Rally for Shelters event page on ocap.ca

The Executive Committee of Toronto City Council is being asked to endorse a plan to move hundreds of homeless beds out of the City's downtown east. If they go ahead and close the shelters on George Street, the chances are overwhelming that such replacements as are found will be located in outlying areas. The 124 bed Hope Shelter at College and McCaul closed in April and no replacement has yet been found.

Sign on to this statement! Demand the City of Toronto enforce its own shelter standards and prevent the ongoing gentrification of the Downtown! To add your organization to the list of endorsers, email ocap@tao.ca or via Facebook and Twitter.

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Seaton House on George Street is the City’s largest men’s shelter. In 2013, over 3,000 men used one of the 540 beds there. The GSRP proposes to turn Seaton House into a long-term care home, emergency shelter, assisted living residence and service hub. There are serious concerns about Seaton House and its conditions but the ‘revitalization’ is a bad idea because…

AUSTERITY WEARS ITS ‘POVERTY REDUCTION’ MASK

OCAP members picket the Liberal poverty reduction consultation in 2013. In the foreground, a person holds a sign reading "Talk is Cheap - Yours is Worthless"

‘Poverty reduction’ is, of course, nothing new to any of us. The Provincial Liberals have kept this farce up for a truly astounding number of years, even as they imposed great levels of poverty, inequality and austerity on communities throughout the Province.

There is really no need to engage in any major examination of the City’s document for the simple reason that it is fluff. It lays out a ‘strategy’ that consists of pious hopes and meaningless statements of intent while,at the same time, carefully avoiding the very issues that could and should be addressed at the municipal level in order to challenge poverty. It proposes, for example, to work to ‘enhance investments in repairs to existing social housing’. The last federal and provincial budgets set aside not one penny for this purpose. What strategy is suggested to overcome this scandalous state of affairs? None at all because no one seriously expects this ‘goal’ to pursued.

Today we marched through the Downtown East End. We got to the Distillery District and were told it was closed. We made our way inside anyways to find hundreds of rich people hanging out, eating dinner and shopping. The police continue to protect the rich while poor people go hungry and die in the streets.

More updates to come.

We marched because we believe:

• all of us should have decent, affordable, accessible housing.

• the massive expenditure of public resources for the Pan Am Games when we are told that there is no money for housing, shelters or social assistance shows that governments can find resources if they want to.
• the targeted policing of poor people and communities of colour is wrong and that social cleansing and police brutality must end.
• if $3.8 million can be spent on lighting a bridge for the Pan Am Games, money can be found to replace the 124 beds lost by the closure of the Hope Shelter.
• sports provide fun and rewarding experiences for people of all ages and athletic resources should go to recreation programs rather than elite level competitions.
• if 10,000 people can be housed in the athlete’s village, more than 243 units can be turned into affordable housing after the Games.
• in social justice and fighting to win.

The Mayor’s Office in Toronto is today occupied by a much slicker operation than it was during the years of dysfunctional, bigoted buffoonery that unfolded under Rob Ford. Mayor John Tory has resumed the drive toward a fully fledged neoliberal city but has the basic political skills to frame his twin agendas of austerity and upscale redevelopment in the language of inclusiveness. He has been sufficiently proficient at this to rapidly create what Michael Laxer has termed an “austerity consensus” supported by the overwhelming majority of the Council, including its left wing.

The agenda of the developers with regard to the central part of Toronto is to complete the creation of an interwoven hive of business, commerce, upscale recreation and high end housing. Standing in the way of this are enduring pockets of housed poverty and a considerable and growing homeless population. Those without housing, very understandably, have tended to gravitate toward the centre of the city and, over many years, shelters and other services have developed in this area. This situation is resented by those working for upscale redevelopment and not only because visible destitution impacts property values and ‘quality of life’ for those with the money to pay for it. It is also the case that the shelters, drop-ins and service agencies that homeless people turn to are located in areas that the forces of gentrification are laying claim to.

As the Pan Am Games approach, the cops are watching. BUT SO ARE WE.

The Pan Am Games are coming to Toronto from July 10-26, and all levels of government have committed billions of dollars to ensure they go off without a hitch. Unfortunately for the people of the Downtown East End, we are considered the “hitches”, and the Toronto Police will be out in force to harrass, intimidate and arrest the people of this neighbourhood to make certain rich tourists and sports bureaucrats can have a pleasant Games experience, at the expense of our quality of life.

Rally & March Thurday July 16

- Housing for All
- More Shelter Beds
- End Gentrification
- End Targeted & Racist Policing

On July 16, as the Games are underway, we will be marching to put forward the demands of communities impacted by poverty and a lack of decent, affordable housing. If there is money to spend on circuses, then the resources can be found to end the need for food banks, tackle the mounting problem of homelessness and ensure that everyone has decent, affordable and accessible housing.

Image description: a man with a small child on his back holding a sign reading "Hands off my Special Diet!" with a red hand print in the middle

In 2005, OCAP took up the fight to access the Special Diet for People on Ontario Works and ODSP. Our hunger clinics and actions to demand access to the benefit spread and huge numbers of people in poverty won additional income to protect their health and feed themselves and their families.

Despite all the efforts to limit the Special Diet, which have caused a great deal of hardship to many in Ontario, we suspected that access to the benefit had not been driven back to the point it was at in 2004. Now, figures we have obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, more than confirm this.

In 2004, average monthly Special Diet cases in Ontario numbered 44,774 with expenditure on the benefit for that year running at $57.6 million. The following year, as the OCAP initiated campaign got underway, monthly SD caseload rose to 75,628 and the expenditure went up to $128.5 milliion. The Liberal Government's efforts to crush these gains continued but, by 2010, monthly SD cases had risen to 140,733 and expenditure to $209.9 million. With all the brutal measures to restrict access that took effect in recent years, we might have assumed these gains would have been rolled back but the last complete year we have figures for, 2013, shows monthly cases at 148,258 and expenditure at $257.3 million. Only partial figures have been obtained for 2014 but average monthly cases comes in at 155,269.