“You don’t know their story”: examining Canada’s housing and homelessness challenges and evaluating its National Housing Strategy

Fleming, Jocelyne Marie (2026) “You don’t know their story”: examining Canada’s housing and homelessness challenges and evaluating its National Housing Strategy. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.

Abstract

This thesis examines housing and homelessness challenges in Canada and evaluates the country’s National Housing Strategy (NHS). It does so through a qualitative lens that foregrounds the lived experiences of individuals. With a commitment to social justice, this research was designed to provide an evidence base to inform policy.

Housing has relatively recently risen to the top of the political agenda in Canada, as a result of worsening affordability challenges and increasing rates of homelessness. There is considerable evidence and consensus amongst academics that these housing challenges have increased in conjunction with the federal government’s exodus from housing policy and subsequent devolution of housing responsibility to provinces and then municipalities from the late eighties to the mid-nineties (Gaetz, 2010). Within this context, in 2017, the Liberal government launched the NHS, a 10-year suite of programmes with the top-line objectives to reduce chronic homelessness, remove families from housing need, and increase affordable housing supply.

At its launch, the NHS was framed as a transformative re-entry of the federal government into housing policy, filling a decades-long gap. Despite the Strategy’s commitments and an influx of financial resource for housing, evaluations conducted to date have cast considerable doubt on the efficacy of the NHS and its ability to achieve its objectives.

The existing NHS evaluation literature has broadly adopted a macro-level, quantitative approach. Policy failure examinations often rely on the objectives asserted within policies themselves to determine success or failure. This approach is the basis for much of the existing NHS evaluation landscape, which broadly, though not exclusively, measures the Strategy’s progress against its targets. Crucially, existing evaluations do not necessarily challenge these targets’ suitability or appropriateness to tackle the nation’s housing and homelessness concerns.

This thesis was developed to address these gaps. It provides a qualitative evaluation of the NHS that centres the voices of lived experience experts, critically examines the ideological underpinnings that have shaped the Strategy and its aims, and explores the barriers and challenges within Canada’s housing and homelessness systems from lived experience perspectives. It adopts a two-part, qualitative methodology. First, it applies the “What’s the Problem Represented to be?” (WPR) framework (Bacchi, 2012) to a discourse analysis of government-issued press releases to identify the problem framing of homelessness and housing precarity as constructed by the owners of the NHS, the federal government. Second, it draws on a series of 27 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with individuals experiencing housing need and homelessness and frontline sector staff in Hamilton, Ontario, outlining their experiences to clarify the barriers and challenges being faced.

Using these findings, this thesis compares and contrasts the federal government’s problem framing against the barriers and challenges as defined by lived experience experts. This framework has been influenced by the Multiple Streams Approach (Kingdon, 2014), which asserts that creating policy change centres on one’s ability to compel and direct problem definition in order to match one’s desired policy solutions.

Drawing on the discourse analysis of federal government press releases, the research finds that Canada’s housing and homelessness challenges are framed as two distinct, parallel rather than inter-linked issues. Federal discourse constructs housing as a national, solvable crisis rooted in structural deficits, while homelessness is positioned as an individualised and ambiguous phenomenon, for which the policy solutions are not yet known. These divergent framings, and the NHS design, are underpinned by ideological commitments to discrete interventions into a market-based housing system and a limited recognition of structural drivers for homelessness, shaping policy responses that are narrowly focused and insufficient.

In contrast, in-depth interviews with individuals who have lived experiences of housing precarity and homelessness in Hamilton, Ontario, reveal worsening conditions across both the housing sector and related service systems. Drawing from systems thinking (Gibb and Marsh, 2019) and conceptualising the city as a ‘system of systems’, this thesis outlines the experiences highlighted by participants, who cited interlocking challenges across housing, healthcare, social assistance, and tenant protection that contribute to and sustain homelessness.

This approach highlights the complexity of these interlocking systems and their contribution to rates and experiences of homelessness and housing need. Based on these perspectives, this thesis introduces a two-part typology of homelessness experiences in Hamilton: one driven purely by economic hardship and the other compounded by non-financial challenges such as mental health, trauma, or systemic barriers. Crucially, the research notes that financially driven homelessness, if left unaddressed, can quickly become more complex due to the trauma and instability associated with housing loss.

These findings suggest a fundamental misalignment between federal policy narratives and NHS design and lived experience. This thesis challenges dominant narratives and problem framings within Canadian housing policy discourse, showing how such framings influence, and arguably hinder, the design and efficacy of policy interventions under the NHS. These findings suggest the need to reframe and reform Canada’s approach to housing and homelessness through integrated structural interventions, such as increased social assistance rates, expanded development of non-market, geared-to-income housing, and improved coordination between housing, healthcare, and social services.

This thesis makes three key contributions. First, it centres lived experience perspectives in evaluating the NHS, addressing a persistent gap in the Canadian policy literature. Second, it highlights the disconnect between political framing and the realities of housing insecurity and homelessness in Canada, offering evidence for more responsive, inclusive, and effective approaches to housing and homelessness. Third, it offers a conceptual framework for policy evaluation that incorporates ideological critique and interrogates how housing and homelessness are problematised, rather than simply measuring outcomes against stated goals.

This research finds that Canada’s housing and related systems create conditions in which housing precarity and homelessness will continue to be a reality for many. Ultimately, this thesis argues that meaningful policy reform will require not just increased investment, but also a fundamental rethinking of how Canada’s housing and homelessness challenges are defined and reshaping its solutions. Addressing the interconnected challenges that drive these experiences will require a coordinated ‘Team Canada’ approach that brings together multiple policy portfolios and government jurisdictions to deliver integrated system-wide change.

• Item Type: Thesis (PhD)
• Qualification Level: Doctoral
• Subjects: H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General)
• Colleges/Schools: College of Social Sciences > School of Social and Political Sciences
• Supervisor's Name: Gibb, Professor Ken and Gurney, Dr. Craig
• Date of Award: 2026
• Depositing User: Theses Team
• Unique ID: glathesis:2026-85687
• Copyright: Copyright of this thesis is held by the author.
• Date Deposited: 15 Jan 2026 14:17
• Last Modified: 15 Jan 2026 14:20
• Thesis DOI: 10.5525/gla.thesis.85687
• URI: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/85687