Report says Liberals need to make prevention central in anti-poverty plan

That spending could include, for example, programs targeted at helping children in child services make the transition to adult life, because they are more likely to become homeless and stay that way longer, making it more difficult to pull them out of it.

A spokeswoman for Social Development Minister Jean-Yves Duclos said the Liberals’ thinking on homelessness is in line with the approach the paper advocates, pointing to federal spending on mental health services, skills training, and the new child benefit.

Yet even the authors of the report acknowledge that the idea of putting public dollars and effort towards prevention is, in some cases, a controversial idea.

“Could you imagine if we built our health-care system around the emergency department and said once we deal with all those people who come into emerg, then we’ll start talking about other kinds of care,” said Stephen Gaetz, director of the observatory and one of the authors of the study.

“It’s not controversial to say we should prevent cancer or the flu, or that we should prevent highway traffic deaths, but it is around homelessness,”

The paper is the first of its kind in Canada to detail what is meant by preventing homelessness — what works and what doesn’t work — and comes as the federal Liberals are set to release a national housing strategy and are starting talks about the future of the government’s central anti-poverty program.

The Liberals launched public consultations in February to help craft a poverty reduction strategy and are setting up an advisory committee to produce a national proposal that they expect to deliver by the fall.

It’s estimated that some three million Canadians live in poverty and 235,000 experience homelessness annually.

Jordan Press, The Canadian Press

by Canadian Press

Report says Liberals need to make prevention central in anti-poverty plan

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