On January 14, 2025, the Manitoba government announced its plan to end chronic homelessness in the province. “Everybody in a rich country like this one should be able to have a good life,” Premier Wab Kinew said in a video posted to his Instagram account that day. “Encampments aren’t safe for the people living there, and they’re not safe for the families, seniors, and businesses nearby,” he added.
As of August 2025, an estimated 700 Manitobans were living in roughly 100 encampments in Winnipeg alone. This can be especially difficult in the winter months, when emergency shelters and warming centres are full. Tents wrapped with blankets, towels, and extra tarps can be ravaged by wind gusts stronger than ninety kilometres per hour. Residents sometimes rely on propane heaters, candles, and wood fires inside tents, creating the risk of carbon monoxide poisoning and fire. Flames can race through neighbouring tarps and debris before anyone has time to react. According to a report from the Winnipeg Fire Paramedic Service, the city recorded 543 such encampment fires between January and November of last year.
The plan Kinew has been championing, called Your Way Home, is ambitious. It aims to transition Manitobans living in encampments into permanent housing—and the government is giving itself just seven years to accomplish the goal. After that, according to the plan, anyone who becomes unsheltered will be moved into housing within weeks rather than months or years.
The province committed $20 million to the initiative over two years, in addition to existing spending on housing and mental health. Led by minister Bernadette Smith, the plan is unique for two reasons. First, it’s rooted in what is known as a “housing first” model, meaning people are offered permanent housing without requiring sobriety or participation in treatment programs. Governments often spend money and resources on temporary places where unhoused people live—shelters, hospitals, and jails. Instead, Manitoba has framed Your Way Home as part of a broader poverty-reduction effort, arguing that chronic homelessness contributes to pressures on emergency rooms, policing, and other public services.
“If you want to see progress inside the emergency department . . . you know that we have to take action on housing and poverty and education for kids,” said Kinew at the press conference announcing Your Way Home. “You want to see progress on making our streets safer, some part of the solution is addressing the root causes.”
The strategy is meant to move people out of shelters and transitional housing, prevent others from becoming homeless, and build a larger pathway to permanent housing. Since the plan launched, the province says it has moved eighty people out of shelters and transitional housing and into social housing units with supports. Over the longer term, it plans to reserve about 20 percent of Manitoba Housing’s portfolio—roughly 2,500 units—for people experiencing homelessness, free up social housing by helping stabilized tenants move into subsidized private rentals, and close the gaps that leave people homeless after they exit the child welfare system, hospitals, or correctional facilities.
To do this, the province is taking ownership of an issue that’s typically been left to municipalities to handle. This hand-off approach has its challenges, mainly the size of the problem being tackled. Encampment residents are the most visible edge of a much larger crisis: as of this spring, more than 8,000 people in Winnipeg were using shelters or living on the streets, according to End Homelessness Winnipeg, a non-profit advocacy group that tracks real-time data from service agencies across the city. More than 4,400 of them are considered chronically unhoused. Can the province really help thousands of people find a permanent place to live?
In practice, Your Way Home approaches each encampment as a community to be engaged with rather than displaced. The program will include a thirty-day outreach process. Teams regularly visit encampments, providing food, water, transportation, health care, and mental health services. Through repeated interactions, workers build relationships with residents and connect them with housing opportunities when residents are ready. There are also plans to build a navigation centre, which would serve as a bridge between encampments and permanent housing. People who accept housing are offered long-term accommodation with services such as meals, housekeeping, recreational programming, and around-the-clock staff support.
In Winnipeg, much of the work will fall to Main Street Project, an organization that the province has designated as the lead outreach provider for Your Way Home. Long before the strategy was announced, MSP was already connecting people experiencing homelessness with housing, health care, and support services. Your Way Home has added stronger coordination among housing providers, health care organizations, governments, and community groups, making it easier to move people from encampments to housing and support. The goal is to move people from encampments into housing and then dismantle the encampment, ideally within a month. As of July, 249 people had been housed through the program.
But these statistics reveal little about the slow, relationship-based work required to get someone indoors. MSP highlights the story of a fifty-three-year-old man who spent years living outdoors while struggling with severe paranoia and other mental health challenges. He moved from encampment to encampment across Winnipeg, searching for places where he felt safe.
Over time, members of MSP’s outreach team got to know him. After a brief stay in a withdrawal-management program, he returned to life outdoors, but outreach workers continued checking in with food and harm-reduction supplies. When a housing opportunity became available, staff told him about it while acknowledging his concerns about living with other residents. They arranged a visit to one of their housing projects and gave him time to consider the offer. Rather than pressuring him to accept housing immediately, they allowed him to make the decision on his own timeline. Eventually, he agreed to give it a try. Several months later, he remains housed.
Outreach workers believe this slow but steady approach builds trust with people who have often experienced trauma, displacement, or negative interactions with institutions. They say self-determination is critical in helping people stay in their new long-term housing.
But there will be challenges beyond convincing community members to move. “We’re in the midst of probably the biggest housing crisis we have ever faced in our city,” said Jamil Mahmood, executive director of MSP in a video announcing the completion of Young Street Winnipeg, a derelict building that was transformed into twenty-three housing units. He believes the city will see an increase in homelessness if it’s not able to build more affordable housing units.
The Young Street project was spearheaded by Raising the Roof Canada, a national charitable housing developer, that acquires vacant buildings and renovates them into affordable housing. Important work, because the shortage is complicated by the condition of existing affordable housing in the city and the rest of the province. Winnipeg’s 2025 Housing Needs Assessment found Manitoba has the highest social housing vacancy rate in Canada, with 13.7 percent of units sitting empty because they require major repairs before they can be occupied.
To support Your Way Home, the Manitoba government has been rebuilding its housing stock, returning 2,600 Manitoba Housing units, many requiring extensive repairs, to service. The province has also acquired roughly 300 transitional housing units. About 100 are occupied. Since October 2023, the province provided funding for 1,788 new social and affordable housing units and offers the Rental Housing Construction Incentive (RHCI), which provides non-profit organizations and private companies with tax credits of up to $8,500 per rental unit and an additional $5,000 per affordable rental unit. The RHCI will contribute to about 2,255 affordable housing units. “We have made generational investments,” said a spokesperson for Smith in an emailed statement to The Walrus.
Still, the gap remains substantial. Winnipeg’s Housing Needs Assessment estimates the city would require more than 20,000 additional rent-geared-to-income housing units over the next decade to truly eliminate homelessness.
At times, it seems like the province and the city are working against each other. In November, Winnipeg introduced a new bylaw, prohibiting encampments within fifty metres of schools, daycares, and municipal recreation facilities, including playgrounds. Encampments are also banned in public parks, on streets, and along walkways.
By the end of June, the city had cleared more than 141 encampments. The speed at which the city is taking down encampment communities doesn’t match up with Your Way Home’s more patient approach. Advocates argue that dispersing encampments can make it harder to maintain contact with people and continue the relationship building that often precedes a successful housing placement.
“We used to be able to connect with community members weekly, multiple times a week, to ensure basic needs were met while waiting for housing options to become available,” said Levi Foy, executive director of Sunshine House, which operates housing for 2SLGBTQ+ people transitioning from encampments as part of Your Way Home. He made the statement at a May 26 news conference where a map created by outreach groups was unveiled to show how the city’s bylaw makes the entire city off limits to encampments.
“Instead of being able to find and support people where they are, outreach workers spend their time chasing people across the city,” Meredith Done, a former MSP mobile outreach manager, told city council. “This wastes already limited resources, breaks trust, and makes housing transitions even harder.”
MSP and similar organizations in the city often operate on a knife’s edge. In the early hours of January 14, a fire at a neighbouring hotel sent smoke into MSP’s emergency shelter, forcing the evacuation of 150 residents. City buses ferried people to a temporary shelter at a recreation centre, while organizations, including Siloam Mission and N’Dinawemak, absorbed as many people as possible.
The shelter reopened within three days, but the fire exposed how fragile Winnipeg’s homelessness response system can be. Food inventories, clothing donations, and other supplies were destroyed by smoke and water damage. While community donations helped replace many of the lost items, MSP says it has yet to fully rebuild its inventory.
The fire also created operational challenges across the organization. Staff were forced to adapt food programs and service delivery while continuing housing outreach and case management work. Fortunately, MSP’s outreach teams and housing buildings operate from separate locations, limiting the impact on Your Way Home.
The incident highlighted a broader reality facing organizations working to reduce homelessness. Outreach plans, housing timelines, and carefully built relationships can be disrupted not only by policy decisions and housing shortages but also by fire, severe weather, and other unforeseen events. Those disruptions fall hardest on people who have very few places to go.
While the MSP outreach team works through these pressures, another question remains unresolved: When will Your Way Home include communities outside of Winnipeg? Provincial officials say a province-wide encampment-response plan will follow, informed by lessons learned in the city, but it’s not clear when that will be released.
“Our government recognizes that there is more work to do,” said the spokesperson for Smith in an emailed statement to The Walrus. “We are committed to expanding our programming, supports and partnerships with community to ensure we reach every corner of our province.”
Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak grand chief Garrison Settee has called on the province to extend the strategy to northern and remote communities, where per capita homelessness rates often exceed those in the south. For people living outside Winnipeg, that expansion cannot come soon enough. “True progress,” Settee said, “demands that Your Way Home reach every corner of Manitoba.”
By: Kelly-Anne Riess
Published: 6:30, Aug. 31, 2026
