Juno News - June 06, 2023


The occupation of Allen Gardens – Toronto’s major drug problem


Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

146.20877

Word count

430

Sentence count

26

Harmful content

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

A park in Toronto has been overtaken by a tent city and I find that disturbing. These people are abusive and seem not to recognize that they are squatting in a public park. I wish somebody would have the guts to clear this place out.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 I'm standing here in Allen Gardens in downtown Toronto, a corner of College and Carleton,
00:00:06.400 and it seems this park recently has been overtaken by a homeless encampment.
00:00:14.440 There seems to be a mix of those who are addicted and Indigenous natives who are living in this park. 1.00
00:00:22.900 In fact, the city has set up a sacred fire pit for the Indigenous to use, with no issue about fires being set in parks.
00:00:35.540 So here we are at the beginning of the summer season, and this park has been completely overtaken by a tent city. 0.88
00:00:44.300 And I find that very disturbing.
00:00:46.900 These people are, as I discovered, walking through, quite abusive.
00:00:50.960 And they seem not to recognize that they are squatting in a public park.
00:00:56.020 Of course, this has been set up by the politicians who have enabled them to overtake a park.
00:01:03.040 What I find especially disturbing, besides them occupying a public park,
00:01:07.780 is that there are plenty of shelter spaces in the system at more than $200 of taxpayer money per night for them to occupy.
00:01:19.080 But they have chosen to squat in a public park.
00:01:23.140 Having just been to the east side of Vancouver, where the drug addicted are squatting on sidewalk after sidewalk,
00:01:33.540 with no end in sight, I fear that the same thing is happening in Toronto.
00:01:39.520 And no one seems to care.
00:01:40.900 It doesn't seem to matter to people.
00:01:43.180 The media, the legacy media, turn a blind eye to it, and the politicians allow it to happen.
00:01:48.060 I can only imagine what people who are trying to walk their dogs or just enjoy the park on a warm afternoon might feel.
00:01:57.580 I don't see many people actually sitting here and enjoying Allen Gardens.
00:02:02.280 And that really disturbs me, that a park can be taken over by people who are aggressive and abusive,
00:02:09.860 and nobody does anything about it.
00:02:12.260 This is not the city that I came to many, many years ago.
00:02:16.760 The attitude of the people who are squatting here is that it is their God-given right to be here.
00:02:24.040 Well, I'm sorry, it is not their God-given right.
00:02:26.980 And I wish somebody would have the guts to clear this place out.
00:02:31.720 For True North, I'm Sue Ann Levy.
00:02:33.420 And I wish somebody would have the guts to clear this place out, and I wish God-given right to be here.
00:02:46.800 And I wish somebody would have purchased the house.
00:02:48.300 And what I wish somebody would have the solution to the house.
00:02:50.860 I wish they would have the guts to clear this place out.