Peggy Morrison began working at the Open Arms Café at the North Bay, Ont. parish of St. John the Divine about 14 years ago, inspired by a recurrent dream she believed was God’s call toward work in homelessness and poverty outreach.
She now serves as rector’s warden at the parish and leads Open Arms. The program provides needy or unhoused clients with a full-course meal every Wednesday night, along with health services and essential items. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, Morrison says, the program has gone from serving about 100 people a week to around 200.
Despite that increase in demand, Morrison says the program’s resources are holding up remarkably well. They had flagged down to almost nothing by the end of the pandemic lockdowns, she says, but thanks to donations from parishioners and the surrounding community, it now has everything it needs.
Morrison’s experience is common among parishes the Anglican Journal reached for this story. Homelessness in northern Ontario has grown three times faster than in any other part of the province, according to a report from the Association of Municipalities of Ontario (AMO), more than doubling since 2021. Parishes that responded to the Journal’s call reported increases in demand met by equal will to help from both Anglicans and their neighbours.
“Christians in particular [are] to care for those who need care. I think that’s just our calling,” Morrison says.
Still, both church and secular service providers warn that there are limits to what the system can absorb. The same AMO report predicts homelessness across the province could more than double by 2035 from about 85,000 to 177,000 people—and that assumes a stable economic outlook. Service providers say serious change is needed to prevent faith and government resources alike from buckling.
Like St. John the Divine, St. Thomas’ Anglican Church in Bracebridge has seen a rise in demand for its services. Administrator Ann Marie Taylor says from 2024 to 2025, the total number of people it served each year increased from 136 to 160, the number of $25 gift cards for food it gave out increased from 79 to 135, and the number of frozen take-home meals it gave out almost doubled, from 94 to 181.
“We have our regulars who have been coming here for a few years … But this year, I’ve met a lot of new ones and they’re getting younger all the time, which scares me,” she says. “We’re seeing double the need [in] one year.”
The congregation at St. Thomas’ has responded with generosity, Taylor says. “They just seem to keep giving,” she says. “If we say there’s a need for something, they seem to find it in their hearts to come up with stuff. When I was asking for coats, they looked in their closets and said, ‘I don’t need four coats. I can get rid of one.’”
Janice Barker, coordinator of the Family Giving Centre at St. Thomas Anglican Church, Thunder Bay—part of the same parish in the diocese of Algoma—describes a similar experience.
Part of the centre’s stability comes from a careful calculation of how much help they can sustainably deliver, she says. They hit that number of 80 households every two weeks about six months after they opened following the COVID-19 pandemic, Barker says.
They’ve stayed steady at that level since, she says, collaborating with other nearby programs to each cover a portion of the city’s need. But Barker says they’re also aware 80 to 90 people is likely their limit before they’ll need to start referring clients to other resources.
Thunder Bay declared homelessness a humanitarian crisis in the city in February. The latest point-in-time count found 652 people unhoused on Oct. 9, 2025, according to the non-profit organization Lakehead Social Planning Council.
“This is not the country to live in a tent. Northwestern Ontario is not the right place,” says Barker. Temperatures in the Thunder Bay area have dipped as low as -32 °C this winter.
Brian Marks is chief administrative officer for the Cochrane District Services Board, which delivers financial support, housing assistance and ambulance and children’s services in an area of Ontario stretching from Timmins to Moosonee. Asked how resources there were holding up to the increased strain of the past couple of years, he says, “They’re not. Plain and simple.”
“The service structure we have [in Timmins] is designed to serve a population of 41,000 based on what services needed to look like 10, 15, 20 years ago,” he says.
While the opioid epidemic and lack of support for children aging out of the care system are contributing factors to homelessness, he says, the real driver of the crisis is poverty. The lack of affordability in everything from food to fuel to housing makes it harder and harder to get people out of homelessness and leads to more joining their ranks all the time, he says.
Marks believes there is enough money in the system now to provide adequate care but says it would need to be applied to projects that meaningfully address affordability and health-care needs over the course of decades.
Instead, he sees short-term thinking from politicians who are concerned with the immediate election cycle. Also disturbing is the attitude he says is prevalent in his service area that treats poverty as a fault of the poor.
“It’s not a choice people have made. It’s [not] that notion that somebody can just pull themself up by their bootstraps or get to that bottom rung of the ladder. People can’t even see the ladder today, let alone reach it.”
Faith congregations already provide a source of volunteerism—exemplified by Barker, Morrison and Taylor—which Marks says has become a built-in and perhaps over-relied upon part of Canada’s support system. But they can also be a source of attitude change, he says.
Marks encourages faith-based institutions to help promote a view of homelessness that treats people as individuals with their own stories. The contact they have with the people they serve can break down stereotypes and spread the will to help, he says.
Anglicans are also taking on more long-term projects to alleviate homelessness in their communities. Connie Knighton, a member of the diocese of Algoma’s social justice committee, points to three examples across the diocese.
The smallest is a six-unit supportive housing facility proposed by Baysville, Ontario’s St. Ambrose Anglican Church. It would be based on a Swedish model that encourages residents to be a part of each other’s support structures, rather than solely recipients.
Another, at Thunder Bay’s Gathering Table parish, seeks to replace a former rectory with a nine-storey, 64-unit affordable housing complex. A third, at Sault Ste. Marie’s Holy Trinity parish, proposes another nine-storey, 108-unit building on the site of the parish’s church, which will include a new worship space.
These efforts show the willingness and ingenuity of faith communities to fight the rising crisis of affordability, Knighton says. But she acknowledges their combined 178 units are a small number compared to the AMO report’s projections for the next decade.
The social justice committee will continue to encourage Anglicans to pressure their elected officials with letter-writing campaigns, she says. And she adds that Anglican churches have many parcels of land they can find ways to use.
“Anywhere there are lands, projects can be done.”
