Juno News - October 04, 2023


Toronto’s Asylum Seeker Crisis


Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

152.51102

Word count

577

Sentence count

36

Harmful content

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Sue Ann Levy visits Toronto's Peter St. Assessment and Referral Centre where dozens of refugees are once again camping out in front of the centre. She asks if they re just taking advantage of the system, or are they part of the problem?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Do you think some of these refugees are just taking advantage of the system? 0.99
00:00:04.000 Not necessarily taking advantage of it.
00:00:07.000 I just think the system itself is just set up incorrectly.
00:00:14.000 It's not that we shouldn't be helping refugees, but we should be helping ourselves.
00:00:21.000 Our own people.
00:00:23.000 A former Deputy Mayor with the City of Toronto, Doug Holliday, once said to me when we were discussing the homeless problem in the city,
00:00:34.000 that if you leave a saucer of milk out for some cats, the cats will keep coming back for more.
00:00:41.000 I thought of Doug Holliday today when I arrived at the Peter Street Assessment and Referral Centre,
00:00:48.000 where a couple dozen refugees are once again camping out.
00:00:53.000 These refugees are not to be confused with the 250 refugees who at various times camped out in front of this centre in July.
00:01:04.000 At the time, our new mayor, Olivia Chow, apologised to them for making them live out on the street
00:01:10.000 and got a cash infusion of $75 million to house them after they had lived in two churches for several months.
00:01:19.000 In fact, she made a commitment at the time to open new shelter spaces and to ensure that they were taken off the streets.
00:01:29.000 But with our Prime Minister's magnanimous open-door policy and the naivety of our city politicians and our mayor most especially,
00:01:41.000 more cats have returned to the feeding bowl.
00:01:44.000 Well, Kel Supri.
00:01:46.000 These refugees are mostly from Nigeria.
00:01:49.000 None would appear on camera and I asked pretty well all of them for fear of ruining their chances to get shelter.
00:01:55.000 But they were led to believe that they could come to Canada for a better life for shelter and security.
00:02:01.000 I don't blame them.
00:02:02.000 I blame our politicians.
00:02:04.000 Our Prime Minister, our Mayor, our city politicians who somehow plug up one problem.
00:02:10.000 It's like putting fingers in the dike and more water appears.
00:02:14.000 The current crop told me they've been out here for days, some of them for weeks.
00:02:21.000 And there are people who are homeless who live here in the city or outside the city who can't get shelter, can't get a bed.
00:02:29.000 They told us that and there seems to be a bit of a class war.
00:02:33.000 They say that some of these refugees are fake refugees.
00:02:36.000 They are fake refugees in my opinion. 1.00
00:02:41.000 You think they're fake refugees?
00:02:42.000 Some of them.
00:02:43.000 Yes.
00:02:44.000 Well, one can blame the politicians for setting up these divisions and for encouraging more and more people to come to Toronto where there is no space with their enabling policies.
00:02:57.000 Well, I don't blame the refugees for coming here.
00:03:01.000 I mean, they were led to believe they would have a new life in Canada.
00:03:04.000 I can't help but notice that many of them have designer luggage.
00:03:08.000 They all have cell phones and laptops and they seem to be fairly plugged in to how to get themselves help.
00:03:14.000 If I were a city politician or a provincial politician or a federal politician with some common sense, and that seems to be lacking amongst our political class,
00:03:25.000 I would say no more.
00:03:27.000 The doors are shut.
00:03:28.000 Go to another city or go out west where people are needed.
00:03:32.000 But this sitting on the street in Canada's largest city is unconscionable.
00:03:38.000 Unconscionable for the people who are here and unconscionable for taxpayers who are required to foot the bill.
00:03:45.000 For True North, I'm Sue Ann Levy.