioned. While some homelessness is highly visible, official counts also are complicated by “hidden homelessness” — those relying on stopgap options like couch-surfing as well as those who don’t interact with sites like shelters and respites. 
The City of Toronto details the size of its known homeless population by counting how many people have used its services within three months and haven’t moved into permanent homes. From June 2021 to June 2024, that population increased from 8,037 to 10,627 people.
The Star has meanwhile identified further data in the document that raises questions. In Toronto, the document cites 15,000 people on the wait-list for supportive housing, a form of affordable housing with embedded social services. But the true wait-list is nearly twice that size, at 28,116 people, according to The Access Point, the organization that oversees it, and previous data shared with the Star suggests it has been over 20,000 people since at least the spring of 2021.
Asked about the discrepancy, the housing ministry referred the Star to its associate minister of mental health and addictions, Michael Tibollo. Emails to a spokesperson for Tibollo and the health ministry went unanswered.
Andrew Boozary, executive director of social medicine at Toronto’s University Health Network, shares Hwang’s belief that accurate data is essential to tackle the issue. He also fears an oversized estimate of Ontario’s homeless population risks the problem being seen as simply too large to fix.
“It’s really important we get the magnitude of this issue right, instead of chalking it up to an intractable problem,” he said. 
This article was edited from a previous version that mistakenly referred to MPP Vijay Thanigasalam as the deputy housing minister. In fact, he is the associate housing minister. The deputy minister role is held by a civil servant, not an elected official.