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Manitoba Has an Ambitious Plan to End Homelessness

Wab Kinew’s approach involves moving thousands of unhoused people into permanent homes

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.

Manitoba’s Your Way Home program aims to end chronic homelessness in the province within seven years

The organization uses relationship-building tools and a “housing first” model

Policy decisions and resource scarcity are challenges that often complicate the work of Your Way Home and the Main Street Project

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........

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