NDP’s bold campaign promise is one it alone cannot keep

The Manitoba NDP made an ambitious promise during the 2023 provincial election: end chronic homelessness within two terms of government. It was bold, compassionate and politically popular.

It is also proving to be far more difficult than advertised.

New figures released Monday by End Homelessness Winnipeg show 8,248 people were living without stable housing in March — up 104 from the previous month. More troubling still, 4,463 of those individuals are now considered chronically homeless, meaning they’ve spent at least six months of the past year without stable housing or have cycled in and out of homelessness for years.

Those are not just numbers. They represent a deepening humanitarian crisis in a city that is already stretched to the breaking point.

And they underscore an uncomfortable truth for the Kinew government: ending chronic homelessness isn’t simply a matter of building more housing units.

That’s part of it, certainly. But it’s only part.

The political temptation is to reduce homelessness to a supply problem — not enough affordable housing, not enough units, not enough roofs. Build more, the thinking goes, and the problem will begin to solve itself.

But chronic homelessness is far more complex than that.

It is rooted in poverty, addiction, mental illness, trauma and, often, a lack of stable employment. It requires not just housing, but supports — treatment beds, counselling services, income assistance that actually meets the cost of living and pathways into the workforce.

Without those pieces in place, simply handing someone a set of keys may not produce lasting stability.

To be fair, the NDP hasn’t been idle.

The province’s Your Way Home strategy, unveiled in early 2025, aims to move roughly 700 people from encampments into housing by 2031. More than 200 people have already been housed under that plan.

That’s not nothing. For those 200 individuals, it’s life-changing.

But it’s also nowhere near enough.

When more than 4,400 people are chronically homeless — and that number is growing — relocating a few hundred over several years falls well short of what was promised.

Meanwhile, efforts at the municipal level have also fallen short of what’s needed.

Winnipeg’s Affordable Housing Now program has approved more than two dozen projects since 2022, promising 2,602 new units. On paper, that sounds encouraging.

But fewer than half of those units (962) qualify as deeply affordable — the kind of rent-geared-to-income housing that experts say is critical for people at the lowest end of the income spectrum.

That’s the housing most likely to make a dent in chronic homelessness. And it remains in short supply.

This is where the gap between political promises and policy reality becomes most apparent.

Ending chronic homelessness requires a level of co-ordination and investment across multiple fronts — housing, health care, social services, employment — that governments have historically struggled to deliver.

It also requires sustained funding over many years, not just pilot projects and short-term announcements.

And it demands honesty about the scale of the challenge.

The NDP’s eight-year timeline always carried a degree of risk. Not because the goal isn’t worth pursuing — it absolutely is — but because it sets a clear benchmark against which progress can be measured.

Right now, the trend lines are moving in the wrong direction.

That doesn’t mean the goal is impossible. But it does mean the current approach isn’t sufficient.

If the province is serious about bending the curve, it will have to go further — and faster.

That means significantly ramping up the construction of deeply affordable and supportive housing. It means expanding access to addictions treatment and mental-health services. It means ensuring people leaving homelessness have the income and job supports needed to stay housed.

And it means working far more closely with community organizations that understand the problem at the street level.

None of this will be cheap. But the alternative — allowing the crisis to deepen — comes with its own costs, both human and financial.

Emergency services, hospital visits, policing and shelter systems all carry heavy price tags when homelessness is left unchecked.

More importantly, there is the human cost — measured in lost potential, deteriorating health and lives lived on the margins.

That’s the part that should matter most.

The NDP deserves credit for putting an ambitious target on the table. But ambition alone won’t solve this crisis.

Results will.

And so far, the results suggest that ending chronic homelessness in Manitoba is not just an eight-year project, it’s a far more complicated one than any campaign slogan could capture.

tom.brodbeck@freepress.mb.ca