A bed of cardboard boxes inside of a bus shelter.
Signs that someone experiencing homelessness was using this bus stop for shelter. Credit: Cathy Crowe Credit: Cathy Crowe

This article was written prior to Toronto’s mayor John Tory’s resignation

Last week Toronto City Council and its new superpowered Mayor John Tory voted against providing the most basic of human rights – shelter, that could protect homeless people for the remaining winter.

City Council rejected its own Board of Health motion to:

“declare (homelessness) a public health crisis in the City of Toronto based on systemic failure of all three levels of government to provide adequate 24-hour, drop-in and respite indoor spaces, and call for the immediate provision of safe, accessible 24-hour respite spaces that are accessible through walk-in access.”

In addition, Council rejected the part of the motion that called for these respite sites, essentially warming centres, to stay open until April 15, despite the temperature.

Toronto is not alone in facing a massive increase in homelessness, worsened by the pandemic. Cities across the country often take the lead from Toronto and I’m hoping their civic leaders will not be so cruel.

The Board of Health motion was a response to statistics, science and an outpouring of citizen, medical and frontline workers’ advocacy, concern, and grief.

Consider this:

  • The city’s own statistics demonstrate the shelter system is widely running at 99.5 per cent – 100 per cent capacity in its 9,000 shelter beds.
  • The city’s Central Intake documents zero shelter availability for anywhere from 108-186 people per day.
  • Hundreds of unhoused people are sheltering on buses, subways, and streetcars or in libraries and coffee shops.
  • Emergency room doctors from across Toronto gave testimony in person to city hall committees and wrote a letter documenting the fact that unhoused people were coming to their ERs simply for warmth.
  • Physicians reiterated to the city that the Extreme Cold Alert protocol, which only triggers warming centre openings at -15 C or -20 C with windchill, does not prevent people from cold injury. People can suffer frostbite, the loss of digits or limb amputations at temperatures higher than -15C. A freezing death was reported as recently as Christmas Day.
  • Encampments continue to grow and it’s impossible to find a major street in the city without unhoused people trying to survive in empty doorways or bus shelters. Gru, a prominent homeless advocate, reports at least three encampment evictions took place at different locations on the day of the city council meeting.
  • Toronto, the largest city in Canada, with over 18,000 homeless people over the course of a year, began the winter with only three warming centres. A fourth was added a week ago. When open, they are always full.
  • Toronto’s unhoused death rate is like a slaughter and should be cause for a coroner’s investigation. For the second year in a row the City reported over 100 deaths in shelters. It is extremely likely the number of homeless deaths is double that if one counts deaths outdoors.

Torontonians have expressed their concern in the thousands. Outrage at the political negligence is stronger than I have ever witnessed in my 35 years of working in what advocates and experts declared a man-made disaster in 1998. That campaign made the point that Canada’s unhoused were internally displaced refugees.

Stone Soup, a faith-based group initiated a letter writing campaign to the councillors and mayor that garnered close to 2,000 signatures. The faith leaders led by Reverend Alexa Gilmour delivered a request to meet with Mayor Tory on January 5. They’ve had no reply.

Similarly, the groups Shelter and Housing Justice Network and Health Providers Against Poverty issued a joint open letter petition with specific policy demands.

Hundreds of concerned citizens at budget and committee meetings called for an emergency response to protect unhoused people.

However, a bizarre revisionist set of facts began to be spewed out over the course of the two-day city council meeting. A group of councillors made speeches to eliminate use of the word ‘crisis’ in the motion and challenged both the need for shelter in the form of 24/7 warming/respite centres and that the city should pay for them.

Councillor Michael Thompson, a Board of Health member, pretty much sabotaged his own Board’s motion, leading the charge against declaring homelessness a crisis. He made the illogical argument that you shouldn’t call something a crisis if you have no means to solve it.

Other councillors suggested the pandemic was over and therefore it was acceptable to move more people into existing shelters, disregarding COVID precautions for physical distancing and indoor masking. Easy to say for councillors with a key to their own home and safe space.

Some suggested that the increase in Toronto’s homelessness numbers might be the result of other municipalities who are putting people on buses and shipping them to Toronto. One councillor, relying on hearsay, suggested that New York City is bussing people to the Canadian border. There is no evidence to this theory.

In another shift of responsibility, some councillors argued in favour of a restart of the Out of the Cold program which quite rightly shut down in the pandemic. This volunteer-based program provided overnight shelter for over 30 years and saved the city millions of dollars by allowing them to ignore the provision of real shelter. While volunteers did their best to provide care and good food, the program endangered people with its crowding and inadequate facilities (basements/gym sleeping spaces, no cots or showers, poor airflow). The most serious flaw in the program was its basic structure, each site was only open one night per week, which resulted in hundreds of people moving nightly from church to synagogue to church. Overall, the Out of the Cold program was a recipe for poor sleep, mental and physical distress, and disease transmission.

This group of councillors, most of whom are ‘the old guard’, willingly fell hook, line, and sinker for the city shelter manager’s insistence that there were too many overwhelming challenges to find the staffing or money to operate warming centres. This was perhaps the most ridiculous argument, given many sites are operated by community agencies that could, if funded, put together 24/7 warming/respite sites. In addition, critics are quick to point out that Mayor Tory with his new superpowers found millions of dollars, outside of the budget process, for 80 overtime police officers to patrol transit.

There was huge backlash to the council’s negative decision. The city’s spin doctors at work didn’t waste time. Within hours of the council vote, they issued a media release with this hopeful title: ‘Toronto City Council votes to examine expanding Warming Centre network.’

But they didn’t. Sure, there will be a review of the cold weather temperature criteria, consultations and a roundtable discussion leading to a report to come after winter. In the short term, councillors are invited to suggest locations for warming centres in their ward (I can’t wait to see that list) while there is no staffing or budget to operationalize them – or so we’re told.

The not-so-subtle undertone to city council’s debate, led by the Mayor’s supporters, was xenophobic, full of obfuscation of the real conditions for unsheltered people and paternalistic to the newly elected slate of councillors who had the temerity to stand up and speak out.

Officially, there are no party politics at Toronto’s City Hall, but the lines are drawn and over the years many councillors have confided in me that the mayor’s ‘wishes’ on an item are transmitted to them through what we know as ‘whipping’ the vote at other levels of government. That seems to have increased drastically with super-powered Mayor Tory.

But why? It can’t leave the mayor with a great legacy. I like Edward Keenan’s analogy of the council and mayor’s decision to hockey. ‘He’s just gotta make a save there.’  Keenan is of course referring to a basically competent goalie who has to stop the puck. If you ask me, same for a basically competent mayor. Make the save.

The sports metaphor is relevant. Mayor Tory (former chair and commissioner of the Canadian Football League) spent more time at the same council meeting fawning over the Grey Cup and its winning team members, who were present for a special presentation, than he did on the homeless crisis. In fact, Mayor Tory did not utter one word in that council debate. The superpower mayor did not make the save.

Health care workers are reeling with this decision.

“These policy decisions are diametrically opposed to health and well-being. A gut punch right now.”  Dr. Andrew Boozary, social medicine lead at University Health Network.

“The impact will be devastating. People who experience homelessness will have to deal with hypothermia, cold related injuries, frostbite, swelling, infection and the worsening of pre-existing illness such as mental illness and substance use. I’m left wondering how it is possible that something so simple as shelter and warmth to prevent hypothermia and death could be so controversial in one of the wealthiest cities in the world. Today’s vote was heartbreaking and devastating.” Dr. Naheed Dosani, a palliative care physician and health justice activist.

For myself, I describe the precursor to today’s tragic city response in my memoir A Knapsack Full of Dreams in a chapter inspired by the movie ‘The Road’ – ‘The Fourth Horseman: The Fallout of a Man-made Disaster.

It’s a furthering of policies of social murder.

Cathy Crowe

Cathy Crowe

Cathy Crowe is a street nurse (non-practising), author and filmmaker who works nationally and locally on health and social justice issues. Her work has included taking the pulse of health issues affecting...