All they wanted was to provide a modernized homeless shelter, reduce the barriers that prevent unhoused people from coming inside and offer a path out of the cycle of poverty. And they yearned to do it humanely. “We want to restore the dignity of the human person,” Ike Nwibe told local podcaster Robert Washburn in January 2024, soon after becoming executive director of Transition House, a charity outreach in Cobourg, Ont. “We want to ensure that those who are accessing our services, they’re actually getting that respect that they deserve.”
As Amarah Hasham-Steele writes in our cover story this month (“Rethinking Encampments”), “homelessness is a fiendishly complex problem.” But too often the complexity stems not from the folks on the street but from red tape.
I’m thinking specifically about Transition House, which serves the people of Northumberland County, where I live. The organizations services were scattered across several motels and two locations, including a 22-bed shelter in a converted century home. The vision was to renovate a former retirement residence and offer 35 shelter spaces, 10 transitional housing units, a warming and cooling hub, and other supports under one roof.
While the organization’s century-home shelter slept people on bunkbeds, four to eight to a room, the new space would offer individual bedrooms. “You know, privacy. That every one of us gets,” Nwibe explains in the podcast. “That helps them to be able to process whatever it is they need to process….And then, with the support of our staff members, they’re able to get back on their feet.”
But last March, the Town of Cobourg introduced a new licensing bylaw for emergency care establishments, and plans were delayed. Parts of the bylaw made good sense, like ensuring staff are trained in mental health and conflict de-escalation. Other parts seemed wholly unreasonable and designed to appease neighbours, like making the shelter’s trustees personally liable if a client litters within a 500-metre radius of the shelter, with fines between $500 and $100,000 per day for contraventions. Who would join that board?
The Ontario Human Rights Commission said the new bylaw could have a “discriminatory impact” on vulnerable people. It said bylaws that prevent or delay a facility from opening “reduce the availability of housing and lead to homelessness, raising human rights concerns.”
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Stories like this one are repeated across the country. An estimated 235,000 people in Canada experience homelessness each year. In Ontario, more than 80,000 people were homeless in 2024, a 25 percent increase since 2022. We must do better.
Despite the many obstacles, Nwibe managed to open Transition House’s warming hub and emergency beds at the end of 2024, and as of mid-January was still working on the transitional housing units.
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Meanwhile, overnight temperatures in Northumberland County are dipping well below zero. The region’s homeless are carrying on with the daily stress of survival, living between couches, cars, motels and shelters. I can only hope they’ll all find warmth, comfort — and the dignity and respect they deserve.
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Jocelyn Bell is the editor and publisher of Broadview.
This article first appeared in Broadview’s March 2025 issue with the title “Finding Shelter.”
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