Canada's wait list for affordable housing has more people than St. John's. Is change coming?

Want to know how long people in Canada are waiting for subsidized, affordable housing?

It's difficult to say.

Even though affordable housing topped the agenda at the premiers' meeting in Winnipeg this week, there's no clear way to know exactly how long people are waiting for affordable places to live in Canada's biggest cities.

Toronto posts its average wait online — 14 years for a one-bedroom unit as of 2022. A spokesperson for the city of Montreal said by email that its overall average wait for subsidized housing, as of December 2022, was nearly six years.

"All of them have gone to the point of absurdity, almost," said Ottawa-based housing policy consultant Carolyn Whitzman.

Others don't have such a specific number at the ready.

CBC News contacted a number of cities and provinces this week, inquiring how long the wait was for a subsidized one-bedroom apartment. We received a patchwork of responses indicating that jurisdictions track the need for affordable housing differently and use different criteria to determine how affordable units are allocated.

That means people in different circumstances may wait different lengths of time for subsidized housing in the same city. In British Columbia, for example, an individual's needs can affect their wait-time, including family status and personal circumstances, such as homelessness.

And the actual number of people in need of subsidized housing may be longer than any list captures. When people see a wait as long as 14 years, they may get discouraged and not even put their names forward, said Whitzman, an adjunct professor of geography at the University of Ottawa.

There are others who are not well equipped to fill out the required applications, or may not know where to start, said Marie-Josée Houle, who was appointed as Canada's first-ever federal housing advocate last year.

"The important question, when we're looking at these lists, is who's not on that list?" she said in an interview with CBC News from North Battleford, Sask.

"It's data. But then what are the assumptions we need to make around the data to qualify it, to justify it?"

One national measure of the need for subsidized housing stretches back to 2021, when Statistics Canada conducted its latest Canadian Housing Survey. It showed that 1.5 per cent of households, more than 227,000 altogether, were on waiting lists for social or affordable housing. And the majority of those households, more than 148,000 of them, had been waiting for two years or longer. 

The wait-lists were long in some of Canada's largest cities, including Toronto (172,700, or 2.6 per cent of households), and Vancouver (29,100, or 1.1 per cent).