Citizens of Nowhere

Every night in Canada, tens of thousands of people sleep outside in one of the coldest climates on earth. They sleep in doorways and ravines, in encampments along riverbeds, in shelters built for emergencies that have become permanent addresses. They are not there because of who they are. They are there because of what we decided. Citizens of Nowhere is a reckoning with one of the most consequential and least honestly examined failures in modern Canadian history — the thirty-year political retreat from the social contract that turned homelessness from a solvable problem into a permanent condition. Drawing on four decades of frontline experience directing the London Food Bank and five years as a Member of Parliament, Glen Pearson writes with the authority of someone who has witnessed this crisis from both ends of the system: from the street level, where a man accepts a meal with the careful dignity of someone who has learned not to expect much, and from the parliamentary level, where that same man is discussed in the language of frameworks and pilot projects and jurisdictional complexity. The argument of this book is as simple as it is devastating: Canada chose this. The cancellation of the Canada Assistance Plan in 1995, the downloading cascade from Ottawa to the provinces to the cities, the transformation of housing from a human right into a financial instrument, the substitution of charity for entitlement — these were not inevitabilities. They were decisions, made by accountable governments, reflecting a set of values that Canadians were never explicitly asked to endorse. Moving from the philosophy of Leonard Marsh and Tommy Douglas to the policy failures of Paul Martin and Stephen Harper, from the tent cities of the pandemic to the Housing First successes of Finland and Vienna, Citizens of Nowhererefuses the comfortable consensus that has allowed homelessness to persist without generating the political accountability it demands. It asks the questions that prosperity allows us to avoid: Why do we look away? Who benefits from our looking away? And what does it say about a country that generates fifteen trillion dollars in household wealth and cannot find the political will to house its most vulnerable citizens? This is not a book about statistics. It is a book about conscience — about the specific, traceable, reversible choices that have made citizens of Canada into citizens of nowhere, and about the different choices that could yet make them something el