‘Nomadland’: Without real housing action, Canada risks a future where kids grow up in campgrounds

The girl in the fuzzy onesie pajamas with bunny ears looked to be about 12. She examined her face in the campground washroom mirror, and with no inhibition despite the stranger beside her, squeezed a pimple. It was a personal act, typically performed in private.

Privacy was a luxury this girl didn’t have. Home, for the time being anyhow, was this well-tended private campground in Washington state. She and her mom were living in an RV that their vehicle was not equipped to tow. I won’t name the campground: it was run by lovely people who may be ignoring state rules that limit camping in RVs to 180-day stays in most counties. I would not want to cause trouble for any of the people who, judging by permanent flower planters, elaborate outdoor kitchen structures and even some permanent flag poles, I saw during a trip through the Pacific Northwest last week, appear to be living year-round in campgrounds. 

In case you wondered, I agonized about whether to attend a family event in a country now so hostile to my own. In the end, the family won out and we drove, camping and hiking in the California redwoods along the way.

Like Fern, the heroine played by Frances McDormand in the film Nomadland, some of the folks we saw living in campgrounds were on the knife’s edge of homelessness, their RVs covered in tarps to keep leaks at bay, their aging vehicles dented and rusting. As the number of unhoused people in the big cities of Washington, Oregon and California continue to grow, affordable housing shortages have similarly worsened in the region’s less populous counties.

The US, which still ranks among the world’s top-10 wealthiest countries, has so far failed the almost 800,000 people who in January of 2024 had no permanent housing. Canada faces similar challenges, albeit on a smaller scale. It’s hard to know exactly how many unhoused people there are here — the latest Statistics Canada report is stale. A point-in-time count found that between 2020 and 2022, 40,713 people were living in shelters, sleeping rough (including in encampments) and in transitional housing. The true numbers are likely far higher. 

A succession of federal governments have done precious little to solve this problem since the 1990s when the Brian Mulroney Conservative government, and then the Liberals under Jean Chretien, wound down construction of social housing. 

Former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reversed that trend with a goal to reduce chronic homelessness by 50 per cent and rebooted social housing programs that had fallen by the wayside. But the rollout was slow and the amounts invested couldn’t keep pace with the rising numbers. Since 2018, street homelessness has increased by 20 per cent, according to a report from the Parliamentary Budget Officer. Building social housing is hideously expensive and the Liberals’ pace of federal investment on homelessness programs under Trudeau from 2018 to 2028 was set to average $561 million per year. Meeting Trudeau’s 50 per cent target would require an astonishing $3.5 billion per year more, given current program designs, the PBO report found.

Now, thankfully, with Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney, Canadians have a leader who seems to understand the magnitude of Canada’s affordable housing woes and says he’s prepared to allocate real money to build more. Carney has promised to double the number of homes built annually in Canada to 500,000. Affordable housing needs will be handled by a new organization called Build Canada Homes (BCH), tasked with overseeing affordable housing construction across the country. 

Carney has promised it will be richly funded; grants totalling $6 billion will be awarded to build "deeply affordable housing, supportive housing, Indigenous housing and shelters." 

"We will immediately develop homelessness reduction targets with every province and territory to inform housing-first investments, improve access to treatment and end encampments community by community," the Carney campaign said in a statement.

That’s an admirable goal and stands in stark contrast to the views of Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who routinely demonizes people who have nowhere to live. His punitive solution to homelessness was to give police greater powers to dismantle tent encampments, arrest unhoused people who erect them, and steer drug users to treatment programs. 

He claimed to have a “housing first” solution to solving homelessness, but did not actually commit to building any social housing. You can see how well that’s working in the US where tent cities proliferate in big cities and campgrounds have become home to those marginally better off.

Lest we get ahead of ourselves, Carney is not the first politician to promise to end street homelessness. Former Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson, now a newly elected Liberal MP, made the same pledge and was roasted for failing when the numbers of homeless people climbed under his watch. But it’s far better to set lofty goals and risk failure than not to try at all. If Carney invests the kind of money he talked about during his campaign, he can make a difference.

Without serious investment, our tent cities will continue to grow, and we’ll soon have families living in campgrounds like the girl in the pajamas or the mom with her preteen boy who cringed when I met him in the women’s washroom the following day. “He’s embarrassed because I make him come in here with me,” she said. “But I can’t let him go to the men’s alone. Too dangerous.”