Yellowknife planned to end homelessness by 2026. Some say there's still a lot to improve

In 2017, the city of Yellowknife adopted a 10-year plan to end homelessness. Its goal was to make it a rare occurrence and preventable by 2026. Well, it's 2026 now. Homelessness has been a key issue during the municipal election campaign, and the city's encampments are evidence that the problem has not gone away. CBC reporter Sarah St-Pierre spent some time looking into this 10-year plan, how it's been going. She joins me now in studio. Sarah, who did you talk to about this? Well, for this story, I really wanted to start with the people who are experiencing homelessness in Yellowknife right now. So I talked to Louisa Yukon. She's been experiencing homelessness since she lost her home back in 2019 in a house fire in Norman Wells. She's been homeless in Yellowknife since April. She says that solving homelessness won't be easy, but she thinks there needs to be more understanding. Yukon wasn't comfortable with being on camera, but here's what she wanted to say to the city's next mayor. Put yourself in our shoes, try to find a real solution, not just a band-aid, and have some real empathy and try to understand the best that you can to the best of your ability to see what we go through each and every day and to understand that not all of us chose this. Some of us are here based on circumstance and not to judge people right away just based on what they're wearing or how they look like or whether they're drunk or high because you had to understand what brought us here. She also said that as an Indigenous woman, she's had a couple of bad experiences from misunderstandings with service providers and she thought that it might help if there was better cultural understanding for Indigenous clients. She also suggested a safe consumption site and having a treatment centre in the territory. I know that Yukon isn't the only person that you spoke to about this. Who else did you hear from? I also spoke with Jade Cornell. He has lived in Yellowknife for 35 years and says he has been without a fixed home for about 8 to 10 years. He says he wants there to be more affordable housing in Yellowknife for people on a low income and thinks that the city could help with that. Build more living accommodations for the low income, low cost housing. Still be on low cost, but we all need a place to live. And yeah, there's more to it than that, I'm sure. But we need more living accommodations. Cut down more trees, I guess, what they've been doing over the years and put more places up. He also said he'd like to see a shelter that's open 24-7 in the city. How much of these things are things that the city can actually do something about? That's the question that I asked Arlene Hachet. She's been a homelessness advocate in Yellowknife for a really long time. She said out of those ideas, the city can definitely help increase the stock of low-income housing and it can help make sure there's better cultural understanding. The city administers some of the federal funding for homelessness going to NGOs in Yellowknife, so it can ask for that accountability on that front. And what is her sense of how things have been going? She says she's seen some progress and that there has been a big increase in funding over the past 10 years since the city adopted its plan. But she doesn't think the money has been well targeted. The point is, as leaders, whether you're at the city level or at the GNWT level, Your job is to change the policy if it doesn't work. And if you look at the decline in Yellowknife, the decline in the downtown, if you look at this massive decline, in my opinion, there's tons of resources allocated to solving, quote, the problem. And the problem is not getting solved. It's growing. Did the city have any response to the fact that their 10-year plan hasn't really gone according to plan? Yes. In an email, Yellowknife Mayor Ben Hendrickson said the city's 10-year plan to end homelessness is still active, but it was approved without clear annual funding, so that created some barriers for it to be effective early on. He called the plan a useful tool and said it has guided how some federal funding to reduce homelessness gets allocated through the city. He also said that the city is advocating for that funding to continue past its end date in 2028. Great. Thank you for your reporting on this, Sarah. Thanks, Lene.