A network of community organizations says Quebec can achieve its goal of cutting homelessness in half by 2030, but only if the province shifts its focus to attacking the crisis at its root.
The call comes in a new report, dubbed the White Paper, from the Mouvement pour mettre fin à l’itinérance à Montréal (MMFIM), which is composed of 35 non-profit organizations and about 20 business and institutional members.
“We’re asking for a paradigm shift,” said Michèle Chappaz, CEO of the MMFIM.
The report comes as Premier Paul St-Pierre Plamondon’s new Parti Québécois government makes homelessness one of its priorities. The PQ leader has taken direct responsibility for the file and promised to invest $1 billion over four years to reduce homelessness by half by 2030.
Last week, the government announced $28 million in one-time emergency funding for 200 projects across 16 regions of Quebec, including nearly $18 million for the Greater Montreal area. The money is expected to create more than 1,000 emergency spaces over the next five months.
However, advocates behind the White Paper say these emergency measures alone aren’t enough to end the fight against homelessness.
“We’ve had so many crises that we have responded in a crisis management type of way,” Chappaz said.
Quebec should instead prioritize what it calls “universal prevention,” the report says, by implementing policies designed to stop people from entering homelessness and to help those who do find permanent housing quickly.
“Prevention also means that if you do become homeless, you only spend one day in homelessness, not seven years,” Chappaz said.
Among its recommendations, the report calls for at least 20 per cent of Quebec’s rental housing stock to be designated as off-market, as well as stable, predictable funding for homelessness organizations for at least five years.
It is estimated that approximately 12,000 people are currently experiencing homelessness in Quebec.
The latest count, carried out in April 2025, showed that visible homelessness in Quebec had increased by 20 per cent compared to 2022. Increases were observed in all 13 regions studied.
According to the White Paper, 29 per cent of unhoused people in the province have previously been placed in youth protection, while 10 per cent had passed through detention centres and 23 per cent had experienced an eviction.
Chappaz said those numbers point to gaps point to trends that suggest homelessness in Quebec is tied to being recently discharged from a provincial institution.
“Those are places where we could have data and actually make a difference in making sure those vulnerable people don’t come into homelessness,” she said.
The report also argues that Quebec’s social safety net is not keeping pace with the cost of living, while evictions and a lack of affordable housing continue to push people into homelessness.
“(In) North America right now, you can correlate the cost of housing with the level of homelessness in any city,” said Sam Watts, CEO of Welcome Hall Mission, whose organization is a member of the MMFIM.
The recommendations come as the new PQ government prepares to host a homelessness summit in early 2027. The premier has said the meeting will focus on longer-term solutions.
“We’ve got to change our mentality and not just focus on this emergency at the end of the line,” she said.
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