Toronto Police finally break up illegal tent cities
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
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Summary
In this episode, True North contributor Sue-Anne Levy talks about Toronto police breaking up a tent city and arresting squatters and protesters. She talks about the history of the tents and the people living in them, and how they came to be.
Transcript
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Toronto police are actually enforcing the law. I'm Candace Malcolm and this is The Candace Malcolm Show.
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If you're like me and you saw the footage of Toronto police yesterday breaking up a tent city and arresting squatters and protesters,
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it might have seemed a little shocking. In this day and age, we don't often see the police actually doing their work
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and enforcing the law, especially if it involves the use of force.
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Well, to help us make sense of this news story, I'm joined by True North contributor Sue-Anne Levy.
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Sue-Anne is an expert on this topic. She's been writing about it for a very, very long time and she has a new piece up at tnc.news.
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So, you know, can you walk us through what happened yesterday?
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Because for me, I just saw that Toronto police were trending on Twitter.
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I looked at some of the videos and I saw, you know, a lot of people on the left, these sort of usual suspects,
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And I think it was perhaps a little out of context because if you didn't know anything about what was going on in these encampments
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and you just thought, you know, the Toronto police showed up one day and decided to bust all these tents,
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So maybe you can help provide a little bit of context and explain what exactly happened yesterday.
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What happened yesterday or what's been happening over the last year?
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Because these encampments, I guess they grew and festered.
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And pardon me for the use of the word festered, but they were horrific.
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And few journalists went into these encampments, but I spent a lot of time in the last year going into them.
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They grew and prolificated when COVID started in, I guess, March, April 2020.
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And all of a sudden, out of nowhere, cropped up this group called the Encampment Support Network.
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And these people started delivering water and it started very innocuously.
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They delivered water to the people living in the encampments.
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Now, the big ones were in downtown Toronto, one at Trinity Bellwoods Park,
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huge one at Trinity Bellwoods Park, one at Alexander Park, which is the Dundas Bathurst area.
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Moss Park was another one and Lamport Stadium Park, which are the four that are being targeted for finally for being cleaned out.
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Well, the activists from the Encampment Support Network, that this group grew,
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just grew by leaps and bounds as the months went on.
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And it became obvious to me because I spent considerable time in Alexander Park, Trinity Bellwoods.
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I was at Lamport Stadium Park doing interviews.
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It became obvious to me that their agenda was basically to keep these people in the parks
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and to enable them in whatever way they could to keep them in the park by providing them with free tents,
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I even heard stories of Uber Eats delivering food to these encampments in Alexander Park,
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even providing them with ways to keep themselves warm.
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I'm not sure if they delivered heaters, but they sure helped them.
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And so it grew and the conditions got more and more squalid as the year went on.
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And, you know, the city council, the Toronto City Council and the mayor
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enabled these people to stay in the parks, enabled the activists to do what they did
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because they screamed loudly, which led us up to the last couple of weeks when the parks were finally cleared.
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The activists, as I feel, have used the homeless as pawns over the last 20 years that I've been covering this.
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They were very upset that these parks were being cleared because they didn't have their people in the parks to make a statement.
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No matter how unaffordable it is, these people need a roof over their heads.
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So you can imagine, Candice, when the police started coming in and actually doing their jobs and cleaning out these parks,
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They were upset they didn't have their showpieces to show the world what a terrible job all levels of government have done.
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How are they paying for these tents, this food, all this kind of thing?
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And then the other one was, you know, yesterday when we saw the police breaking down the tents and removing the protesters,
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they were sort of creating human shields and the police just seemed like they had had enough.
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You know, how did all these people know to be at that park at that time?
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And over the year as they've grown, if you go on their Instagram page, they're called Encamp and Support Network.
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They have an Instagram page and they have a Twitter page and they use social media and they do a shout out.
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So yesterday, the day before, they had a shout out.
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They had a shout out to people to come down and help them be there at 5 a.m.,
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meet greeters with yellow ribbons around them to get their marching orders.
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Now, this started in May when the police tried to clean out for the first time Lamport Stadium Park,
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which was what we saw yesterday, the same park.
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They showed up, not in as great numbers, but they managed to hold off a bulldozer that was trying to clean up the park back then.
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Now, I'm sure it was with the help of the activists, but the activists are organized.
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They have a group of people, doctors, lawyers, academics who support them, and they've used the courts to try to hold the city off.
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But this is standard, sort of their standard MO, and this has been used in other cities like Seattle.
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I mentioned the column today, Portland, Venice Beach, where the activists, it's all the same kind of template, you know,
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where they shout and scream, use the courts, gather prominent people in law and doctors and academics.
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And then, of course, you've got the media, who never go down to the parks.
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I was the only one over the course of the year, pretty much.
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Never went and saw what the conditions were like.
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And then suddenly show up yesterday and think, oh, my God, horror of horrors, you know,
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and never talk to the people who are affected by the encampments around the parks, the neighbors,
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the people who are trying to use the parks over the last year.
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Well, it's interesting. We had another journalist from True North go down to Lampard Park and was told by a police officer
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that a very small fraction of the people there yesterday were the actual homeless people living in the tents,
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that the overwhelming majority, like 90 percent, were these activists that show up.
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Now, you mentioned that the goal was to have affordable housing for these individuals.
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I was under the impression that the police were offering, or the city and the police were offering hotel rooms
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That was the great irony over the last year, pretty much a year, because the mayor and council rented
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these extremely expensive hotel rooms in major hotels, including the Novotel down on the Esplanade.
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People living beside it were horrified because it was a upscale hotel and they rented rooms.
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Every homeless person gets their own room, three square meals a day, two snacks.
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And, you know, they have TVs in the room, Wi-Fi, that kind of thing.
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And the activists will tell you that it's unsafe there.
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Well, I can't imagine that it's more unsafe to be in your own hotel room than being in an encampment
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where there was drug dealing, rats, horrible garbage, fires.
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The number of fires increased by 250 percent in the last year.
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I mean, the conditions were just it was squalor.
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I mean, I was mortified when I went to Alexander Park a couple of weeks ago and saw what had happened
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I've stayed at the Novotel, not that one in Toronto, but I've stayed at the one in Ottawa.
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And so when you went through the names of the parks, we have Trinity Bellwoods, which is in a very upscale,
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It's a hipster area, but there are a lot of houses around there in Little Italy.
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And then, you know, same thing with Moss Park over in Regent Park.
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They tried to gentrify it and have more families there.
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And I know I probably wouldn't take my kids to those parks today.
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But in the past, certainly I've taken my son to Trinity Bellwoods Park before because it's a beautiful park.
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Don't they worry about the livability of the city, the ability of families and, you know,
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parents with young children to be able to enjoy the park as well?
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I can't imagine any parent wanting to take a child to a park where there's a homeless encampment
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growing bigger and bigger and bigger and taking up more and more of the space.
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Did you ever ask or did you ever sort of see the dichotomy between families and these activists?
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I heard from a lot of people because they quickly found out that I was really one of the only people
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So a lot of people reached out to me and with their frustrations, it was affecting businesses down
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And, you know, a perfect example was Alexander Park.
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There is a brand new condo that borders on the south end of the park.
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And there were fires, outrageous fires last fall and winter.
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And these people were really worried that the fire was going to extend to their properties.
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By the way, the activists gave the tent people fire extinguishers as well.
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There was pictures of, they provided me with pictures of fire extinguishers being thrown at windows
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on their property by drug addicted encampment residents.
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When I went down to Alexander Park a couple of weeks ago, it was a beautiful June day.
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In terms of kids, families, one person was walking her dog through the park.
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But from what I understand, they were afraid to walk their dogs through there.
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And no, you know, I can't blame them because from what I saw, it was pretty frightening.
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I'm used to it, but it was a pretty frightening thing to see.
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I grew up in Vancouver and we're very used to these homeless encampments.
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So, you know, there are certain parks that are occupied by homeless people.
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But, you know, they have so many parks in Vancouver that it sort of makes up for it.
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You can find safe areas where you can take your family.
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Toronto, I would say, has a very limited number of parks.
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They already have a problem in that sort of very inner part of the city that there isn't a lot of green space.
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So it's really sad that these few spaces were overtaken.
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I know you don't have much time and I want to be respectful.
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So I'll just ask one last question to you, Sue Ann.
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So, you know, if you were just watching on social media, it sort of just seemed like the police just decided to show up one day
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But the reality is that they have been posting notice for, I believe, weeks, if not months.
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Can you sort of walk us through the process up until yesterday to the point where the police finally said enough is enough.
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And the great irony was that they would post these notices and then not act on them.
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So I think the activists felt that, you know, they could get away with it.
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They were taken to court by the activists last fall.
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Basically, they were the activists tried to get an injunction that the city couldn't clear the parks and the city won or the injunction was not granted.
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So from last fall, the city had the right to clear the parks.
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They knew that this was a possibility, but they figured if they screamed loud enough, they would continue to have their way.
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Well, for the most recent, I guess, eviction, they posted trespass notices on June 12th at all four parks.
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However, I guess they thought that the city would back down yet again.
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And they actually, you know, got, I guess, some reprieve at Lamport Stadium because when they tried to clear it in May, they only got the job half done and then more people returned.
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Obviously, more people returned because they had to clear it again yesterday.
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So, you know, the city is to blame in large part because they enabled this to happen over the last year to grow, to not follow through on their threats and, you know, and to ignore the people who were suffering from COVID and needed a little bit of green space and couldn't access their local parks.
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Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, Sue Ann, unfortunately, I think that some of these videos are going to lead the defund the police crowd, you know, to have even more ammo for their fight.
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But, you know, I still think it's a good a good day when police are doing their job enforcing the law and, you know, moving people out so that everyone else in the city can enjoy these spaces that are supposed to be public and supposed to be for everyone.
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Thank you so much for joining us and providing so much context to this important story, Sue Ann.
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Thank you so much. Thank you. And thank you for joining us. I'm Candace Malcolm, and this is The Candace Malcolm Show.