After dinner in the basement hall of St. Patrick’s Church in central Toronto, volunteers with Out of the Cold begin clearing the concrete floor so sleeping mats can be laid out. Some 80 or so homeless people will be staying overnight.

One of them is 54-year-old Angela, who lost her home six years ago during a period of severe mental instability. She pushes back her dinner plate wearily and reaches for her cane. It’s been snowing heavily all day and she was out in the storm until the shelter opened at 4 pm. “Even though I suffer from diabetes, epilepsy, schizophrenia and depression,” she says, “I’ve been on the city’s housing wait list for three years now.”

With 176 000 others also on that list, Angela says she expects to be homeless for a long time to come. And that means her chances of living out her natural life-span could be reduced by as much as 40%, according to a study by Dr. Stephen Hwang, director of the Centre for Urban Health Solutions at Toronto’s St. Michael’s Hospital.

But as revealing as this figure is, says Hwang, “far too little is known about the true extent and causes of mortality among the homeless in Canada.”

On any given night, 35 000 Canadians are homeless, including some 5000 in Toronto.