80 people have died in the last two years as a direct result of homelessness in Toronto. That’s one homeless person dying every 10 days. In 1985, people fighting homelessness started keeping track of these senseless, and entirely preventable deaths. Since that time, they’ve recorded over 800 deaths—lives sacrificed in service of a perverse economic logic that demands ever more cuts from the destitute and grants ever more comforts to the rich. Talk to anyone who has used the City’s emergency shelter system, or anyone who works with people using shelters, and a grim picture emerges of chronic overcrowding, bug infested dormitories, the recurrent spread of contagious diseases, and the perpetual lack of sufficient beds.
Category Archives: Shelter Crisis
Open Letter to Mayor John Tory
From the Members of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty: February 1, 2017
Mayor Tory:
We have learned that, in the lead up to the austerity Budget that you and your co-thinkers on the City Council are working on, you will be speaking at the pro-business C.D. Howe Institute on February 9. We intend to be there as well to deliver a clear message.
Toronto is a City of huge wealth. There are whole neighbourhoods of very rich people and banking and corporate interests are headquartered here. Yet, the revenue that could be obtained from the properties of such people is scandalously disregarded. Now, you embark on a course that will cut vital services across the board.
In the face of your impending attack, we demand:
- No cuts to Toronto Community Housing. No more homes can be boarded up when the waiting list for housing is so vast. Increase funding to the vital Housing Stabilization Fund (HSF) to prevent people losing their housing and enable them to obtain it.
- No cuts to the homeless shelter system and related supports. Expand life saving warming centre and drop in services.
- Enforce the 90% maximum occupancy shelter policy, stop closing facilities in the central area of the City and, as an immediate emergency measure to deal with the appalling crisis of overcrowding in the shelters, open the federal armouries to the homeless.
The unprecedented austerity measures you are imposing on communities in this City make a farce of your claim function in an ‘inclusive’ fashion. You are conducting a war on the poor that is harsh and brutal and we intend to give a lead on the 9th in terms of building resistance to your attacks.
The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP)
No Cuts to Shelters & Housing
Rally and Picket to Fight Tory’s Hypocrisy: Thursday, February 9 | 11am | 67 Yonge Street [Just south of King St] [Food Provided]
Facebook Event | Stop Tory’s Hypocrisy! | Download Poster | Download Flyer
Read our open letter to Mayor Tory | John Tory’s Lies Cost Lives
On February 9, John Tory will be speaking at the C.D Howe Institute, a right-wing think-tank dedicated to the needs of the rich. He will be assuring Toronto’s wealthy that the budget he has in store for 2017 will benefit them.
We don’t doubt it will be, and we know full well what it will do to the poor and working class people of this city. Built within his austerity budget is a devastating cut to the already failing Shelter, Support and Housing administration. This in a context where homeless shelters are bursting at the seams, rents are sky high, it takes more than 10 years to get public housing, and rooming houses are being sold off to greedy developers.
Tory won’t stop until we make him.
On February 9, join us to make sure Budget 2017 isn’t a death sentence for people on the streets, and a push onto the streets for the thousands of other desperately holding onto housing with their fingernails. #FightToWin
Rally & March for Homeless Shelters
Thursday, December 15 | 4:00pm | Toronto City Hall Square
[Meal Provided] [Queen & Bay, near Osgoode or Queen station]
Note: Please let us know if you need ASL translation by December 10 by emailing or calling us.
Toronto’s homeless shelter system is bursting at the seams. This is a city that drips with wealth yet abandons homeless people to die on the streets or face conditions of brutal overcrowding that denies them basic dignity and jeopardizes their health.
All summer long homeless shelters have been packed, and now as we head into winter, there is real risk that even survival spaces like the Warming Centres and Out of the Cold facilities won’t be able to handle the overflow.
The City must stop cutting shelter beds in the central core, and open new space now if are to avoid tragedies this winter.
Join us for a rally & march to make sure the City opens desperately needed shelter space now.
Bursting at the Seams: Released
The Gala Premiere Screening of our new short film outside Mayor John Tory’s luxury condominium last night was a success. See media coverage on CityNews, Toronto Sun, Now Magazine, and CP24. Also, some pictures from last night are available here and here.
The full video is also now online, please share it far and wide and join us in the streets to demand the City stop cutting shelter beds and open desperately needed new spaces.
Toronto’s Poor: A Rebellious History
Book Launch: Thursday, December 8 | 6:30 pm | St. Luke’s Church (353 Sherbourne)
Website | Facebook | Wheelchair accessible venue, Childcare available
Join us for the launch of long-time OCAP member, Gaetan Heroux, and labour historian Bryan Palmer’s new book, Toronto’s Poor: A Rebellious History, documenting more than 180 years of poor people’s resistance in this City.
The book reveals the long and too often forgotten history of poor people’s resistance. It details how the homeless, the unemployed, and the destitute have struggled to survive and secure food and shelter in the wake of the many panics, downturns, recessions, and depressions that punctuate the years from the 1830s to the present. It is about men, women, and children relegated to lives of desperation by an uncaring system, and how they have refused to be defeated. In that refusal, and in winning better conditions for themselves, Toronto’s poor create the possibility of a new kind of society, one ordered not by acquisition and individual advance, but by appreciations of collective rights and responsibilities.
Written by a historian of the working-class and an anti-poverty activist, this rebellious history links past and present in an almost two-hundred year story of struggle and resistance, inspiring a sense of what can be accomplished when poor people fight to win.
The Persistence of Poverty
Now Magazine featured an article today about OCAP’s work in resisting the agenda of Liberal austerity that has moved from a question of reduced entitlement to that of lethal abandonment.
Bursting at the Seams: Premiere
Everyone’s Invited to the Gala Screening & Premiere of our New Short Film
Thursday, November 10 | Mayor John Tory’s Condo | 6:30pm
[Bedford & Bloor, Outside St. George Subway Station]
Food will be served before the screening
In collaboration with a few key allies, OCAP has made a short film on conditions of brutal overcrowding within Toronto’s homeless shelter system. We are going to show it outside the building where Mayor John Tory lives in somewhat better circumstances.
Watch the Film Trailer:
As we move into winter, the homeless are being crammed into facilities where they face the most appalling conditions or are dumped onto the streets. The crisis is being compounded by a concerted drive by City Hall to move shelters out of the City core to make way for more upscale redevelopment.
Come out, see the film and support the fight for the right to shelter.
Note: One Bedford is just outside St. George subway station (accessible subway station).
Ontario Coalition Against Poverty 