Drawing on doctoral research into Canada’s National Housing Strategy (NHS), this briefing considers the lessons learned from the first NHS as the Government of Canada develops NHS 2.0. It identifies important differences between how housing and homelessness have been understood within federal policy and how housing insecurity is experienced in practice.

 

In particular, the research, which foregrounds lived experience perspectives, highlights financially driven homelessness as an important but comparatively overlooked dimension of housing insecurity, and demonstrates how housing outcomes are shaped across multiple public systems.

 

The briefing argues that NHS 2.0 presents an opportunity to learn from the existing evidence, reconsider how Canada’s housing and homelessness challenges are understood, and use these lessons to inform future policy design. Without this shift, Canada risks another decade of grappling with many of the same challenges.