Canada is gripped by a surge in homelessness that has seen tens of thousands of people priced out of the rental and real estate markets and left to live in the streets of the wealthy nation.
Researchers warn government data is vastly underestimating the number of homeless across the country, as the social ill spreads from major cities to small towns.
In Quebec, one in two homeless people can be found in rural parts of the eastern province, instead of mainly in Montreal as had been the case in the past, according to a new report published in September.
Danny Brodeur-Cote has lived for months in a makeshift camp in woodlands near a cemetery in Granby, a town of 70,000 inhabitants 80 kilometres (50 miles) east of Montreal, after being evicted in June from an apartment he rented with his girlfriend.
I work five days a week,” the janitor with dishevelled brown hair told AFP, pushing a shopping cart to the campsite.
At age 39, this is the first time in his life that he has found himself living on the streets. “What little housing there is is much too expensive,” he said.
A few blocks away, a park has been transformed into a makeshift encampment for men and women of all ages, some of them employed like Brodeur-Cote.
Nearly one in four homeless people found themselves on the street after being evicted from housing, according to the Quebec government report.
“In Granby alone, we need at least 1,000 affordable housing units,” says Karine Lussier, director of a local anti-poverty organization.
Between 2018 and 2022, the number of homeless people in Quebec increased by 44 per cent, their numbers swelling to 10,000 last year. Indigenous people, who represent five per cent of the Canadian population, are particularly over-represented in the streets, especially the Inuit, said Lussier.
“Visible homelessness did not exist three years ago in Granby,” mayor Julie Bourdon told AFP, admitting that “rents are very high now compared to two years ago.”
The city, rather than dismantling the camps and relocating the occupants, decided to opt for maintaining what it calls “places of tolerance.”
The situation, says France Belisle, mayor of Gatineau — a city of nearly 300,000 inhabitants across a river from the capital Ottawa — could only be the tip of the iceberg because these are “the figures compiled a year ago.”
With the rising cost of living and galloping inflation this year, she fears that the picture is much worse than recent statistics reveal.
People “are no longer able to make ends meet,” she says.