Policy Crimes

In this episode of Policy Crimes, hosts Tristan Markle and Lina Moskaleva talk with longtime anti-poverty organizer and former Vancouver City Councillor Jean Swanson about how Canada went from homelessness being rare in the 1970s to the crisis we see today. Jean explains how governments once built tens of thousands of social housing units each year, and how cuts in the 1990s to both housing and we...

Canada’s housing crisis is worsening, with housing need and homelessness numbers rising despite government aspirations to reduce them. In this episode of Policy Crimes, Tristan Markle speaks with Dr. Carolyn Whitzman, Senior Researcher and Adjunct Professor at the University of Toronto’s School of Cities, about two major reports on addressing housing need, which she released in tandem last week. T...

Canada’s National Housing Strategy was launched in 2017 with bold promises, including cutting chronic homelessness and core housing need by 50%. But eight years later, the opposite has occurred – with increases of about 50%. So what went wrong? Dr. Nick Falvo walks us through why the strategy didn’t meet these aspirational goals, and he imagines with us what we could have done, and could still to,...

In our first three episodes on the Cost of Homelessness, we explored how housing the homeless can often cost less than leaving them in the emergency system. But that's not always the case for every person, program, or place. And saving money isn't the main goal—ending homelessness is about improving lives. In this episode, we speak with Dr. Eric Latimer, Professor of Psychiatry at McGill Universit...

In this episode, Dr. Cheryl Forchuk — a leading Canadian researcher and mental health nurse — traces how hospitals shifted from rarely discharging patients into homelessness to doing so with alarming frequency. In the 1980s, a discharge to “no fixed address” was so unusual it set off hospital-wide concern. By the 2000s, it had become routine. Forchuk led landmark studies showing that simple change...

Governments often ask whether we can afford to house people experiencing homelessness. Housing policy expert Steve Pomeroy flips the question: how much are we already paying to keep people homeless? In this episode, he revisits his foundational cost of homelessness research showing supportive housing costs about one-third as much as emergency responses like shelters, hospitals, and police. Pomeroy...

Homelessness is one of the most visible and urgent policy challenges of our time. But what if the way we respond to it — through shelters, emergency rooms, and jails — is more expensive than simply providing stable housing? In this first season of Policy Crimes, we’re investigating the Cost of Homelessness. And in this pilot episode we talk to Dr. Dennis Culhane, one of the world’s leading homeles...