The Fight Against Street Deaths in Toronto
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- Published on Thursday, 05 February 2015 21:22
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1077 .... February 6, 2015
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The Fight Against Street Deaths in Toronto
John Clarke
The twin agendas of urban redevelopment and austerity have increased the scale of the homeless crisis in Toronto. Over 4,000 people cram into the emergency shelters every night and many more try to survive out on the streets. This situation raises the question of what lengths the agenda of austerity can be taken to. If people are allowed to freeze to death for lack of basic shelter then we have moved beyond reduced entitlement and arrived at a situation of reckless and lethal social abandonment.
As the New Year got underway, four homeless men perished in Toronto within a less than two week period. Two froze to death, one burned lighting a fire to try... and stay warm and a fourth man came in from the cold, under the City's ‘respite program’ and died inside the Peter Street referral centre. All of these deaths took place against a backdrop of worsening conditions and acute overcrowding within the City's homeless shelter system.
The problem of crowded shelters goes back a long way. When the Mike Harris Tories came to power in Ontario, in 1995 and massively cut social assistance rates, the demand for shelters in Toronto exploded. A series of appalling street deaths forced the City to open more space and adopt a policy of keeping shelter occupancy levels at 90 per cent. Over the years that followed, however, the City Administration simply disregarded that policy and allowed the overcrowding problem to get worse. By 2012, street deaths were again spiking and the conditions in the shelters becoming intolerable. The Mayor at this time was Rob Ford and he publicly took the position that occupancy levels of 96 per cent were perfectly acceptable.