The number of people on Ontario Works (OW) and the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) who are also experiencing homelessness has shot up 72 percent since 2019, according to a new report from human rights organization Maytree.
In its newest policy brief released this week, the organization — which describes itself as “committed to advancing systemic solutions to poverty and strengthening civic communities” — says that more than 30,000 people using these programs don’t have stable housing.
Those figures, based on provincial government data obtained through a freedom of information request, measure from July of 2019 to July of 2025.
Alexi White, Maytree’s director of systems change, told CBC News in an interview that when OW and ODSP were first implemented in the 1990s, the programs provided enough funding to allow people to rent a room in many Ontario locales — but that situation has since fundamentally changed.
“Over time, we’ve just simply allowed the realities of living on low incomes to kind of skyrocket and just ignored that from a policy perspective,” White said.
The report highlights other pressures being felt by social program recipients, including that homelessness among those who have relied on OW for more than a year has spiked by 136 per cent over that same six-year period.
“Far from stabilizing lives and helping people escape poverty, reliance on OW is increasingly a homelessness sentence,” wrote study author Lena Balata, Maytree’s senior policy adviser.
The report also notes that 70 per cent of unhoused recipients are single adults, which is the group that receives the lowest benefits from the province.
In a response to questions about the study’s findings, Ministry of Children, Community and Social Services spokesperson Daniel Schultz said in a statement that the province has “taken historic action to make life more affordable for Ontario families while expanding employment opportunities and using every tool we have to protect our economy, jobs and communities.”
Inside Toronto’s homelessness problem
The statement goes on to say the province has enacted measures including increasing ODSP rates by 20 per cent since 2022 alongside a 400 per cent rise in earnings exemptions, as well as exempting the federal government’s Canada Disability Benefit from being counted as income for people receiving social assistance.
“This has allowed ODSP, Ontario Works and Assistance for Children with Severe Disabilities recipients to receive up to an additional $200 a month without it affecting the financial benefits of their social assistance,” Schultz wrote.
But gaps remain. In the report, Balata lays out the constraints OW and ODSP recipients deal with in the face of high rents, especially in urban centres like Toronto. The maximum monthly rate for a single adult on OW was $733, while the highest ODSP benefit was $1,308.
According to figures from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s Rental Market Report, the average market rent for a bachelor apartment in Toronto this year is $1,499, which rises to $1,763 for a one-bedroom.
“The rise in the rental market has really been crushing in the last few years,” White said, noting rental prices have dropped a couple of per cent over the last year in parts of Ontario.
“But if you zoom out and look at things over a five to 10-year range, the rental housing market, especially at the low end, has just become increasingly out of touch for many people on very low incomes.”
As part of its report, Maytree is calling on the provincial government to enact a series of measures, including addressing the systemic causes of poverty (especially for Indigenous, racialized, and disabled communities), ensuring that income supports are adequate to afford housing and expanding affordable and supportive housing options.
