Housing for All

Preventing Homelessness

An effective housing strategy is not only about constructing new homes. It also means helping people remain in the homes they already have.

Bruce County assistance can include help with rent and utility arrears, first or last month's rent, moving expenses and eviction-prevention supports.

The Town has also made a direct local investment in preventing homelessness. In 2025, Saugeen Shores increased its annual contribution to the Municipal Housing Allowance Program from $150,000 to $225,000, with that funding planned to continue through 2033. The program is administered by Bruce County and helps eligible households offset housing costs and remain stably housed. The increased Town funding was intended to support 30 Saugeen Shores households, with another five households supported through County funding. Read more here.

The important question is whether people can reach assistance early enough to prevent a housing crisis from becoming homelessness.

COAST: Bringing Support to People

One important development is COAST (Community Outreach and Support Team).

COAST is a mobile, multidisciplinary Bruce County program launched in June 2026 that brings mental-health, addiction, housing and harm-reduction support directly to residents. The team includes staff from CMHA Grey Bruce, Bruce County Human Services and Bruce County Paramedic Services.

COAST brings services into communities rather than expecting everyone in crisis to navigate several different agencies on their own. Its work includes outreach to people experiencing homelessness, including people staying in encampments and motel shelter locations.

Programs like this also raise an important longer-term question: How do we maintain continuity of effective outreach and support when individual funding programs have fixed end dates?

Responding to Encampments

Bruce County introduced a coordinated Homelessness and Encampment Response Protocol in 2026. This approach emphasizes safety, dignity, connections to services and clear responsibilities among agencies.

Encampments present difficult questions for municipalities and communities. There can be immediate concerns involving safety, sanitation, weather and the use of public land. At the same time, moving people from one location does not resolve homelessness if suitable housing and support are unavailable.

Recent court decisions are also important. In a case involving the encampment in Kitchener, Ontario courts have restricted Waterloo Region’s ability to remove residents where adequate alternatives were not available. In 2023, the Superior Court restrained the Region from clearing the encampment after finding Charter concerns, including the lack of accessible shelter options. In May 2026, a further Superior Court decision found that the Region’s site-specific bylaw intended to clear the encampment violated sections 7 and 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and could not be enforced. Read more here

The 2026 decision emphasized that municipalities must consider the actual circumstances facing people living in an encampment, including whether realistic and accessible alternatives are available, before removing them. The Region of Waterloo and the Province of Ontario have appealed the May 2026 decision, so the legal issues are still being considered by the courts.

For Saugeen Shores, the lesson is that an encampment response should consider both immediate public-safety and public-space concerns and the Charter rights and practical circumstances of people who have nowhere else to live. Moving people from one location does not, by itself, resolve homelessness if suitable housing or accommodation is unavailable.

A useful measure of success is therefore not simply whether an encampment disappears. It is whether people can obtain and retain safe, appropriate housing.

What Ontario Research Tells Us

A recent Ontario research project, Rethinking Municipal Policy Responses to Encampments: Building a Human Rights Approach in Ontario, examined how municipalities respond to homeless encampments through bylaws and encampment protocols.

The researchers emphasize an important limitation: written policies do not necessarily tell us how those policies are implemented or how they are experienced by people living without housing.

They developed a framework based on five areas:

• reducing reliance on policing and enforcement;
• addressing conditions within encampments and meeting basic needs;
• providing equitable and accessible services;
• meaningfully involving people living in encampments in decisions affecting them; and
• recognizing Indigenous rights.

The researchers identified examples of multi-sector outreach and new service-delivery approaches, while also reporting that enforcement-focused responses can undermine trust and make it harder to connect people with housing and other services.

It is important to be clear about what this study does not tell us. It was not an assessment of Saugeen Shores or Bruce County. Instead, the research offers useful questions to consider when examining our own response: Are people being connected with housing and services? Are basic health and safety needs being met? Are people affected by decisions given an opportunity to participate? What happens after an encampment closes? and are we measuring whether people successfully move into stable housing?

The report forms part of the multi-year Realizing the Right: Municipal Policy Responses to Encampments project. Rethinking Municipal Policy Responses to Encampments - Building a Human Rights Approach in Ontario. Read more here.

More Housing Choices

Homelessness cannot be considered separately from the broader supply and affordability of housing.

Bruce County has established a county-wide housing target covering a range of housing, including market, affordable, community, supportive and transitional housing. Locally, that means considering a wider range of homes — apartments, townhouses, duplexes, additional residential units and accessible homes — while asking practical questions about affordability, infrastructure, transportation and access to services. And there is an important distinction: a home priced below the prevailing market rate is not necessarily affordable to a household with a low income.

Questions We Should Keep Asking

As Saugeen Shores and Bruce County respond to housing and homelessness, useful questions include whether prevention programs are reaching people soon enough, whether residents can easily find and access assistance, whether housing and health services are coordinated, what gaps exist in emergency and transitional accommodation, and how results are being measured.

Public reporting should look beyond the number of housing units approved. It can also examine homes completed and occupied, actual rents or prices, how long affordability protections last, how many households were helped to remain housed, movement from homelessness into stable accommodation, and program costs and funding gaps.

Housing is fundamental to the long-term wellbeing of a community. Addressing homelessness requires prevention, a range of housing choices, practical support services and cooperation among the Town, Bruce County, provincial and federal governments, housing providers and community organizations.

The goal should remain clear: helping more people find - and keep - a safe home they can afford.