Ottawa commits $27.3M for End Homelessness Winnipeg to distribute

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This article was published 11/03/2025 (210 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The federal government is providing an additional $27.3 million to End Homelessness Winnipeg for distribution to service providers in the city.

The funds are coming via the Designated Communities and Indigenous Homelessness streams of Reaching Home: Canada’s Homelessness Strategy.

The funds bring the total allocation for Winnipeg through the streams to $174.7 million, from the 2019-2020 through 2027-2028 fiscal years.

The funding will be distributed by End Homelessness Winnipeg’s community advisory board based on a request for proposals process in which organizations will be able to apply.

Organizations may want to expand hours, revisit wage costs, incorporate some type of training plan or have other uses for a portion of the money, said End Homelessness Winnipeg CEO Jason Whitford after the funding was announced Tuesday.

Winnipeg South Centre MP Ben Carr said the federal government was focusing on allowing grassroots organizations to manage where the dollars go and what they’ll be spent on.

“The federal government is well-positioned, by virtue of its resources and expertise, to take a leadership role in initiating these supports,” he said.

The province’s new homelessness strategy promised in mid-January to move 300 people from city encampments to sustainable housing, one encampment at a time, within 30 days. The program has been slow to start, with just one person moved in the first month.

As Winnipeg gets warmer, more people will be settling into encampments, Whitford said. He said End Homelessness Winnipeg will work within the province’s strategy and it will be a “learning process” for community organizations.

“What needs to happen is co-ordination among among the community resources and buy-in for this approach, and that’s somewhat going to be a challenge,” he said.

“Where you have some resources that are more more rights-based, and then some that are more inclined to say, ‘No, you can’t be here, you’ve got to move on, you’ve got to go into housing.’”

End Homelessness Winnipeg is nearing completion of its yearly street census, which collects data from homeless Winnipeggers and the organizations supporting them, Whitford said. The report is expected to be released in mid-April.

malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca