Juno News - August 01, 2024


Toronto doubles down on failed homeless strategy

Mentioned
Councillor Osma Malik Augustus Streets Angela Robinson Lois Dilbert Olivia Chow Osma Malik
Canadians spend more on taxes than food, clothing, and housing combined Guilbeault tries to be hip and cool

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

136.91

Word count

757

Sentence count

54

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

The City of Toronto is planning a homeless shelter just metres from a safe injection site, and residents of a quiet, safe neighbourhood in Toronto are worried about what will happen when it opens. Sue Ann Levy explains why this is such a bad idea.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Well folks, Toronto City Hall has done it again.
00:00:03.900 They are foisting this, what's soon to be a shelter for 50, heaven knows what kind of
00:00:12.080 individuals, on a quiet neighbourhood in west of Bathurst Street in Toronto.
00:00:19.560 It's a story that keeps repeating itself and repeating itself, not just in Toronto,
00:00:23.960 but across the country. You've got the combination of drug addicted people fueled by safe injection
00:00:33.160 sites that turn them out into the street looking for shelter, plus a sanctuary city that takes in
00:00:40.860 far too many illegal migrants that they can't house. And this is what happens. This shelter was 1.00
00:00:47.560 supposed to open last November. It's to be operated by St. Felix Centre, which doesn't
00:00:53.860 exactly have the best reputation in Toronto, having operated a shelter at Queen and Augustus
00:01:01.560 Streets, whose occupants terrorised the neighbourhood for years. I saw them. I was down there. I did
00:01:07.940 stories on it. They also operate a shelter in Liberty Village in Toronto, which also has
00:01:13.920 terrorised the neighbourhood. I saw that and did stories on it. Now they're set to open a shelter
00:01:20.740 just feet, just metres from a safe injection site. And you know what's going to happen. There'll be
00:01:27.380 cross-pollination between the two. The residents in the neighbourhood were just caught totally by surprise
00:01:33.580 and they are angry, upset, worried about what's going to happen to what has been a relatively safe
00:01:41.840 neighbourhood until the safe injection site came in. Well, I'm perfectly stunned. So last summer,
00:01:49.440 we were meeting with Angela Robinson, the director of the safe injection site, about our concerns about
00:01:57.440 how things were getting really bad. We had a meeting with her and then just a few days later, I found out
00:02:03.120 that they were going to put a homeless shelter here. And I just was stunned because you have a safe
00:02:10.080 injection site, you have a school, you have a homeless shelter, you have this wonderful, vibrant, eclectic,
00:02:18.800 gritty, yeah, but we like that neighbourhood. And to me, it just didn't make sense.
00:02:22.720 And we knew nothing about this. Councillor Osma Malik had not let us know about this project. We
00:02:28.880 learned about it through a rumour. We've been trying to get answers from the City of Toronto
00:02:32.880 and they won't talk to us. This shelter is going to cost upwards, upwards of $880,000 per user
00:02:44.560 for 10 years. 4.4 million. Obscene numbers, absolutely obscene numbers. It is a lot of money,
00:02:52.720 and money that could have been spent on supportive housing perhaps, but it's where it's located. So
00:03:01.760 there is no outdoor space at all. It's surrounded by laneways and asphalt. There's nowhere for anyone
00:03:09.280 to go during the day. People are homeless, so there's nowhere for anyone to go. There's no programming
00:03:15.360 in the building that we're aware of. It's an unbelievably surreal, ridiculous situation. We all 0.90
00:03:24.160 just walk around going, anybody who comes into the neighbourhood looks at the building and they go,
00:03:28.720 you're putting a shelter there? Whose idea was that? That's what they say to us. Lois Dilbert lives 0.81
00:03:35.840 right near the safe injection site and has seen personally the fallout, the chaos, the mayhem
00:03:42.880 of that safe injection site. One can only wonder what's going to happen when this shelter opens.
00:03:49.440 I sit in my backyard, people either having psychotic break or high come down the laneway,
00:03:57.200 aggressive behaviour, defecation in the laneway, paraphernalia. It's horrible, daily.
00:04:04.480 Emil planted a beautiful garden on Adelaide Street. He fears the garden will not last once the shelter
00:04:13.840 opens. I think they'll relieve themselves in the garden and any other place because there won't be
00:04:21.040 any outdoor facilities for them and garbage will be thrown. They'll be walking through it. They'll be
00:04:28.160 sleeping in it. They'll be passed out as we can see at the safe injection site where they're passed out in the
00:04:33.200 lane right next to the safe injection site, which is a community health clinic. It's so ironic. It's
00:04:40.320 frustrating and it angers me that our city and the councillor for this particular riding totally disregards
00:04:49.200 the community's concerns and has totally ignored our concerns. It's yet another story of City Hall
00:04:57.680 using its muscle to foist an expensive, obscenely expensive shelter on an unsuspecting neighbourhood.
00:05:05.360 I've covered many such stories and it never changes and it's gotten worse under the stewardship of Olivia
00:05:12.160 Chow and her deputy mayor, Ozma Malik, who represents this neighbourhood and couldn't give a hoot
00:05:18.080 what happens to these residents. For True North, I'm Sue Ann Levy.