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(ADAM PROSKIW / iNFOnews.ca)

The 2003 Okanagan Mountain Park wildfire triggered the second largest civilian evacuation in Canadian history.

Two of the 33,050 evacuees were parents to Tim Richter who is now CEO of the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness.

He argues the same kind of efforts brought into play to cope with the wildfire needs to be activated to tackle the far bigger and far more deadly crisis of homelessness in Canada today.

“In 2003, my parents were evacuated,” Richter told iNFOnews.ca. “They went to a reception centre. They took their name and address, figured out what they needed. First point – they collected the individual data.

“Then they were put into a shelter, the Delta Hotel. Then the focus was on getting them and their neighbours back into housing. For those neighbours who lost their homes there was a plan for them longer term, working with their insurance or whatever, planning longer term housing. Then there was a focus on rebuilding.”

More recently, people are not still homeless following 2013 floods in Calgary or the 2016 Fort McMurray Wildfire and most have returned home after last summer's McDougall Creek wildfire.

“Why is it that our response to fire or flood is different than our response to homelessness from poverty and policy?” Richter asked. “The crazy thing is, the impact is the same. The impact of homelessness in terms of the loss of housing is as big as our largest natural disasters.”

Back to the Kelowna wildfire, the emergency response process was in place before it hit.

“All that activity was coordinated by the City of Kelowna and the federal and provincial governments came in to support,” Richter said.

“Ending homeless requires the exact same kind of coordination. You need a command centre. You need real time data. You focus on keeping people safe in the emergency, so shelter or whatever.

“You focus on housing. Deal with the people in an emergency crisis and get them back into housing as soon as you can then figure out how we prevent it from happening in the first place.”

Richter stressed that it is possible to end – or at least very drastically reduce – homelessness in Canada. That’s been proven in Europe where, for example, Finland has cut its rates by more than 60%. Even the U.S. has cut theirs in half in the past 10 years when it comes to homeless veterans, which were of a magnitude of what Canada faces today.

How many are homeless in Canada is unclear, unlike in the U.S. where a research company recently published a list of the states with the highest levels of homelessness per capita.

“Canada doesn’t have great data on homeless,” Richter said. “Americans are about a decade ahead.”

Canada only started doing point-in-time counts in 2018 and they are usually done only every two years.

They provide a snapshot of what the situation was on a particular day of the year but do not allow for tracking which strategies work or where efforts should be focused.

“You can’t solve a problem you can’t see,” Richter said. “By the end of this year, we will be working with 90 communities and somewhere around 37 have real time data on people experiencing chronic homelessness – not all homelessness but chronic, so that’s the beginning of that process and it takes time."

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Just as in the forest fire analogy, the first step in dealing with a home loss is to determine who is in need and what those needs are.

“We can’t tell you how many people are experiencing homelessness in Canada right now,” Richter said, noting it's believed to be about 265,000.

“You’ve got to think of homelessness as a flow of people through a system We have an estimate but we don’t know so we need to be able to see the movement of people through the system.

"In Kelowna, for example, how many people are becoming homeless? How many people are returning to homelessness for a month, from supportive housing or rental apartments or programs? How many people have left homelessness into housing? How many people have we lost track of – they’ve gone to jail, they’ve gone to hospital, they’ve left town?”

Collecting that data is essential in order to figure out the best way to respond.

“In Kelowna, you have different housing programs, different shelters, different mental health programs,” Richter said. “You’re investing in housing but without that kind of integrated data. Where you’re putting that money is a bit of a guess. It’s an educated guess but it’s still a guess.

“If you have real time data, you can say: ‘I need 36 units of supportive housing with this population with these needs and these 36 people specifically.’ Then you can build that housing and you can say: ‘If we house these 36 people, it will have this effect on our homeless numbers. That helps you play with the different coordinated responses. Get all those agencies working around a shared set of data and plan and target interventions. It’s just a much more efficient way of building a homelessness focus.”

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The challenge, if this is the way to effectively combat homelessness, is getting someone to take the lead to make it happen.

“I often joke that homelessness is the political equivalent of a junior high school dance because each level of government is sort of standing in the corner staring at their feet waiting for somebody else to do something, to make the first move," Richter said.

"This is why the disaster management analogy makes sense because there’s a clear agreement that the city leads then the provincial and federal governments support. You can have a consistent national approach if that emergency management system is mandated and designed by the federal government."

From his perspective, the federal government needs to step up.

“The federal government needs to say homelessness is a solvable problem,” Richter said. “We’re going to develop a national strategy for the elimination of homelessness and we’re going to provide resources to communities through regional and other programs and we’re going to invest in housing but we’re going to help communities build the coordinated systems.”

Key to any solution is housing.

“In Canada, the rental housing crisis that we’re facing today began in 1980 when the federal government stopped its incentives for rental housing construction,” he said.

The BC government is the most ambitious in the country when it comes to housing, Richter said.

“It’s going to take time for some of these measures to have an impact because housing takes years to build,” he said. “I think the measures the Government of BC is taking will work but, I think, on homelessness in particular, it’s going to be really important for them to help cities build these coordinated systems or else you’re spending money a little blindly.”

With the BC election coming this fall and a federal one next year, homelessness should be the top campaign issue, Richter said.

“I think we’re in a place, now, where everybody’s feeling the housing crisis and demanding action. It’s just who’s going to take charge.”

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