Can Thunder Bay restore public safety while reducing homelessness? We examine policies that work

THUNDER BAY — For a growing number of Thunder Bay residents and business owners, homelessness is no longer viewed only as a housing or social-services issue. It has become intertwined with concerns about property theft, shoplifting, discarded needles and garbage, open drug and alcohol use, aggressive behaviour, panhandling, encampments along waterways and whether people feel comfortable using the city’s downtowns and public spaces.

Those concerns cannot simply be dismissed.

Thunder Bay Police Service launched its downtown Project Support initiative specifically in response to complaints involving open drug use, disorderly behaviour, vandalism, aggressive behaviour and trespassing.

Statistics Canada, meanwhile, reports Thunder Bay’s police-reported crime rate increased 18 per cent in 2025, the largest increase among Canadian census metropolitan areas, although the Crime Severity Index rose a much smaller three per cent.

At the same time, homelessness itself is not a crime, and it would be inaccurate to blame every person living outdoors for theft, drug trafficking, vandalism or violence. The challenge facing Thunder Bay is how to enforce laws and protect neighbourhoods, waterways and businesses while getting people who are living outside into shelter, treatment and ultimately permanent housing.

Reality is not all homeless people are a problem, and the goal should be making our community safer for everyone. Some of the homeless people, especially women are at risk.

The available evidence from Thunder Bay and other North American cities suggests neither enforcement alone nor housing programs alone will be sufficient.

Thunder Bay Has a Homelessness Problem and a Public-Space Problem

Thunder Bay’s homelessness numbers have moved sharply upward.

The city’s October 2025 Point-in-Time count identified 652 people experiencing homelessness, the highest recorded in the local count. That was up from 557 people identified in October 2024. The 2025 count included 198 people in emergency shelters, 154 in transitional housing and 130 staying in encampments.

The District of Thunder Bay Social Services Administration Board reported that its district-wide By-Name List contained 1,129 actively homeless people at the end of 2025, with 58 per cent identifying as Indigenous.

That Indigenous overrepresentation is important in Thunder Bay. Any effective response has to involve Indigenous organizations and culturally appropriate housing, mental-health, addiction and reconnection services rather than treating homelessness solely as a municipal enforcement problem.

The pressures also go well beyond encampments. Residents report thefts from yards, sheds and vehicles. Business owners have raised concerns about shoplifting, trespassing and behaviour that frightens employees and customers.

Thunder Bay Police demonstrated that organized retail theft is a real problem through Project Eclipse, an investigation that ran from September 2025 through February 2026 and led to the recovery of more than $39,000 in stolen property and 256 charges involving thefts and robberies at numerous businesses.

Thunder Bay Police have been busy in the Intercity area recently dealing with the issue of shoplifting. The rumour mill is people are “placing orders” for goods, and they are being stolen out of businesses to meet that “demand”.

Those charges involved specific accused individuals and should not be generalized to everyone experiencing homelessness. All accused persons are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty in court.

The distinction matters: poverty is not illegal. Theft, assault, trafficking, vandalism and threatening behaviour are.

Downtown Businesses Are Telling Police There Is a Problem

Thunder Bay Police launched Project Support on April 20 in both downtown cores.

Police say the initiative was created following continuing complaints about open drug use, public intoxication, trespassing, vandalism, aggressive behaviour and the resulting effect on businesses, residents and public confidence. Officers conduct visible foot patrols alongside social navigators who can connect people to housing, mental-health and addiction services.

By mid-July, police reported more than 4,100 community engagements, 199 Social Navigator referrals, 39 arrests, 25 provincial offence notices and numerous trespass-enforcement actions. Police noted that many arrests involved outstanding warrants.

That approach illustrates one part of a workable strategy: intensive outreach first, but enforcement when criminal or persistently disruptive behaviour occurs.

Panhandling Is Not Automatically Illegal

Panhandling generates complaints, particularly when people feel intimidated.

Ontario’s Safe Streets Act does not prohibit every request for money. It prohibits solicitation conducted in an aggressive manner and solicitation in specified circumstances, including near ATMs, public transit stops and vehicles or in parking lots.

Aggressive solicitation can include threats, blocking someone’s path, abusive language, following someone, continuing after a refusal or soliciting while intoxicated.

That means police and enforcement officers can respond to aggressive solicitation while recognizing that peaceful solicitation is a different legal issue.

What Is Thunder Bay City Hall’s Policy?

Thunder Bay City Council has moved considerably further on encampment policy during 2026.

The City is implementing a 10-Part Enhanced Encampment Response Action Plan, intended to combine outreach, designated encampments, shelter capacity, public-space regulation and longer-term housing measures.

On May 19, council approved its new Use of Public Spaces By-law.

The rules restrict activities including unsafe propane use, dumping waste, damaging municipal property, unauthorized use of utilities and construction of permanent or semi-permanent shelters. The bylaw is intended to protect public access and safety while remaining consistent with Charter protections for people who have nowhere else to sleep.

That last point is significant.

Thunder Bay cannot simply send equipment into every encampment and order everyone out regardless of whether somewhere genuinely accessible exists for those people to go.

An Ontario Superior Court decision involving a Kitchener encampment ruled in May that removing people from their only lawful sheltering location where adequate accessible shelter was unavailable violated Charter rights. Ontario and Waterloo Region are appealing that ruling, so the law continues to evolve.

Thunder Bay’s bylaw was deliberately written around that legal reality.

Thunder Bay Has Approved Designated Encampment Sites

Council approved designated encampment areas at Freedom Park, Simpson Street and Current River Park.

The rollout was subsequently modified so Current River Park would be operationalized only when Freedom Park and Simpson Street reached a combined occupancy of 80 per cent.

City planning documents contemplated approximately 25 tents at each designated location, with fencing, defined layouts, monitoring, maintenance and co-ordinated services.

Designated sites are not intended to be permanent housing.

They are an attempt to move people away from random camps on riverbanks, trails, neighbourhood green spaces and other unsuitable locations and place them somewhere where garbage collection, sanitation, outreach and site management are possible.

Whether that approach works will depend almost entirely on enforcement and management.

A designated encampment without rules, sanitation, security, storage and a path into housing risks simply concentrating the same problems in another location.

McVicars Creek and the McIntyre River Need a Separate Environmental Response

Thunder Bay’s waterways deserve particular attention.

Tents, discarded material, shopping carts, propane cylinders, human waste, needles and garbage along creek and river corridors are not merely aesthetic problems.

They can become environmental, flooding, fire and worker-safety issues.

The city could establish a dedicated waterway protocol that prioritizes McVicars Creek, the McIntyre River and other sensitive corridors for rapid assessment, outreach, relocation where lawful alternatives exist, cleanup and continuing monitoring.

That should include routine reporting on tonnes of waste removed, propane cylinders recovered, needles collected, sites remediated and how often previously cleaned locations are reoccupied.

Without publicly available measurements, residents have little way of knowing whether conditions are improving.

The 80-Unit Shelter Village Is a Critical Test

One of Thunder Bay’s largest responses is the Temporary Shelter Village at 879 Alloy Place.

The project is designed for 80 private, climate-controlled sleeping units with beds and locking doors along with food, washrooms, laundry and around-the-clock staffing. The District of Thunder Bay Social Services Administration Board committed about $2.77 million through Ontario’s Encampment Response Initiative.

As of the most recent publicly available construction update located by NetNewsLedger, common buildings were in place in July and sleeping cabins were being delivered and installed as the operator prepared to receive residents.

The Village could make enforcement elsewhere much more practical because it creates an alternative to sleeping along creeks or in unmanaged parks.

But 80 spaces cannot solve a homelessness problem involving hundreds of people.

Another $10.7 Million Is Going Into Shelter and Supportive Housing

Ontario announced $10.7 million this spring for five Thunder Bay projects providing 66 transitional or supportive housing units and 120 additional shelter spaces.

Projects include 46 transitional supportive units through Urban Abbey, 13 through PACE, seven through Teen Challenge, 40 additional spaces at Grace Place and the 80-unit Temporary Shelter Village.

That is substantial new capacity.

The important question now is not how much money has been announced. It is how many people actually move from the street into shelter, from shelter into transitional housing, and from transitional housing into permanent homes.

A system that continually adds shelter beds while people cannot move into permanent housing eventually becomes clogged.

Addiction and Mental Health Cannot Be Left to Police

Thunder Bay’s visible disorder is also tied to an exceptionally serious addiction crisis.

TBDSSAB reported that among respondents to the 2024 Point-in-Time survey, 80 per cent reported ongoing substance use and 61 per cent reported a mental-health condition. Those figures describe survey respondents and should not be interpreted as applying to every person experiencing homelessness.

Police cannot provide psychiatric treatment, detoxification, rehabilitation or long-term addiction medicine.

Municipal government cannot provide all of those services either.

Those are areas where Ontario’s health system has a major responsibility.

Thunder Bay therefore needs enough detoxification spaces, residential treatment, stabilization beds, mental-health care and supportive housing so an officer or outreach worker encountering someone in crisis has somewhere meaningful to take that person.

Repeatedly transporting someone from a street corner to an emergency department, jail, shelter and back to the same street is expensive and does little to address the underlying problem.

What Edmonton Is Doing

Edmonton offers one model for combining enforcement and outreach.

Its Encampment Response Team includes peace officers, Edmonton police and municipal operations staff. Complaints are logged through 311, active sites are assessed, residents are offered transportation and supports, and abandoned sites are cleaned.

Importantly, Edmonton says encampments are closed only when sufficient shelter space is available. When shelter capacity reaches 90 per cent, teams are instructed to verify availability before proceeding.

Edmonton also publishes unusually detailed performance information.

In June 2026, it reported 840 encampment complaints, 665 sites cleaned, 152 propane tanks removed, 323 shopping carts recovered, 2,911 needles removed and more than 108,000 kilograms of material cleared. Average complaint-to-cleanup time was 2.24 days.

Thunder Bay could adopt similar public reporting.

Residents do not simply want to hear that the city has a strategy. They want to know whether a reported camp is assessed in two days or two months.

Denver: Move an Entire Encampment Into Housing-Oriented Shelter

Denver has pursued a different model through its All In Mile High initiative.

Instead of repeatedly clearing camps and allowing them to reform a few blocks away, Denver has focused on resolving entire encampments by moving people into non-congregate shelters and micro-communities, then working to move residents into permanent housing.

An interim evaluation by the Urban Institute found the program was associated with a 98-per-cent reduction in encampments containing more than 20 people.

The lesson for Thunder Bay is important.

Removing a tent is not the same thing as resolving an encampment.

A camp is resolved when the people who were living there have somewhere better to go and do not simply relocate to the next creek, park or railway corridor.

San Diego Shows Both the Potential and Risk of Enforcement

San Diego combines designated Safe Sleeping sites with an Unsafe Camping Ordinance.

Its Safe Sleeping sites provide tents, meals, washrooms, showers, 24-hour security and housing-navigation services. The city can then enforce camping restrictions in other public spaces under specified circumstances.

A 2026 city audit found a substantial reduction in the unsheltered population downtown following implementation of the ordinance.

But there was an important warning: the city received an average 13 per cent more encampment reports citywide in the two years following implementation.

That suggests some of the problem may have moved rather than disappeared.

Thunder Bay should pay close attention to that experience.

Clearing McVicars Creek only to create new encampments along another waterway would be movement, not progress.

Houston Shows Why Permanent Housing Still Matters

Houston has become one of North America’s most closely watched Housing First communities.

Its approach has emphasized permanent supportive housing, co-ordinated outreach, a housing navigation centre and partnerships among government, police, health agencies and dozens of homelessness organizations. The city reported 124 encampments decommissioned and people moved through its navigation system into housing in earlier phases of the strategy.

Houston is not a finished success story. Its 2026 regional Point-in-Time count still identified 3,321 people experiencing homelessness, and recent counts show continuing unsheltered homelessness.

That is another useful lesson: even successful housing systems require continuous investment as rents, addiction, migration, health conditions and economic pressures change.

What Thunder Bay Can Do Now

Thunder Bay does not have to choose between compassion and public order.

A practical strategy needs both.

The city can aggressively enforce theft, assault, vandalism, threatening behaviour, trespassing, illegal dumping and dangerous use of public spaces without criminalizing a person merely for being poor or homeless.

It can rapidly clean abandoned camps, particularly along waterways, while outreach teams work to relocate people into designated sites and available shelters.

It can establish measurable service standards — for example, initial investigation of an encampment complaint within 48 hours and cleanup of an abandoned site within a defined period — and publish the results every month.

It can expand Project Support-style foot patrols in business districts while maintaining Social Navigators as the first point of contact for people whose primary problem is addiction, mental illness or lack of housing.

It can also improve access to secure storage. One recurring problem in encampments is the accumulation of bicycles, carts, propane cylinders, building materials and household goods. Providing limited secure storage for legitimate personal belongings removes one argument for maintaining sprawling camps while making it easier for police to investigate property reasonably suspected to be stolen.

The province, meanwhile, needs to provide enough treatment, psychiatric care, detoxification and supportive housing that police and outreach workers have somewhere to refer people.

Ottawa and Queen’s Park also need to recognize the disproportionate impact of homelessness on Indigenous people in Thunder Bay and fund Indigenous-led housing and healing programs accordingly.

Businesses Need a Response Too

There is another constituency that cannot be ignored: people who own and work in businesses.

A business that repeatedly loses merchandise to theft, pays for broken windows, hires private security and watches customers avoid the area is carrying part of the cost of the broader social crisis.

Expecting those businesses simply to absorb those costs is not sustainable.

A downtown recovery strategy could include stronger foot patrols, environmental design improvements, lighting, rapid graffiti and waste removal, trespass support, security partnerships, storefront improvement programs and regular meetings between police, BIAs, outreach agencies and businesses.

Public confidence matters.

People are less likely to shop, eat or attend events somewhere they perceive as unsafe — whether every individual fear is statistically justified or not.

Restoring confidence requires both measurable reductions in disorder and visible improvements to streets and public spaces.

The City Should Publish a Monthly Homelessness and Public-Safety Dashboard

One of the strongest ideas Thunder Bay could borrow from Edmonton is transparency.

Every month residents should be able to see how many encampments were reported, assessed and cleaned; how many people entered shelters; how many moved into permanent housing; how many people returned to homelessness; how many needles and propane cylinders were removed; how many Social Navigator referrals were completed; and whether police calls for theft, assault, trespassing and public disorder are rising or falling.

Targets should be public.

Without data, every side of the debate operates on anecdotes.

Residents see a stolen barbecue and conclude nothing is working. Advocates see someone displaced from an encampment and conclude enforcement is failing. City Hall points to dollars invested.

A shared dashboard would allow the community to ask the more useful question: Are conditions actually getting better?

There Is No Single Solution — But Doing Nothing Is Also a Policy Choice

Thunder Bay cannot arrest its way out of homelessness.

It cannot build its way out of open drug trafficking or property crime without enforcement either.

And simply tolerating unmanaged encampments along rivers, parks and neighbourhoods has consequences for the environment, residents, businesses and the people living in those camps themselves.

The best-performing approaches elsewhere generally have a common thread: clear rules for public spaces, rapid response to problem sites, intensive outreach, enough low-barrier shelter, treatment for addiction and mental illness, and a relentless focus on moving people into permanent housing.

Thunder Bay has pieces of that model already.

The Use of Public Spaces By-law provides rules. Project Support provides targeted enforcement and outreach. The designated encampments provide an interim place for outdoor sheltering. The Temporary Shelter Village is intended to add 80 spaces. Provincial funding is adding additional emergency and transitional capacity.

The test over the coming months is whether those pieces begin functioning as one system.

For residents whose yards are being entered, businesses coping with repeated theft and people who no longer feel comfortable in parts of their city, patience is wearing thin.

For people living in tents, cars or doorways, another Northern Ontario winter is approaching.

Both realities can be true.

Thunder Bay’s response will succeed only when residents regain confidence that laws and public spaces are being respected and fewer people are sleeping outside.