Doug Ford thinks homeless people don’t work. He couldn’t be more wrong

Doug Ford, if you are homeless in Ontario, you are always working — working to survive.
People walk dozens of kilometres daily to find water and enough food to eat. They spend hours each day looking for somewhere to relieve themselves, bathe and secure clean, weather-appropriate clothing. They scout endlessly for a safe space to rest out of the elements, although they never get more than a couple of hours of sleep at a time.
People’s lives are fully spent meeting their basic needs, and that is the hardest, most relentless work there is.
And yet, even under these exhausting circumstances, many people do have formal employment. As a front-line worker, I’ve had clients working full-time at Dollarama and No Frills. I’ve had clients who were lawyers and real estate agents.
I’ve personally employed dozens of unhoused people at my agencies — including in full-time, living-wage and unionized positions — as eviction prevention and outreach workers in their own communities. Construction site foremen often go to shelters and drop-ins to pick up homeless people as under-the-table labourers, sometimes to build condominiums that they could never afford.
But even understanding that surviving homelessness is work in-itself and that people without homes can also have formal employment, the issue isn’t about the canniness of each individual to lift themselves up out of homelessness. The enduring and unchallenged stigma surrounding homelessness means that many employers would never hire you. Many landlords will also refuse to rent to you.
But this also isn’t about the attitudes of individual employers or landlords — although anti-homeless bigotry is a serious and under-addressed systemic problem.
Just how is the Ontario government working for homeless people?
If this is about jobs, what jobs?
Ontario’s unemployment rate is climbing: at 7.1 per cent, we’ve surpassed the national average. Moreover, since Doug Ford became premier in 2018, Ontario has experienced a net increase of just 26,500 jobs, despite our population growing by over 1.5 million people.
Last week in Windsor, Premier Ford framed the solution to local encampments as “getting a good-paying job.” What he failed to mention is that Windsor’s unemployment rate is 9.2 per cent, or that jobs, let alone decent ones, are scarce across the province.
If this is about housing, what housing?
Doug Ford’s plan to build 1.5 million homes by 2031 requires 150,000 new housing starts every year. Yet, in June 2023, there were just 10,114 new homes started in Ontario — less than 10 per cent of what the government itself has mandated. This year, the number of provincial housing starts dropped to just 5,681.
And this doesn’t even address what kind of housing is being built and who can afford it, let alone the fact that someone must live in a completed home — not a housing start.
While the Ford government fails on both employment and housing, it also fails in its homelessness response. There is no provincial homelessness strategy. Provincial funding for homelessness is based on outdated statistics and historical funding levels, not on actual population need.
In some cases, Ford has even delayed the release of crucial funding for homelessness programs without any reason or recourse. And, of course, the province is also failing to reform the laws surrounding rent increases, evictions, the rates of social assistance — in fact, 59,100 homeless Ontarians are on Ontario Works (OW) and the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) — and a slew of other policy factors that impact whether people can access, and keep, housing.
In combination, these are egregious political choices, given that the ministry knows that 234,000 Ontarians are now actively or at high risk of homelessness. They can’t all pick themselves up by the bootstraps, as Ford would have it.
Again, if this were really about jobs, it should be abundantly clear who is flagrantly failing to do theirs: Doug Ford and his government.