Staff and parishioners at St. Mary’s Parish in Barrie, Ont., have penned close to 1,800 letters pleading with politicians to address a growing crisis of housing affordability plaguing the city.

The parish-wide push on the weekend of April 4-5, organized by its Social Justice and Advocacy Committee, offered a platform to tell various elected leaders, including Ontario Premier Doug Ford, Deputy Premier Sylvia Jones, Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing Rob Flack and local MPPs Andrea Khanjin and Doug Downey, of their concerns around this growing problem.

Each letter is pressing for steps toward tackling the affordable housing shortage and bolstering social support for those who need it.

Catherine Ecker, St. Mary’s parish catechist and coordinator of ministry with maturing adults, said the seismic response from the community over just one weekend left her overwhelmed, yet hopeful.

“It was quite amazing to see the number of people who came in, willingly stood in line, picked up their letters and sat down to fill them out,” she said. “There is a real desire in our community to see change in how housing is built and funded so that everyone can access safe and affordable homes.”

St. Mary’s is no stranger to backing the Barrie community through support rooted in faith, having assisted in the local Out of the Cold programs and other social causes providing food and shelter to the homeless.

May 2023 saw the parish launch its advocacy committee, a concrete way to ensure a Church-based “two-footed” approach to address issues like affordable housing and a homeless rate that has seen a 25-per-cent increase from 2022 to 2024 in Ontario.

“ The Church's teaching on social justice is a unique, joint approach. It deals with both the immediate need, such as acts of charity through outreach programs that are so vital, but the other is advocacy and working to change the structures,” she said. “Unless we change the structures, we are not going to move forward effectively.”

Fr. Larry Leger approves of his congregation's methods and motive. Through different symposiums with organizations such as  the Barrie Homelessness and Housing Justice Network, staff and parishioners began to learn how, through education, they could  bring about social change.

Barrie and the surrounding Simcoe County have not been exempt from the issues brought on by the lack of affordable housing. While the county is building rent-geared-to-income units, the supply of affordable housing lags far behind the number of people requiring a home.

“It has certainly gotten more and more difficult to find affordable housing in the area,” Ecker said. “High rents, limited amount of spaces, and while  there is building that's happening, it doesn't mean it will be affordable. Like Waterloo and Peterborough, Barrie certainly has a number of encampments, and worst of all, waiting lists for rent-geared-to-income homes are still between eight to 10 years, to my knowledge.”

In Barrie, misconceptions about homelessness have added a great deal of urgency to this work, with St. Mary’s catechist sharing how an all-too-common mistake of assuming the unhoused automatically suffer from addiction or mental illness, which are often caused by housing and food insecurity first, creates further problems.

“ If you can begin to understand what it feels like not to know where your next meal is coming from, you can begin to understand why addiction becomes part of the problem. The more we can educate people about how widespread the challenge is and what the real difficulties are, the less likely we as a community are to run into obstacles when affordable units get put up in our neighbourhoods,” she said.

Looking ahead, the advocacy committee awaits responses from Ford, Flack and others, hoping to secure meetings with officials who have the capacity to drive change in more ways than one.

For Ecker, the campaign embodies Catholic social teaching’s heartbeat of compassion paired with justice.

“This has been about raising awareness through education,” she said. “When people understand how real these issues are and the number of people remaining unhoused, we have a chance of enacting action as our next approach.”