Study suggests link between foster care, homelessness

OTTAWA — A first-of-its-kind study in Canada is drawing a link between youth homelessness levels and a foster-care system that researchers say could be playing a more active role in keeping young people off the streets.

The study, to be released today, found nearly three out of every five homeless youth were part of the child-welfare system at some point in their lives, a rate almost 200 times greater than that of the general population.

Of those with a history in the child-welfare system, almost two of every five respondents eventually “aged out” of provincial or territorial care, losing access to the sort of support that could have kept them from becoming homeless, the study found.

Canada is creating a group of young people who are at higher risk of becoming homeless because they lack resources when coming out of foster care, said Stephen Gaetz, the study’s co-author and director of the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness.

The report urges the federal government to focus on preventing youth homelessness — particularly among Indigenous youth — and provinces and territories to focus on “after care” by providing support as needed until age 25.

“We’re not calling out child protection services. We’re not pointing fingers going: ‘It’s horrible what you’re doing,’ ” Gaetz said. “Rather, we’re saying this is an unintended consequence of a whole number of things, but it’s something that we can identify as leading to bad outcomes when young people leave care.”

The study, based on a survey of 1,103 young people who were experiencing homelessness in 42 communities in nine provinces and Nunavut, offers the first national portrait of Canada’s population of homeless youth.

Homeless youth ages 13 to 24 make up about one-fifth of Canada’s homeless population — which means there are about 6,500 people in that age cohort experiencing homelessness on any given night.

New census data released last week reported some 43,880 youth in foster care in 2016, a decline of about 4,000 from the 47,890 young people Statistics Canada counted in 2011, the first time such data was collected for the census.

The problem is particularly acute for Indigenous youth, who in 2011 made up nearly half of the children in care nationally.