Hanes: Welcome Hall Mission has a solution — and election platform — for Quebec's homelessness crisis |
After more than a decade leading Welcome Hall Mission, one of Montreal’s largest non-profit organizations helping the vulnerable and unhoused, CEO Sam Watts has resisted all attempts to get him to run for office.
But with a Quebec election on the horizon in October and François Legault having left the premier’s office ahead of the vote, Watts has distilled his on-the-ground knowledge into a ready-made election platform addressing the twin housing affordability and homelessness crises.
It’s a first for Welcome Hall.
“I’m putting this out there for all of our parties and saying: ‘Look, what’s the harm in saying, it’s 2026, we need to step up because what used to be solidaire in the 1970s ain’t gonna work anymore,'” said Watts, who also sits on Montreal Mayor Soraya Martinez Ferrada’s tactical group on homelessness. “And so we need to find ways of adapting our Quebec approach to some of the realities that are emerging.”
The platform has three pillars and nine policy recommendations based on tried-and-true prevention measures that could potentially save more than $2 billion a year in health and social services costs.
The one thing that’s not in the eight-page document? A call for more emergency shelter beds.
“I think we need fewer because as long as we’re doing that, it’s going in the wrong direction,” Watts said. “The reality is shelters are a 19th-century solution and we’re really dealing with a 21st-century challenge, so we can do better.”
Instead, the strategy is based on recognizing safe, affordable housing as a key health determinant and marshalling resources to stop people from losing their homes in the first place.
“Let’s do a wholesale campaign of prevention and rapid response so that someone who is in an emergency situation can either back out of it, or be helped in days or weeks to find their way back into housing,” said Watts. “That should be the way we respond to this thing, not to simply accept that this is the way it’s going to be so let’s just organize some encampments.”
Inadequate housing and homelessness cost Quebec’s health system $2.05 billion every year — before a single shelter bed is funded, the document states.
Substandard housing is cited by a quarter of Quebecers rating their health as poor — the leading cause ahead of poverty, unemployment and diet, it adds. People with inadequate homes face twice the risk of health problems including respiratory illness, injury and mental illness. Children in housing with mould, pests or dampness face developmental and educational setbacks, compounding inequity across generations.
All the statistics were culled from Quebec government sources, Watts noted, so they shouldn’t generate any debate or surprise.
The platform calls for housing to be enshrined in a public health prevention strategy, integrated housing and health teams to be deployed in every region, and front-line care settings like CLSCs and ERs to screen for housing instability.
It advocates modernizing housing standards to ensure good air and water quality, accessibility, as well as a comfortable temperature, while tackling mould and pests. It also recommends proactive, risk-based property inspections targeting low-income rental stock in priority neighbourhoods and setting up a permanent fund to finance urgent repairs in housing occupied by vulnerable tenants.
The fallout from the cost-of-living crisis is a major risk factor for housing instability and homelessness. Over half of food insecurity stems from difficulties affording housing, costing $90 million in food aid each year in Quebec.
“This is a housing policy failure, not a food bank capacity problem,” the document states. “When households spend more than 30 per cent of their income on rent, a predictable cascade begins: grocery spending is cut first, food insecurity rises, children’s development is affected, eviction risk climbs, and homelessness becomes a statistical near-certainty.”
The platform recommends expanding portable rent supplements for low-income households and funding community-based eviction prevention programs in every region to intervene before arrears reach the tribunal phase.
Notably, it calls for the closure of the loophole that allows rents to be jacked up when housing units become vacant, since Quebec only controls increases for tenants. This has driven up the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Quebec to $1,700 a month, a level that is a struggle for low- and middle-income households.
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Not only is the platform timely due to the looming election, it also follows the release of the results of the most recent head count of the unhoused population in Quebec this month, which painted a grim picture. The data found that homelessness surged 20 per cent to more than 12,000 since the last enumeration in 2022. While the bulk — more than 5,000 people — are in Montreal, the problem is growing much faster in regions where it is an unfamiliar phenomenon.
But Watts said there is a conundrum behind the statistics, in Montreal at least. Welcome Hall is on pace to rehouse 400 people a year through its various transitional units and programs, and that’s without even counting similar efforts by other groups.
The organization managed to help 75 unhoused Montrealers sign leases in the last eight weeks alone, despite a housing market that has grown more expensive.
“It looks like everybody is failing, but I would say it identifies a systemic issue, which is what I’m trying to get to with these policy ideas,” Watts said.
While there is no magic bullet, the remedies to this humanitarian crisis are known and proven. Someone just needs to have the political courage to implement them.
“The fascinating thing about it is we’ve been doing the solution for a number of years at a very small scale. So all that we’re saying to the government — and various governments, because it does involve the feds and the municipalities — is let’s scale this thing up,” Watts said. “It strikes me that if we start moving in the right direction, we will very quickly see a reduction in visible homelessness.”
Parties drafting their own platforms on housing and homelessness should take note.
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