Beyond 18: Quebec Must Guarantee Housing for Youth Aging Out of Care

A HAY Center Policy Perspective

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Imagine turning 18 and being told that the roof over your head expires that night.

Not that your childhood ends. Not that school is over. Not that you’ve figured out who you are, how to cook a week of meals on a thin budget, how to negotiate a lease, how to hold down a job while healing from trauma you didn’t ask for. Just that the roof expires. You have a garbage bag of belongings and a birthday no one is celebrating.

For too many young people in Quebec who grew up in state care, this is not a thought experiment. It is the plan.

And the plan is quietly producing a homelessness crisis our province already knows how to see.

The day the support stops

Adulthood is not a switch that flips on a birthday. Developmental researchers describe a stage called Emerging adulthood, roughly ages 19 to 29, when young people are still forming their identities, problem-solving skills, and sense of belonging. Most young people get to move through that decade with a family behind them — a couch to crash on after a breakup, a parent who co-signs a lease, a cousin who knows someone hiring, a holiday dinner to come home to.

Youth aging out of care often get none of that.

The Senate of Canada’s 2024 report Nothing to Celebrate: The Crisis of Youth Aging Out of Care put it plainly: governments take on the role of parent for children in care, but unlike a loving parent, that role is cut off abruptly on an arbitrary birthday. The committee heard story after story of young people discharged into poverty, housing instability, and compounding mental health challenges — with no national legislation or standards to guide the transition.

One young woman told the Senate she had been legally blind, homeless several times, denied services, spat at in public, threatened, and assaulted. She had aged out of care and, like so many others, “felt alone.”

That is not a failure of personal resilience. That is a failure of policy.

The path from care to homelessness is predictable

We don’t need to guess what happens next. The data is already in.

The federal Everyone Counts Point-in-Time Counts conducted across 87 Canadian communities between 2020 and 2022 found that 44% of people experiencing homelessness first lost their housing before the age of 25. Nearly one in three — 31% — had spent time in foster care, a group home, or another child welfare program. Among youth respondents specifically, 45% had experience in government care.

People with care experience were three times as likely to first experience homelessness as children and twice as likely to first experience it as teens compared to those without that history.

And internationally, studies of youth aging out of foster care have found that between 31% and 46% become homeless by age 26.

Read those numbers again. They are not a warning about what could happen. They are a description of what already is.

A young person leaves care. They try. They couch-surf. They accept unsafe housing because it beats the street. They fall behind in school. They lose the job they were holding together. Survival takes the place of planning. And when it all breaks, we call it a personal crisis — when it is a structural one we built in advance.

Quebec already knows. That’s what makes this urgent.

Quebec’s *Programme qualification des jeunes (PQJ) is a real acknowledgment that 18 is not a magic number. The program serves youth from 16 to 25 and is designed to mobilize community resources around the transition to adulthood.

But Quebec’s own framing gives the game away: the BRIDGE stream for ages 18 to 25 is described as “short-term support based on needs.” Short-term. Needs-based. Conditional. A bridge you have to qualify to stand on, that may give out beneath you when you most need it to hold.

Meanwhile, Quebec’s own consultation materials on homelessness report that the province’s 2022 count estimated 10,000 people in visible homelessness, including 1,335 in unsheltered locations — a 44% increase over 2018. The province itself says responding to this crisis requires intersectoral collaboration and the mobilization of every actor involved in rebuilding stability.

So we know homelessness is deepening. We know youth from care are disproportionately funneled into it. We know that the transition out of care is exactly where prevention should be strongest. And yet, in 2026, we are still leaning on short-term bridges.

This is not an unknown problem. This is a known problem we are still underfunding.

Other provinces have moved. Quebec can too.

British Columbia has already legislated a longer runway. Its *Strengthening Abilities and Journeys of Empowerment (SAJE) program provides supports and services to youth from care up to age 27, including pre-19 planning, housing-related rental supplements, and income support designed specifically to prevent homelessness.

Nova Scotia is now debating Bill 201, which would extend support for youth aging out of care up to age 26 — a direct response to the Senate’s national call for a paradigm shift toward readiness-based, not age-based, transitions.

Quebec is not facing an unanswerable policy question. It is facing a political choice. And right now, our province is choosing to stay behind — while young people absorb the cost in their bodies, their education, their mental health, and their futures.

We should not be comfortable with that.

What Quebec should do

The HAY Center is calling for three things. None of them are radical. All of them are overdue.

1. Legislate a guaranteed right to housing and wraparound support until at least age 25 for every young person leaving Quebec’s care system. Not a pilot. Not a discretionary program. A legislated floor.

2. Build that guarantee through a formal partnership between government, public institutions, and community organizations. Community groups — especially youth-led, culturally rooted, and frontline organizations — hold trust, continuity, and lived understanding that ministries cannot replicate. PQJ already names community collaboration as essential. Legislation should make that collaboration binding, funded, and sustained.

3. Anchor the model in readiness, not age. The Senate report is clear that arbitrary age cutoffs harm young people. Supports should include housing, mental health care, life skills, education access, and identity and cultural connection — and should flex to where a young person actually is in their journey, not where a calendar says they should be.

Community capacity should not be an excuse for the state to step back. It should be how public responsibility is honoured.

Housing is the floor, not the finish line

Housing is not a reward for young people who have their life together. It is what makes having your life together possible.

Housing is what lets you sleep long enough to think clearly. To go back to school. To keep a job. To show up to a therapy appointment. To cook a meal. To regulate your nervous system. To imagine a future beyond the next month.

Without housing, everything becomes crisis management. With it, emerging adulthood becomes possible.

This is not only the economically responsible response to youth homelessness — it is the developmental, ethical, and human one. A society is measured by how it treats the young people it has already claimed responsibility for.

A call to everyone reading this

To the National Assembly: Draft and pass legislation that guarantees housing and wraparound support to age 25 for youth leaving care. Quebec should not be a laggard in a national conversation we helped start.

To ministries and public institutions: Stop framing support as short-term and needs-based. Build coordinated, stable, readiness-based transitions — and fund the community partners who make them work.

To funders and philanthropy: Invest in community organizations — especially those led by and for racialized, Indigenous, and historically underserved youth — that are already doing this work on shoestring budgets. Multi-year, unrestricted funding saves lives.

To the community: Mentor a young person. Hire one. Rent to one. Show up to consultations. Write to your MNA. Share this piece. Refuse the polite silence that lets “aging out” keep meaning “falling through.”

To every young person who has aged out, is aging out, or is afraid of what 18 will mean: You are not the failure here. The system is. You deserve a home — not a bridge, not a pilot, not a program with an expiry date. A home. And we will not stop saying so until Quebec agrees.

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At the HAY Center, we believe Quebec has an opportunity to do more than manage the fallout of a broken transition. We have an opportunity to prevent it. When care ends, responsibility does not. No young person raised by the state should enter adulthood through the doorway of homelessness.

— Elijah Olise, Founding CEO, Holistic Afro Youth Center / Centre Holistique Afro Jeunesse