Last month I wrote about the dangers and jargon in our language on homelessness.
I have a new take.
October 8 marks 26 years since advocates declared homelessness a national disaster.
The rest is history. A bad history. The bad players are the three levels of government that have allowed homelessness to drastically worsen over 26 years. A humanitarian disaster is the outcome, but it is intentional neglect that has caused severe illness, injury and thousands of early deaths. The name for that is social murder.
The latest example of government intentional neglect is playing out in Canada’s largest and richest city.
Can you believe that Toronto can’t find a way to shelter unhoused people without using Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) buses? I don’t. City politicians could open a real shelter, but they won’t. Why not? My theory is that Mayor Olivia Chow is holding out for provincial money.
Toronto has now set the lowest standard for emergency shelter delivery in the country, and while I am not a lawyer I believe the decisions of the senior bureaucrats and more significantly the mayor and city council should be considered as crimes against humanity due to acts of omission to protect health and life.
There is nothing about Toronto’s homeless shelter buses that even comes close to the United Nations Standards for providing shelter. Nowhere in the world would transit shelter buses be considered an acceptable form of shelter.
Real shelter means a bed or at minimum a cot, provision of meals including at least one hot meal per day, washrooms, showers, qualified staff and certainly not the action of displacing people at 5 a.m. (and one could ask, to go where?). Presumably to prevent dangerous shelter conditions we developed Shelter Standards, the essence of which is to ensure respect and dignity while providing protection and care.
A transit bus provides none of the above for the most vulnerable people in our city.
Warming buses, as Toronto calls them, are now in our lexicon of not only language but solutions for homelessness and that is a dangerous problem.
Despite decades of evidence that city shelters are chronically at capacity, city bureaucrats proposed the use of transit buses to remove homeless people from mostly subways to transport them to shelter space. If, and bureaucrats suggested that was a big ‘if’, those sites were full, unhoused people would be allowed to stay on the buses overnight. The program was first billed as a ‘Transit Bus Initiative.’
To give the TTC and the city credit, mental health multi-disciplinary outreach supports were enhanced to respond to broader community safety issues on the transit system. These range from wellness checks to nursing support to enhancing de-escalation training for transit staff. There’s even an app for transit users to report safety concerns.
After an entire fall-winter-spring 2023-24 season of city reliance on warming buses for shelter, most advocates, the public and media were left in the dark on the program’s outcome or the city’s plans to shelter people in the future.
At the July TTC board meeting there was disjointed discourse on the TTC’s Partnership Approach to Community Safety, Security and Well-being on Public Transit that touched on police response times, the system’s antiquated PA system, costs of the transit/warming bus (terms used interchangeably) program and how to minimize the city’s reliance on transit for shelter for the coming cold weather season.
TTC staff reported that the transport bus program cost $1.2 million for among other things bus modifications, security contracts, portable toilets and heaters. In 5,900 service encounters (not individual people) help was offered however only 296 people were successfully transported to a shelter or warming centre because there was rarely capacity. The initial proposal to use two buses grew to six or eight buses with a peak usage of 62 clients staying on the buses. As City councillor and TTC board member Dianne Saxe noted it was surely “very poor-quality shelter.”
Of great concern is that we learned zero about the human impact, gender, age, race, accessibility or health needs, or where people were referred to at 5 a.m. because the data was not tracked. More concerning is the silence of partner agencies who provide services to the warming shelter bus program. To my knowledge none expressed concerns about the inadequacies of the program and the need for humane shelter and none submitted a deputation to the TTC July meeting.
Councillor Paul Ainslie, who sits on the TTC board and who has a successful track record of holding the city accountable through data (he is responsible for Toronto’s official tracking of homeless deaths), expressed frustration that despite his city council motion six months earlier that requested bus usage data be incorporated into city’s shelter data, nothing had happened.
As are often the case, decisions at civic bodies are muted or deferred. In this case the decision was to ask staff to report back in October on “options to reduce dependence on the TTC transit network for shelter during the 2024/2025 winter season.” I would have preferred a motion that read: “Communicate to Toronto Shelter and Support Services that the TTC is not a suitable provider of shelter on buses and is unable to provide this service in the future.”
Of note, in September I received the Transit Bus Initiative Usage report, and it shows that an entire 100 bed shelter could be filled immediately. But we knew that.
While the buses had people on them every night I picked a few dates to illustrate the need:
December 25: 14 people stayed on buses. I wonder, did they have a turkey dinner?
February 14: 64 people stayed on buses.
February 18: 90 people stayed on buses.
March 21: 82 people stayed on buses.
You get the idea.
Obviously housing is the long-term solution, but real shelter in the short-term is doable, and Toronto should be leading on the human right to shelter.
For Mayor Olivia Chow and her team, the shelter options are endless: use city assets such as community centres or empty schools, expropriate properties to develop into shelter, utilize a fourth Sprung dome (already used for years in the city for respite sites), allocate an empty Housing Now site for a pilot Two-Step Homes cabin community, ask the federal government for the use of a federal site, shift city staff from municipal buildings to convert meeting rooms to shelter, rent or expropriate empty condominium floors to operate as a shelter or a legion hall or a building at the Canadian National Exhibition.
End the plans to only deal with shelter need in the winter.
Break new ground and declare shelter as a human right.
Support rabble today!
We’re so glad you stopped by! Thanks for consuming rabble content this year.
rabble.ca is 100% reader and donor funded, so as an avid reader of our content, we hope you will consider gifting rabble with a donation during our summer fundraiser today.
Whether it be a one-time donation or a small monthly contribution, your support is critical to keep rabble writers producing the work you’ve come to rely on as a part of a healthy media diet.
Become a rabble rouser — donate to rabble.ca today.
Nick Seebruch, editor
