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Comparative city homelessness counts and plans: Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Ottawa, Montreal

Toronto's homelessness numbers sit inside a national picture of rising counts across major Canadian cities, each measured by a different method, on a different schedule, and paired with a different kind of plan.

The finding

Toronto's own shelter-system data counted 9,251 actively homeless people system-wide as of May 2026, of whom 6,176 (66.8%) met the federal definition of chronic homelessness — though this dataset excludes people sleeping outdoors and non-SMIS shelter sites, an explicitly documented limitation of its own [CL-834, CL-835]. Nationally, Statistics Canada's Homeless Shelter Capacity table recorded 22,379 emergency shelter beds across 587 shelters in 2024, up from 16,009 beds across 418 shelters in 2020 — a real capacity expansion at the national level CSRL2-838.

The four other cities compared here each ran their own Point-in-Time count on a different date, using different methodologies, so none of these figures should be read as directly equivalent to Toronto's shelter-system count above. Greater Vancouver's March 2025 count found 5,232 people experiencing homelessness regionally (up 9% from 4,821 in 2023), of whom 2,715 were within the City of Vancouver specifically (up 12% from 2,420); the region's unsheltered share rose 22% in the same period, the largest unsheltered increase since the 2005-2008 counts CSRL2-840. Calgary's October 2025 count found 3,314 people, up 6.2% from 3,121 in 2024 — though Calgary's homelessness rate per capita has fallen roughly 40% since 2008 even as the absolute count has risen, because the city's population has grown more than 53% over the same period CSRL2-843. Ottawa's October 2024 count found 2,952 people, up from 2,612 in 2021 and 1,654 in 2018, with unsheltered homelessness rising sharply from 190 to 556 people over that span CSRL2-846. Montreal's April 2025 count found 5,036 people — the highest rate (229.5 per 100,000) of any Quebec health and social-service region — though Quebec's own health ministry describes this as a topline, preliminary figure only, with full results not expected until fall 2026 CSRL2-849.

Each city's planning response differs in kind, not just in scale. Vancouver's Council adopted a 10-year target of 83,000 new homes approved (2024-2033) under its Housing Vancouver Strategy, alongside a 2024-2026 Three-Year Action Plan that explicitly names addressing homelessness as one of its action areas CSRL2-842. Calgary has no confirmed, currently-branded 10-year homelessness plan successor in the public record — a genuine gap, not an oversight in this research CSRL2-845. Ottawa's newly refreshed 10-Year Housing and Homelessness Plan (2026-2035) is structured around 3 priorities, 7 goals, and 18 objectives, co-designed with the city's Housing and Homelessness Leadership Table, and deliberately sets mostly directional rather than fixed numeric targets until more baseline data accumulates CSRL2-847. Montreal's current coordinated action plan (2021-2026) commits more than $150 million over five years across 24 objectives and 5 focus areas CSRL2-850. On open data specifically, Montreal's own municipal open-data portal has no dedicated homelessness or shelter-occupancy dataset, unlike Toronto's, which publishes both a shelter-flow and a daily-occupancy dataset CSRL2-851.

Why it matters

Every city compared here shows homelessness counts rising in its most recent measurement, but the comparison also shows real differences in how well-equipped each city is to track and respond to that rise: some cities (Ottawa, Vancouver) have current, structured 10-year plans; Calgary does not have a confirmed successor plan in the public record; and data transparency itself varies sharply, with Montreal's own open-data portal lacking a homelessness dataset that Toronto, Vancouver, and others already publish. Reading these figures side by side also shows why raw counts alone can mislead: Calgary's count has grown in absolute terms while its per-capita rate has fallen, because population growth outpaced homelessness growth — a distinction that would be lost citing the raw count alone.

What this page does not cover

This page does not adjust any of these Point-in-Time or shelter-system counts to a common methodology or measurement date — each city's own count uses different definitions, timing, and coverage (Toronto's shelter-system count is not a Point-in-Time count at all), so these figures describe each city's own measurement, not a standardized cross-city comparison. It does not include Montreal's specific count as a settled, final figure, since Quebec's own health ministry describes it as preliminary pending fall 2026 results. It does not cover the international comparators (Denver, Houston, Rockford, the UK's Everyone In programme) that exist elsewhere in this library's research trail, which would fit a separate, international-comparison page.

Sources

Jurisdiction: Canada · Topics: comparative-cities, point-in-time-count, housing-plans, shelter-capacity · status: working draft · review: pending (the library’s own tags, kept visible) · published 2026-08-17 · corrections welcome.