Quebec City looks to Finland’s successful approach to ending homelessness
As Quebec faces a worsening homelessness crisis, some politicians, including Quebec City Mayor Bruno Marchand, have suggested the solution may be a Finnish model that aims to give everyone a home.
But while Finland has managed to massively reduce the number of people experiencing homelessness through its “housing first” approach, one Quebec expert said she’s not sure it could be applied here, even if the provincial government was interested.
“It’s the right way to fight the problem of homelessness,” Helsinki Mayor Juhana Vartiainen said of his country’s approach in a recent interview.
The Finnish model is simple, he said: give people quality, permanent housing before attempting to address other issues — such as alcohol and drug use, or mental health problems — or helping people find jobs
“That’s really the fundamental idea of our policy, if we give people a home, there will be very positive side-effects,” Vartiainen said.
Giving people an apartment leads to improved health, less drug and alcohol use, he said, and increases the chance that people will find jobs. Once someone is given a home, he said, there are teams that ensure they receive the care and support required.
There were 18,000 people experiencing homelessness in Finland when the country first launched its effort to tackle the issue back in 1987. At the end of 2022, the figure had dropped to 3,686 in the country of 5.5 million, though only 492 spent the night outside.
In Quebec, 10,000 people were experiencing visible homelessness in October 2022 — the last time the provincial government counted — an increase of 44 per cent since 2018.
Annie Fontaine, a Universite Laval professor who specializes in social work, said Quebec could learn lessons from the Finnish
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