It’s not just Whitehorse and it’s not just places like the Lower East Side in Vancouver.

A new study presented in Whitehorse this week reveals that homelessness is on the rise in the Yukon and across Canada.

Though there are some differences between rural and urban areas, the data show more and more people nation-wide have become vulnerable to the possibility of ending up in shelters or on the street.

The research project from the Lawson Health Research Institute uses health data combined with street-level engagement to attempt to give an accurate picture of how many people are actually experiencing homelessness in Canadian communities, and who these people are.

“We found that every community we went to said that it is really bad here and was really focusing on it as a local issue,” said Cheryl Forchuk, the principal researcher from Lawson and a professor at the Arthur Labatt Family School of Nursing. “But it really is a national problem.”

As one of 28 Canadian communities chosen to take part in the study, Forchuk presented the results on Wednesday morning in Whitehorse to engaged community members, social service providers and those with lived experience of homelessness.

This forum comes to Whitehorse as the Yukon government continues to work on recommendations from a scathing 2022 report by Canada’s auditor general saying the territorial government was not doing enough to address deficiencies in the provision of affordable housing.

The audit found these issues had lingered since a previous audit in 2010.

The report led to several specific recommendations by the Yukon legislature’s public accounts committee.

Last week, these recommendations were accepted by the Liberal government and it pledged to integrate them into several action plans it has created to address homelessness and housing affordability.

Some of the problems identified are specific to the Yukon, but most are issues Forchuk saw in many communities.

The new study did find differences between big cities and those in smaller communities like Whitehorse, but ultimately these places had more in common than different.

“Every community we talked to said things are getting a lot worse,” Forchuk said.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Forchuk said they found 15.8 per cent of people they engaged with were homeless for the first time. They also found many shelters reported they were suddenly at, or exceeding, capacity.

Most major homelessness studies have focused on large urban areas, Forchuk said, and the team involved in this one wanted to make sure to include rural areas and small communities.

The main difference they found in these areas was the large percentage of people experiencing homelessness in rural communities who identified as Indigenous.

This number is 83.6 per cent in rural areas, but only 28.6 per cent in cities.

Other differences included types of diagnosis for psychiatric illnesses, with more rural respondents being diagnosed with substance abuse issues and more urban ones dealing with mood disorders.

During their nine-day trip to Whitehorse in 2021, researchers observed some unique issues here, especially in terms of the reason people were homeless.

Many of the people they talked to reported having issues getting home to remote communities after coming to Whitehorse for things like medical care. This was a particularly difficult issue during the pandemic, Forchuk said.

People were getting stuck in Whitehorse with no place to go, she said.

The project’s goal is to provide an accurate picture of how many people are experiencing homelessness in Canada to try to get an idea of which groups are most vulnerable.

In Whitehorse, this work quickly identified Indigenous people from remote communities as one of these vulnerable populations.

One of the issues around data collection in many communities is that it is essentially collected in lists on excel spreadsheets that sit on somebody’s laptop.

This prevents useful access to the information and can also lead to certain groups being under-represented.

Some groups are more inclined to access services through shelters, for example, meaning that if data are collected in those places, some people who do not like to use shelters – Forchuk gave the examples of homeless youth and veterans – may be left off these lists.

Then there is the issue of privacy. Many people living in these situations may not want their information disclosed due to the stigma attached to homelessness.

This is relevant in Whitehorse as the recent recommendations from the legislature’s standing committee said the Department of Community Services and the Yukon Housing Corp. need to figure out a way to accurately count who is experiencing homelessness in the Yukon, something they have failed to do.

Currently they use a list in which people voluntarily identify themselves. There is also a by-list, created by the Safe at Home Society, of people identified as experiencing homelessness or at-risk of homelessness.

Both these lists leave out certain groups, and the society does not want to share the names on their list due to privacy concerns.

What the researchers found, though, is all groups need access to health care services.

They also found that people who are experiencing homelessness are more likely than the rest of the population to need medical care.

The use of health data means more people are included, and it can solve some of the privacy issues. Once information is entered into health care information systems, it becomes extremely secure and is protected under law.

“If I abuse that data I could be criminally charged,” Forchuk said.

The original proposal for this project happened before the pandemic and initially was only to include 10 communities.

Once the pandemic arrived, many other studies were shut down, opening up extra funding.

During the early stages of the pandemic, it became apparent many people living in shelters or on the street were much more exposed to the virus and were having much worse outcomes after getting sick, including more hospitalizations and more deaths.

This made getting accurate data all the more important – though at times it made travelling difficult and exposed researchers to the virus themselves.

From all these data, Forchuk has come to the conclusion that more people are vulnerable to homelessness than they once were, and society needs to do more to help.

She said there was a time when people who were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s or with autism were cared for and didn’t end up on the street, but this is what they are seeing now.

It also used to be just about considered a crime when a hospital was forced to discharge a patient into homelessness. She said it would only happen once or twice per year.

Now, it is a regular occurrence.

There was also a time, she said, when the federal government was in charge of managing public housing.

When this responsibility was given to the provinces and territories in the early 1990s, it resulted in what she said amounted to a development freeze.

Now, she said that compared to other countries, Canada does not have near the percentage of housing stock dedicated to affordable housing.

“We have to take a bigger view,” she said. “How do we really solve the problem in this country?”

Lawson is the research institute connected to London Health Sciences Centre and St. Joseph’s Health Care London in Ontario.

The project was funded by the federal government through the Public Health Agency and the Reaching Home program.