The causes and impacts of Aboriginal homelessness are difficult to quantify and evaluate because our understanding of these phenomena is based on:
- Assorted anecdotal evidence consisting of front-line worker observations;
- Various and methodologically disparate municipal homelessness censuses; and
- Municipal and academic reports examining these trends.
Two specific schools of thought have also emerged that identify the cause and effect of urban Aboriginal homelessness. One is derived from front-line, worker-collected data utilized for municipal policy development, and the second school is found in the researcher-driven academic literature, which is often developed according to personal interest, and with limited intention of informing policy or support services. Those seeking to explicate these issues have therefore lacked a baseline underscoring national rates of urban Aboriginal homelessness.
This infographic is based on an exhaustive search of online reports and other data sources, and the homelessness counts undertaken in major urban centres nationally during the last decade. Only those reports that identified the presence of significant Aboriginal homelessness in large Canadian cities were used. For all the cities that fit our evaluative criteria we estimated that the urban Aboriginal homeless population accounts for 29 percent of the overall homeless population in Canada. Of the total 70,200 Canadian urban homeless, 20,358 are Aboriginal, and these data reflect only those who were counted in recent censuses. They do not account for rough sleepers and couch surfers, as an example. It is estimated that the Canadian homeless population exceeds 150,000 although recent academic assessments suggest that roughly 250,000 people are homeless at any given time. Using a median 150,000 as our guide (a substantial majority of which is urban populations), the above analysis would suggest that there are 43,500 urban Aboriginal homeless individuals in Canada. Statistics Canada has estimated that there are an estimated 633,306 urban Aboriginal people nationally.
These data would suggest that 6.97% of all urban Aboriginal people are considered to be homeless on any one night, compared with 0.78% of the mainstream population. Put another way, more than one in fifteen urban Aboriginal people are homeless, compared to one out of 128 non-Native Canadians. This means that urban Aboriginal people are more than eight times likely to be or become homeless than non-Native urban individuals.
