CANDIDATE STATEMENT
Victoria Stewart
Ward 5 council candidate
Stewart outlines a Ward 5 response on homelessness, housing exits, emergency capacity, costs and public reporting for the first year of a new council term.
Common question
What first-year municipal action would you support to improve Chatham-Kent’s homelessness response, and how would it balance stable housing, access to treatment and support, lawful enforcement, and neighbourhood and public-space safety?
The question was sent on September 8, 2026 to every certified mayoral and council candidate after a voluntary CK Signals poll reached 40 responses. The poll was non-scientific and self-selected; it did not measure public opinion, voter intention, candidate support or the likely election result.
CANDIDATE STATEMENT
The text is attributed to the candidate. It is neither a CK Signals conclusion nor a verified fact merely because it was submitted.
From management to measurable reduction
Stewart says Chatham-Kent should move from managing homelessness and encampments to reducing homelessness and outdoor living. She cites figures from local materials on homelessness, chronic homelessness, acuity and income-support use as the baseline context for her response.
She says the first six months should produce costed implementation options, identify municipal, provincial, federal and partner contributions, and specify responsibilities. The cited baseline figures, costs, authority, funding and partner commitments have not been independently verified here.
Emergency capacity and coordinated support
Stewart argues that emergency shelter capacity needs to be restored following recent local closures and points to temporary and transitional shelter models. She says treatment and recovery supports should be coordinated with housing and public-safety responses.
She cites local capacity and occupancy figures in support of that argument. Those figures, the condition of facilities, the availability of programs and the feasibility of a coordinated response remain attributed candidate statements unless confirmed in public records.
Permanent exits and prevention
Stewart proposes expanding rent-geared-to-income, deeply affordable, rent-supplement and supportive housing, and using municipal land and senior-government funds where available. She connects this to the gap she describes between local rents and income-support amounts.
She does not identify a costed program, confirmed municipal land, senior-government funding commitment, approval path, delivery lead, number of homes or timeline for housing exits and prevention.
Costs, public safety and first-year accountability
Stewart calls for comparable before-and-after public-safety and neighbourhood data, referring to a local address as an example of how she would test whether intervention changes conditions. She says enforcement should be paired with housing, health, treatment and recovery supports.
She proposes quarterly reporting on homelessness, housing exits, shelter use, treatment access, repeat emergency-service contacts and neighbourhood conditions, and says policy should change if results are not working. The data authority, privacy rules, costs, targets, accountable owner and review process are not yet specified.
Verification boundary
Stewart expressly authorized public attribution of this response in a direct September 17 email from the campaign address listed in the candidate directory. The public links in the source register were supplied by the candidate; their inclusion does not independently verify every statistic, characterization, forecast or proposed action in her response. Those statements remain attributed candidate material. Costs, funding commitments, municipal authority, delivery partners, data access, privacy safeguards, targets and timelines require separate evidence before being presented as facts.
Read the methodology