A sign advocating for the rights of the unhoused.
A sign advocating for the rights of the unhoused. Credit: Cathy Crowe Credit: Cathy Crowe

Tensions abound in a homeless tent encampment in a city park, a used syringe is found by a seven-year-old, neighbours are up in arms and protest the encampment, a tent in the encampment is set on fire, a homeless man is stabbed in a swarming and teen girls are suspected.

Meanwhile, a cooling centre with tables and chairs provides temporary shelter, an outreach worker delivers donated food to an encampment and finds a shelter bed for a young woman. Supportive neighbours post pro-encampment signs on their front porch.

Description of the new norm in a Canadian city?

Yes and no.

Spoiler alert.

These are scenes in White Squirrel City an episode in ….. dun dun  … Law and Order Toronto: Criminal Intent,

Law and Order is a 35-year-old detective and legal drama franchise. The Toronto version caused a stir when it premiered in 2024 especially with the episode about politicians and crack pipes. The show has become known, not only for its dramatized storytelling of local events but also for its iconic Toronto scenes: Toronto’s futuristic City Hall and council chambers, the Union Station bridge to the Rogers Centre, the Toronto sign at Nathan Phillips Square, the CN Tower and the local neighbourhood scenes like Koreatown.

The encampment in the White Squirrel City episode is a thinly disguised Trinity Bellwoods Park in downtown Toronto (a known habitat for white squirrels) and it is the setting for a murder. The murder victim, the ‘mayor’ of the encampment, is maybe an homage to the Mayor of Toronto’s first Tent City that existed 23 years ago or possibly a more recent figure at an encampment.

In a CBC column about the making of Law and Order Toronto, Chris Dart interviews Tassie Cameron, a producer and writer for the show.

Cameron says working on Law & Order is like “trying to construct a Swiss watch while having a stroke. You’re just like, OK, I have 400 little moving springs and coils and pieces of plots and clues and alibis and photographs and you’re trying to put them all together into a thing that is elegant and that ticks along and moves and keeps time, but you get sort of boggled by the amount of detail that you’re trying to incorporate into the story sometimes. And that’s the stroke part, right?”

I get the 400 little moving springs metaphor.

There is a lot packed into this episode, albeit superficially. While watching the episode I began scribbling notes to myself to keep track of the references to homelessness. Who does that when they’re watching a cop show?

I was prepared to dislike the show. I’m not a fan of police dramas and I don’t often see either homeless people or the issues they face portrayed fairly in movies or televised dramas. But after more than three decades working in what I call a man-made disaster I’ve learned that it takes an all-hands-on deck approach to engage the general population to push the political apparatus to action. It’s why, over the years, I’ve participated in various art forms such as In the Air Tonight and the Tent City projection on a waterfront silo by Dave Colangelo and Patricio Davila and Housepaint at the Royal Ontario Museum curated by Devon Ostrom.

While White Squirrel City covered the obvious and visible aspects of homelessness such as tent encampments and risk of violence, it also inserted themes of loss, grief, domestic abuse, youth alienation and violence, the power of social media on young people, addiction and discrimination.

There is even the correction by the female police detective to a uniformed officer who uses the word homeless admonishing him that the proper way to refer to homeless people is to call them unhoused “that’s the word we’re using these days”, a nod to a current semantic debate. In another scene a sympathetic coroner admits her brother is homeless, living under the Gardiner Expressway, a reminder anyone can be affected.

Stereotypes are on display to be challenged. The tattooed encampment resident is not the murderer. The murdered ‘mayor of White Squirrel Park’ was drinking iced tea from a flask, not alcohol, nor was he a child abuser.

The fact that a law-and-order drama attempted to address complex issues related to homelessness is a credit to the show’s writers, but it also reflects the pervasive nature of homelessness in Canadian cities and towns.

I don’t expect a 45-minute television drama, especially a policing drama, to cover the systemic causes of homelessness. Yet, it is regrettable that this drama in this location ignored the real-life police harassment and ticketing of people in encampments, military style evictions as well as destruction of property by city workers. It happened in full view of TV cameras and was sharply criticized by the Toronto Ombudsman in an investigation’s report.

If anything, Law and Order Toronto: Criminal Intent, both what’s in the show and missing, point to what is now a decades long humanitarian disaster that governments continue to allow to worsen. Their intentional neglect to obvious solutions causes ill health, permanent psychological damage and early death. On International Women’s Day it’s important to note that the median age of death for unhoused women is 36.

Meanwhile, all levels of government pursue the criminalization and displacement of homeless people. If you haven’t read it yet, I refer you to Displacement City an anthology, written by people most impacted, that elaborates on these issues.

To this day, Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow’s government persists in encampment evictions while still not providing adequate shelter spaces or housing. Last week the city closed its warming centres but sent out a notice saying city workers would continue to offer support and hand out blankets, sleeping bags and warm clothing. Why would that be needed? Because there is a massive shortfall in shelter that only worsens with seasonal closing of sites.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford, re-elected with a majority government, is expected to reintroduce legislation that will make being homeless in public criminal.

Federal funding for housing is not exactly happening at warp speed.

Political inertia only fuels NIMBY neighbours who continue to protest encampments but also the building of new shelters and housing in their community. Change.org, a petition site, is even allowing petitions to protest shelters, as if you can legislate what type of people can live in a residential area. (Note: I will not insert that link here)

This is all to say that the concept of social murder, initially coined by Friedrich Engels to describe public policies that lead to early mortality among the working class, and most recently championed and researched by Professor Dennis Raphael and colleagues in articles such as 1845 or 2023? Friedrich Engels’s insights into the health effects of Victorian-era and contemporary Canadian capitalism is alive and well in Canada.

Inaction is criminal intent.

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...