SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
Since the city's point-in-time homeless count report was released earlier this month, finding a homeless population of 139, at least one person working in the field thinks the process was flawed.

Lydia Bardak: John Howard Society NWT executive director says if the count wasn't mandatory it shouldn't have been conducted. - NNSL file photo

Lydia Bardak, executive director of the John Howard Society's NWT chapter, echoed comments made to Yellowknifer just after the count last May, saying she thinks it lacks detail, didn't provide any new numbers and, most of all, was depressing.

"'Would you like us to contact you if a home becomes available in the next few years?'" said the executive director of the John Howard Society's NWT chapter, paraphrasing a question pitched to 188 homeless people who attended two parallel barbecues in May.

"It's really sad that it would actually be years."

Councillor Linda Bussey, co-chair of the community advisory board on homelessness, said she's satisfied with the report on the count published Feb. 8. She said the count wasn't perfect, but it marks a starting point that will provide information for the Housing First program to put roofs over the heads of the homeless, scheduled to launch in the summer.

"It's not perfect. Far from there," she said. "We didn't do enough to look at youth homeless, so next time we're going to do a better job."

Bussey said attracting people to the event with the promise of barbecued fare wasn't ideal and "not everybody came," but they did poll beyond the dual barbecue.

"That night, May 14, we took the occupancy of four shelters in town and we worked in collaboration with the YWCA," said Bussey. "We didn't work in silos."

Lacks Northern focus: Bardak

Bardak said she's critical of the survey because it wasn't geared for the North.

"Nobody looked at it with a Northern eye," she said, adding that one of the survey questions asked where the respondents were planning to stay that night.

"The first option is sidewalk or bus shelter," she said. "Oh you mean like they do in Toronto, where they sleep above the subway where it's warm? We don't have sidewalk grates here. So anyone from the North would be going, 'People don't sleep on the sidewalks, what are you talking about?' And in the downtown core we don't even have a bus shelter."

Bardak said promising hot dogs to boost attendance at the event was flawed thinking.

"It doesn't include people who don't like hot dogs, because they wouldn't have gone to the barbecue," she said. "The entire report apologizes for itself for how unreliable it is."

The report states the 139 figure is the minimum number of homeless people at the time. It states it likely didn't accurately capture those who live on friends' and family's couches and that the report "represents only a fraction of Yellowknife's hidden homeless population." Forty-six were noted as being couch-surfers in the report.

Bardak said there are more reliable sources of data on homeless numbers available and the city had access to that information when it carried out its count.

"The RCMP know how many people they have in cells who if they had some place to go they wouldn't be in cells," she said. "The shelters know how many they have and how frequently individuals come in. The hospital knows when they're discharging someone to homelessness. The jail knows when it's discharging someone to homelessness. So there is much more reliable and valid numbers out there than this."

A previous 'report card on homelessness' found that in 2008 936 individual people experienced homelessness at some point during the year.

Count doesn't impact funding

Bussey said carrying out the count doesn't impact how much funding the city will get to launch its Housing First project from the federal government.

"A point-in-time count is not mandatory under the Housing Partnership strategy. It's recommended, but it doesn't have an impact on our funding."

Bardak said if the count wasn't mandatory then it shouldn't have been carried out at all.

"If it's not mandatory then we shouldn't do this," she said. "It's not going to give any reliable or useful information."