OP-ED: Toronto’s shelter plan out of control, costs pegged at $675 million

Sue-Ann Levy writes, "In a mere two years, there has been a 41 per cent increase in staff ministering to the homeless and a 27 per cent increase in the Shelter and Support Services budget."

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Author: Sue-Ann Levy

Just like south of the border, being a sanctuary city has taken its toll on Toronto.

In a mere two years, there has been a 41 per cent increase in staff ministering to the needs of the homeless and a 27 per cent increase in the Toronto Shelter and Support Services budget.

It is now at $898 million with seemingly no accountability whatsoever for what is spent. It won’t be long before that hits $1 billion.

Depending on who one speaks to—whether spokesmen for the city or those with a watchdog group called Integrity TO—somewhere between 40 and 45 per cent of the city’s shelter beds are occupied by refugees.

It has been as high as 50 per cent.

As I’ve written many times, homelessness has been an industry at City Hall from the time the city was amalgamated in 1998.

But under the mayoralty of Olivia Chow, the city’s shelter and support department has become an obscenely bloated mess of people leading strategies that make absolutely no sense.

Although the city’s shelter staff will claim the demand for beds is particularly acute in Toronto because of the “humanitarian crisis” of refugee claimants requiring shelter, it is more a case of, “If we build it, they will come.”

For one thing, Chow and her socialist councillors don’t need to accept any more refugees and shouldn’t because other services are being abandoned (like maintaining the city as a municipal government should) to prop up the homeless industry.

When the city’s management tried to scale back on housing refugees in the shelter system, the diversity and oppression-focused Ombudsman Kwame Addo got into the act.

His 2024 report, not surprisingly, said the city’s decision to not allow refugees into the shelter system “resulted in systemic discrimination on the basis of race and citizenship.”

That’s all Chow and her big-spending cabal needed to hear.

The shelter bureaucrats came up with a whacky plan to close the hotel shelters (that is, to stop leasing hotels), convincing themselves that 20 new shelters would not be as temporary as hotels.

”They would be purpose-built, permanent and long-term use shelter sites,” a report to council says.

And they would be “significantly more cost-effective” than leasing temporary hotels.

The plan was passed at council on Thursday.

It figures. Only in the mad world of socialists would building new emergency shelters be considered more cost-effective!

In fact, it would seem the clock has turned back to that time in 1999 when Chow’s late husband, Jack Layton, and the activists guilted the city council into declaring homelessness a crisis and creating all kinds of emergency shelters.

They were supposed to be a stopgap measure, but have grown like the weeds we see in Toronto this summer.

Because fans of big government love to create bricks and mortar, Chow and Co say their new 20-shelter scheme will produce 1,600 beds for $675 million.

That’s $421,875 per bed for what members of the New Toronto Initiative say are the merely partitioned sleeping spaces, not full apartments or private rooms.

Sounds very cost-effective.

The New Toronto Initiative is a grassroots group fighting an absurd plan to site one of these shelters in a Green P parking lot on Third Street in Etobicoke.

As members of that group have told me, the proposed shelter doesn’t even meet the city’s own shelter standards. The imprint is 5,754 square feet too small and there is no room for on-site green space or pet areas.

Considering that it will also host 24-hour access to harm reduction supplies, the neighbourhood expects that the residents will use or loiter on the street, in alleyways behind the shelter and in school yards.

David Margolies, speaking at a press conference at City Hall on July 15, said if city officials and councillors think they can shame people into silence who don’t want crack pipes and used needles in their neighbourhood, they’d better think again.

“This type of gaslighting does not work on us,” he said. “We’re here to fight for a return to common decency in our neighbourhood… we will not be cowed by childish and absurd name-calling from our councillors and some media.”

At that same press conference, Diane Chester, who lives in a quiet neighbourhood near a 50-bed respite site at 629 Adelaide St. W., called out the shelter siting process “secretive and undemocratic.”

They have not been able to get answers about the 24-hour harm reduction shelter that just opened, except to know that St. Felix Centre – which has a track record of being a terrible neighbour – will be operating it.

“Mayor Chow is only bringing social chaos into Toronto neighbourhoods,” she said to applause.

Indeed, she is.

The shelter plan is broken, and the sites have been picked with no thought or consultation whatsoever except for efforts at guilting and intimidating the surrounding residents by the city’s consultants of choice, in particular, Bruce Davis of Public Progress.

As proof of the childishness and secrecy of council, last week the head of the planning committee, Gord Perks, a long-time Marxist, tried to silence MP Roman Baber for daring to speak up against the planned shelter at Wilson and Keele Ave.

Heaven forbid, citizens who pay taxes should have rights.

This is exactly why Daniel Tate, who formed his own group called Integrity TO, has put out a petition demanding a third-party audit of Toronto Shelter and Support Services.

He wants answers about the obscene amount of money spent on this “broken model” and why refugees are taking up to nearly 50% of shelter space.

As he reasons, since the shelters are funded by public money, the public has every right to provide input in the placement, operations and the impact on the surrounding community.

”This is a call for accountability,” Tate writes. “The sheer enormity of public financial resources that are being drained to support an increasingly growing and worsening problem demands deeper examination.