Premier’s senior adviser optimistic that encampment-clearing, resident-moving homeless strategy on track

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This article was published 19/02/2025 (276 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Just two weeks into her new job overseeing Manitoba’s ambitious new strategy to address Winnipeg’s homeless crisis, Tessa Blaikie Whitecloud believes things are on track to begin clearing encampments and move people into housing.

Blaikie Whitecloud said Tuesday she’s hopeful “we can have a success story by the end of this month, and certainly we’ll have several of them (by) early March.”

Premier Wab Kinew announced the plan in January to clear encampments in the city one at a time and move their residents into secure, safer housing beginning this month.

Blaikie Whitecloud, the former head of Siloam Mission who began working for the province Feb. 3, wouldn’t identify the program’s first encampment selected by outreach workers or say which non-profit organizations have units lined up for them.

“Today, we’re working just with what’s already in the sector,” she said. “So it’s only a handful, but we’ll have a dozen or so new units coming online on a monthly basis moving forward,” she told the Free Press.

Service providers have been invited to lunch and a presentation from Blaikie Whitecloud, Housing, Addictions and Homelessness Minister Bernadette Smith and Mayor Scott Gillingham Monday at Thunderbird House.

Blaikie Whitecloud said it will be an opportunity to connect with sector leaders.

Her role as the province’s senior adviser on homelessness was announced Jan. 14 when Kinew released his government’s plan to end chronic homelessness by 2031.

“Working with the City of Winnipeg on a 30-day timeline beginning in February, the new strategy will see the government move one encampment at a time into housing, including 300 new social units that have been purchased and will be supported by non-profit organizations,” the premier said, unveiling Your Way Home: Manitoba’s Plan to End Chronic Homelessness.

That’s still the idea, said Blaikie Whitecloud, brought in to help implement the strategy.

“There is going to be a desire to work with a whole encampment as we try to end that element of chronic homelessness. However, there may be moments where somebody needs a different type of housing than their counterparts in an encampment,” she said.

“We’re working with existing service providers that have those relationships already to build up what the great work they’re already doing around being housing-focused. The challenge to the sector, and coming from the sector myself, is that there hasn’t been the units. So, it didn’t matter if you were talking to somebody about what you wanted their housing to look like or what they wanted their housing to look like if you couldn’t bring that housing to fruition.”

Social housing is now being made available after it was defunded and neglected for years by the province, she said.

“It’s all about housing,” she said. “We’re working from getting the units online with trusted community partners and then, from there, working with trusted community outreach groups to say who is a good fit there.”

The Right to Housing Coalition called on the province Tuesday to increase funding for social housing.

“They are going to have a very hard time meeting their goals around this homelessness strategy if they don’t start adding some supply,” said coalition spokesperson Shauna MacKinnon.

The housing advocacy group has said the province needs at least 10,000 new social housing units. Last year, it asked the newly elected NDP government to make a long-term commitment to add 1,000 social housing units annually for 10 years, beginning in Budget 2024. The province committed to adding 350 new units.

The coalition held a news conference Tuesday to say this year’s budget will need to provide funding for 1,650 new social housing units to make up for the shortfall.

Thousands of people are at risk of becoming homeless because they’re in places that are unaffordable, in poor condition, overcrowded or unsafe, said MacKinnon, a University of Winnipeg researcher, professor and chair of the department of urban and inner-city studies.

“There’s got to be money in that budget that shows how they’re expanding the supply significantly, and also what they’re putting into that budget in terms of the supports,” MacKinnon said.

The provincial strategy focuses on an estimated 700 people who live in encampments. It involves creating a new housing stream in the Manitoba Housing system that dedicates 20 per cent, or 2,500 Manitoba Housing units, to that group.

It plans to take advantage of underused Manitoba Housing stock and provide rent subsidies to help households move out of Manitoba Housing and into private or non-profit units.

Meanwhile, social and safety concerns at Manitoba Housing facilities are “blowing up” without adequate support and security, MacKinnon said Tuesday, pointing to reports from buildings on Strauss Drive and Kennedy Street.

“They need 24-hour security in some of these places,” she said.

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca