When Ontario’s new deputy housing minister assumed the role this summer, he was given an internal document briefing him on the housing crisis. That document included a staggering figure the government now concedes is false — an “unofficial” estimate that nearly a quarter of a million Ontarians are homeless.
The 234,000-person “unofficial” estimate is repeated twice in the footnotes of the transition documents prepared for MPP Vijay Thanigasalam in June. First reported by the Trillium, it’s a figure that bewildered experts — if true, it would suggest more than 95 per cent of Ontario’s homeless population is either living outside Toronto or off the radar, as the city’s own count in June sat at 10,627 people.