In theory, Toronto city staff were supposed to execute the purchase of a large, vacant commercial building in the eastern suburb of Scarborough in late October without anyone finding out about it. For a city bureaucracy not exactly known for its ability to keep secrets, it was a tall order. Before the sale had been completed, a television reporter named Alan Carter was standing in front of the building in question with a story so juicy it ran as an exclusive on Toronto’s CityNews.
Carter had just confirmed his tip — that the city was buying the building at 2535 Gerrard St. E. for “an 80-bed men’s shelter.” The local city councillor, Parthi Kandavel, told Carter he was completely blindsided by the revelation. He shared his concerns, which were in line with those of a growing number of his constituents, who had already begun gathering in the parking lot at a nearby school to co-ordinate their opposition to the plan. Carter said the parents he spoke to weren’t against another shelter in the community, but they felt this location was too close to a school and a daycare, and none of the services that a shelter would typically want at hand existed at all.
Toronto’s mayor, Olivia Chow, gave the story renewed legs the next day when she complained about the fact the location of the shelter had been made public. “The location of shelters remains confidential,” Chow sternly pronounced. “And I sure hope the councillor (Kandavel) did not violate the confidentiality clause because the city has not announced where these shelters are.”
At this point, it was a local story. But that was about to change.
Jennifer Hedger, longtime sports anchor for TSN, lives in the neighbourhood near the soon-to-be-shelter with her husband and son. On Halloween day, she let her 74,000 followers on X know how she felt about it. Linking to the latest CityNews story, her series of posts began with: “If you’re wondering what it’s like to live in Toronto …”
Instead of “assuring the neighbourhood their concerns would be heard,” Hedger wrote, Mayor Chow “bemoaned the fact that the neighbourhood had been tipped off!”
“These things are supposed to be secret,” Hedger continued, “so no one can oppose them!”
Hedger’s post blew up. Some supported her and others denounced her as a NIMBY — and not just in Toronto. From as far away as Vancouver, former heroin addict-turned-government opioids advocate Guy Felicella shamed Hedger on X: “It’s not ‘your neighbourhood,’ it’s everyone’s!”
The Globe and Mail’s architecture critic, Alex Bozikovic, also piled on, calling out Hedger for “proudly” arguing that “poor people don’t belong in ‘their’ neighbourhood.”
“Assuming that unhoused people are violent criminals,” Bozikovic added, “and that they should not be housed anywhere near a daycare is bigotry.”
The challenge with such charged assertions is that they oversimplify what is, in truth, a very complex set of problems and related concerns. Shelter systems in larger Canadian cities such as Toronto and Ottawa and Vancouver have seen demand for beds surge because of a skyrocketing increase in immigrants seeking refugee status. As of September, approximately 250,000 people had applied for refugee status in Canada in 2024, almost 20 times the number for all of 2014.
Categorizing those in need of shelters as “poor people” is, in many cases, a woefully inadequate description of those using the services. Nor do most Canadians believe those using shelters are violent criminals, though violence is a valid consideration.
In April 2024, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) released The Shelter Safety Study, which revealed, among other things, that the annual number of incidents of interpersonal violence in Toronto shelters increased by 283 per cent between 2011 and 2021, while the mean daily service users only increased by 66 per cent during the same decade. Critical incidents, including violence, went from about 2,000 incidents per year in 2011 to 10,000 in 2021.
It wouldn’t come as much of a surprise to many Toronto residents that almost half of the city’s unhoused population is struggling with a substance use disorder, according to a 2021 report. For Jennifer Hedger’s neighbours, this alone is a compelling reason for the city to be transparent with residents and business owners on the placement of shelters — not bring them on board once the decision is etched in stone.
Their concern over this lack of transparency, made clear in interviews with Hedger’s neighbours, is arguably dwarfed by another fear: in line with lofty promises of safety and engagement made before they open. These two offences trigger more public outrage than proposing 80 people in need move into the neighbourhood.
Toronto isn’t the only Canadian city with communities pushing back against the broken promises of various social services. Last February, hundreds gathered at city hall in Richmond, B.C., to protest a proposed injection site they claimed was shrouded in secrecy.
In the St. Henri neighbourhood of Montreal, a coalition formed in the fall of 2023 after parents, residents and businesses were blindsided by the news of a building under construction to become a shelter with a supervised injection component. It’s just a few metres from a fenced-in park that children at an elementary school use for their recesses and lunch breaks.
In November, hundreds of residents protested in the Ottawa suburb of Kanata after learning that the city planned to erect a series of “sprung structures” (giant platformed tents) at a local commuter park-and-ride to accommodate asylum seekers. Once again, the most common complaint from residents — and their local member of Parliament, Jenna Sudds — was there had been zero community consultation prior to the announcement being made.
While the protests in Ottawa were unfolding, the police in a smaller Ontario city suspended a program the force had embarked on a year earlier with a local shelter due to safety concerns. The Peterborough Police Force’s Safer Public Spaces initiative, in concert with the shelter and a church drop-in centre, was designed to dissuade open drug use by compassionately encouraging users to move along to the city’s supervised injection site.
The compassionate approach didn’t work. Peterborough’s police chief stated that there were 700 calls for service to the area surrounding the church drop-in centre between January and November 2024, up from 168 calls during the same period in 2023.
Police Chief Stuart Betts announced that his force would no longer only encourage drug users to relocate to the injection site. Instead, anyone caught using illicit substances outside would have their substances seized and be subject to searches and, possibly, arrest.
We would like to have our concerns heard and know the risks involved. What we have right now, though, is crickets
Jennifer Hedger
It all sounds ominous to Jennifer Hedger in Scarborough. When reached for comment on the shelter that’s slated to open in her neighbourhood in early 2027 (the city later clarified that it will be for adults of all genders, including couples), Hedger said the following in mid-November: “Our community understands the need for homeless shelters. This is not up for debate. It is important, however, that when choosing the site for a new shelter, it has to work for both the residents of the community where it is located, and the people who will be using the shelter.
“Our community is frustrated by the complete lack of communication with the city. We would like to have our concerns heard and know the risks involved. What we have right now, though, is crickets.”
***
What Hedger and her neighbours in Scarborough would soon learn is that another community, on the west side of Toronto’s downtown, found themselves in an almost identical situation a year earlier. In that case, residents were tipped off in early October 2023 about a mid-size commercial building the city was about to lease for 10 years at 629 Adelaide St. W. for a low-barrier respite centre — 24-hour sites that offer resting spaces, meals and service referrals to people experiencing homelessness. It didn’t take long for outrage to manifest across what is known as the Niagara neighbourhood.
It took less than a week for media stories to appear, some of which covered numerous demonstrations in front of the two-storey vacant brick building. One of the most vocal opponents of the plan was the area’s member of Parliament, Kevin Vuong.
“People are demanding to be heard,” Vuong told a local reporter. “They think it’s incredibly unfair that they are having this decision undemocratically forced on them. They’re not saying don’t do this. What they’re saying is give us a seat at the table. They’re concerned about safety.”
One of the primary drivers of this safety concern was the fact that this respite centre was going to be on one side of St. Mary’s Catholic Elementary School (less than 50 metres away), while a supervised injection site existed on the other side (it was one of 10 sites the Ontario government would later order to close by March 31, 2025, for being within 200 metres of schools and daycares). Many residents said this site had created concentrated drug activity in the immediate area instead of curbing activity that might have existed there prior to its opening.
“We see it already,” one local parent told the CBC. “We find needles and condoms at the school.”
The community invited their city councillor, Deputy Mayor Ausma Malik, to the rallies, but she was conspicuously absent. Although known to support the respite site location, Malik was careful to point out in her statements to the media that the responsibility for procuring sites for respite centres and shelters had been delegated to city staff in 2017. In other words, she had no part in it.
That didn’t fly in the Niagara community. It was betrayal. Between chants of, “Keep kids safe!” a new one broke out, led by Vuong. “Where is Ausma?” a few hundred people repeated over and over. “Where’s our councillor?”
It only took a few days for the Niagara neighbourhood to find Malik, but they had to go to city council to do so. They discovered that the city’s Economic and Community Development Committee, of which Malik was a member, was going to be addressing the city’s Shelter Infrastructure Plan on Oct. 24, 2023. A few dozen residents showed up to deliver their deputations in person.
One of the first residents to address the committee was Curtis Priest, president of a condo board. Priest, who had worked with a provincial homelessness task force, addressed the elephant in the room early on. “I know this probably comes off as NIMBYism,” said Priest. “To be frank, I reject that label. Our neighbourhood already supports more than its fair share with various facilities to help the homeless right now.”
A common theme among Priest and his neighbours that day was the fear this respite site was going to “exacerbate the public safety problems we already have.” Priest went on to describe a recent incident in which his wife and son were assaulted in front of their building by a man “who was homeless and high, with severe mental health issues.”
“It still haunts them to this day,” said Priest, choking back tears. “My son is traumatized and when he sees people screaming on the street and punching in the air he has a panic attack.”
Priest concluded by expressing how upset he was that his community had to find out about the site through grapevine rumours “when a lease was basically being signed.”
The school is starting to look like a prison — not super-max but definitely medium security.
Kevin Morrison, Toronto Catholic District School Board, about St. Mary’s
“I don’t think this is going to have better outcomes for anybody in the community,” he concluded, “and I strongly suggest we rethink not just this particular location but how we go about putting these sites in place to begin with.”
A representative of the Catholic school board, Kevin Morrison, also addressed the committee, presenting himself as an expert on what happens when respite centres are beside schools, because he had three city schools in that category. Even in the best-case scenarios, said Morrison, “there’s no amount of community liaison you can do with these centres that stops the problems — which is what children see.”
The supervised injection site that opened in 2017 to the north of St. Mary’s school had a massive impact on the school, Morrison added. Custodians had to be trained to deal with needles, condoms and human waste. Eventually, there was no choice but to erect massive security fences. “The school is starting to look like a prison — not super-max but definitely medium security.”
Malik’s response to criticism about how the community was kept in the dark was to point out that in the next few days an outside consulting firm hired by the city to handle the engagement process was going to be conducting a series of Zoom meetings with those who’d contacted Malik’s office. That response only led residents to question Malik further about whether that was “a proper forum for engagement.”
“It just feels like we are being cast aside,” one resident responded to the councillor. “That our concerns are not properly being heard by the city. We’re being managed, basically.”
One evening a month later, about 100 neighbours joined a highly choreographed 90-minute virtual “Information Session” on Zoom, hosted by the consulting firm the city hired to run the community engagement process, Barnes Management Group. The first nine minutes were devoted to the land acknowledgment, code of conduct, the African ancestral acknowledgment, brief introductions and meeting agenda. Welcome remarks from Gord Tanner, general manager of the city’s Shelter, Support and Housing Administration (SSHA) and Malik were another six minutes.
An important change had occurred: the city had stopped referring to 629 Adelaide St. W. as a low-barrier respite centre with no central intake. It was now being presented as a 50-bed, 24-hour emergency shelter with a mandatory intake process.
A director of SSHA walked the assembled — all muted by the host — through an overview of the Toronto shelter system, which, at the time, was housing about 11,000 people per night. It was at capacity; hundreds were getting turned away each night.
The director conceded that the criteria behind the search that led to 629 Adelaide St. W. being leased were: a building that required minimal retrofits, was a suitable size, and it fit the city’s budget. Not considered: locations of nearby schools and daycares, concentration of other services in the area, or what or who surrounded the building.
There were 45 minutes left for questions and answers after the various presentations. Things started to get heated when resident Jennifer Hilsden was unmuted. She referred to a petition in the area surrounding the new shelter that “shows approximately 98 per cent of the participants … strongly oppose having a homeless shelter at that location.”
Hilsden also took a swipe at the Zoom meeting format, with Barnes people in the background deciding who can speak and when. Having maybe a tenth of the participants get the opportunity to ask questions was “not community engagement.”
Suhal Ahmed, an SSHA manager, remained stone-faced. “If the community decision is to talk about the location of shelter services, that’s not a conversation we can really have.”
***
It’s not just residents and business owners in Toronto who have been tipped off through unofficial channels about new shelter locations. In the fall of 2023, Montreal’s St. Henri community was confronting similar fresh revelations: a shelter that would include a supervised consumption site.
This site was billed as “a stone’s throw” from Victor-Rousselot Park, which the Montreal Gazette called “a fenced-in area where children from the elementary school of the same name spend their recesses and lunch breaks.” The coalition that quickly formed in St. Henri was furious that such services could be contemplated without involving residents and business owners in the discussion.
Nevertheless, the new Maison Benoit Labre transitional housing and inhalation centre opened in St. Henri in April 2024. A few weeks later, the borough’s mayor, Benoit Dorais, told the media things were going fine: “There haven’t been any serious incidents so far.”
Those words pushed resident Michael MacKenzie to make his views known in a very public way. Dr. MacKenzie is a professor of social work, psychiatry and pediatrics at McGill University, and studies “the trauma-informed treatment of mental health and addictions.” But in a column he wrote for the Montreal Gazette in early June titled, “A case study on how not to build community trust,” MacKenzie set the record straight about what he and his neighbours close to the site had been experiencing since it opened: groups of people injecting drugs, assaults, a man with his pants down masturbating in front of a neighbour’s window in broad daylight and sex acts on the sidewalk.
The area had some challenges before, MacKenzie admitted, but the “influx of new people in distress and dealers drawn to the area” ballooned into something it had not seen before Maison Benoit Labre opened its doors.
MacKenzie did not have a lot of time for charges of NIMBYism emanating from politicians. “One of the most vocal proponents of the new location — Dorais — lives on the block abutting its former location,” MacKenzie wrote. “In other words, it is no longer in his backyard.”
The problems children and their parents were experiencing around Maison Benoit Labre gained national attention when Conservative Party of Canada Leader Pierre Poilievre held a news conference inside Victor-Rousselot Park on July 12 and announced that, if elected, his party would be shutting down supervised injection sites “next to schools, playgrounds and anywhere else they endanger the public.”
Poilievre went off when a reporter referred to them as “safe injection sites.”
“You think it’s safe when a bullet comes flying out of one of these sites in Toronto to kill a mother?” he said. “You think it’s safe to have people using heroin and crack and cocaine next to a playground like this?”
“Supervised injection sites then,” interjected the reporter.
“They’re drug dens,” responded Poilievre. “And they’ve made everything worse everywhere they’ve been done.”
A month after Poilievre’s visit, Dorais told the media that he had asked Quebec’s Social Services Minister Lionel Carmant to relocate the day centre for homeless people in Maison Benoit Labre. The 30 people living in the building full-time would remain, as would the supervised consumption site, which the city said only about six to eight people were using each day. The expectation was this would happen before the school year began.
When November rolled around and nothing had happened, MacKenzie penned another column for the Montreal Gazette. In it, he confirmed that most of the concentrated problems around Maison Benoit Labre, usually involving people “in significant psychological distress,” came from the non-resident guests using the day services.
Maison Benoit Labre refused to close the day site, regardless of what the province was telling them to do. “It was surprising to see how quickly they put the Coalition Avenir Quebec government in its place,” MacKenzie wrote, “despite the ministry providing nearly all its funding.”
MacKenzie also reported crime statistics released by Montreal police that showed “a shocking rise in crime” near the building. Emergency calls were up 1,967 per cent within 50 metres of the centre (from six calls to 124). Even within 250 metres of the centre, “mischief calls were up 800 per cent, and a 93 per cent increase, or near doubling, in crimes against people.”
“Even overdose incidents were up 300 per cent,” continued MacKenzie, “giving lie to claims from the organization’s director that they went where the need was already existing.”
If provincial and municipal officials cared about the children around this centre, MacKenzie demanded to know why they weren’t moving faster to close the day site and continued to “provide no-strings-attached funding to an organization that has stated their intention to not comply with closing those services.”
The professor ended his column with this: “Dealing with adult trauma in a way that can harm children is not harm reduction; it’s harm production.”
***
By the time 2024 began, the Niagara neighbourhood in Toronto had already formed its own community group, the Niagara Neighbours for Community Safety, to oppose the shelter being proposed for 629 Adelaide St. W. One of its co-founders was Diane Chester, whose property was directly behind the proposed new shelter, less than six metres away.
Chester’s group pursued two specific courses of action in early 2024. First, it hired a lawyer to file an application in Ontario Superior Court to challenge the shelter based on a zoning violation. It also filed a raft of requests under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain all city documents related to 629 Adelaide St. W.
While it lost the zoning challenge (the decision is being appealed), it received thousands of pages from its Freedom of Information requests that Chester told the National Post she found deeply revealing and disturbing.
For example, Chester discovered in her mountain of materials a document called, “Lessons Learned: 629 Adelaide Street West.” It was the slide deck of a presentation city staff had put together for SSHA’s general manager, Gord Tanner. When it came to public stakeholder meetings, city staff weighed in: “Large community meetings should be virtual information sessions that are carefully facilitated and managed.” If engagement “has been contentious,” it added, “these meetings should require registration.”
“Lessons Learned” was also one of many documents that opened a window onto the fact that the relationship between city staff and the future operator of the shelter, St. Felix Centre, was not as rosy as it appeared on the surface. There were two main reasons for this. First: “As tensions with the community increased and the protests heightened, St. Felix Centre became resistant to engagement.” Second: “St. Felix has provided inconsistent construction updates about project timelines.”
Chester had already witnessed the former during a stakeholder meeting in November 2023, when St. Felix’s executive director, Brian Harris, responded to one challenging question by abruptly exiting the Zoom meeting.
For Chester, this was not a good sign. “If St. Felix doesn’t want to engage with us now, before the site is even open,” she said, “I don’t see that boding well for how it will engage when there are real problems to deal with once it’s operating. This is how they’re going to respond when the going gets tough? Run and hide from the upset neighbours?”
***
The Niagara neighbourhood’s confidence in the St. Felix Centre to run a 50-bed emergency shelter next to a school did not exactly grow in the coming months. In fact, as they learned more about the respite site St. Felix had operated nearby at 25 Augusta Ave. — the site 629 Adelaide was supposed to replace — the neighbourhood’s concerns were amplified.
The Niagara Neighbours for Community Safety launched its own website, and one of the first things it featured was a two-and-a-half-minute video put together by a mother with three young children who lived next to St. Felix’s respite centre at 25 Augusta in the summer of 2018. The videos were shot as part of a GoFundMe campaign so that the mother, Sammy Barcelos, could afford to move her family away from the respite site — a campaign that was reported on as far away as the Daily Mail in the United Kingdom.
Barcelos’s footage starts with a man smoking crack on the sidewalk in front of her house as her children are running around their tiny front yard less than two feet away. “I love living here,” she says. “Did I mention that my three kids are living here? I guess it doesn’t matter.”
The crack-smoking is interjected by scenes of graphic violence and groups of people just feet away from her house, slapping their forearms and injecting right next to the street. A man leaning against her front fence screams, “Every fucking day!” as Barcelos then turns the video camera on her startled daughter, in diapers, playing on the front porch.
Diane Chester and her neighbour, Jennifer Hilsden, began knocking on doors on Augusta Avenue to find out what it had been like to deal with the management at St. Felix’s respite centre before it was closed in mid-2023 (it was to be turned into long-term affordable housing units). One elderly woman they spoke to, who was just four doors from the centre, provided them with a two-page statement about her experiences.
This list of regular occurrences is essentially a written version of Sammy Barcelos’s video: shouting and swearing all hours of the day, discarded needles in her yard, drug users injecting in the children’s playground next to the centre, human feces and urine on her property, screen door kicked in, verbal abuse and threats of physical violence.
The neighbour stated that when she became tired of the boxed lunches St. Felix handed out to its guests being discarded on her front yard, she requested that St. Felix place garbage bins around its property. She said St. Felix’s response was: “We are not responsible for the activities of our guests once they leave our property.”
***
As Diane Chester reviewed the emails back and forth between St. Felix and the city, she began to perceive a noticeable change in tone as time went on. This was partly because St. Felix kept moving the goalposts when it came to construction timelines. Initially, 629 Adelaide St. W. was supposed to be up and running by November of 2023. Then it was spring 2024, until that was pushed back to fall.
Its emergency shelter is now scheduled to open in the spring of 2025. As far as Chester could tell, the 10-year lease for 629 Adelaide was negotiated without any clear funding commitments from the city. The estimated cost, including operational expenses, as of the summer of 2023 was more than $40 million. The Freedom of Information documents in Chester’s possession disclosed that the owner of the building, which required significant upgrades, had negotiated a $300,000 four-month rental deposit.
Chester, a former city employee, was flabbergasted by the sums being devoted to transforming this building into a shelter, especially since her neighbourhood was resolutely opposed to it. Eventually, Chester would publicly divulge that 629 Adelaide, built in 1947, would require, conservatively, at least $2.8 million in renovation costs.
This was on top of the city paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent for a building that housed no one for at least a year and a half. In total, the 10-year operating and leasing costs for 692 Adelaide amounted to $45 million.
The 10-year cost for each of the 50 beds? $900,000.
***
When spring arrived, the idea of having a “community walk” of the area around 629 Adelaide St. W. was revived after it had been postponed months earlier due to construction delays. Preparatory emails flew back and forth between Barnes Management Group, city officials and Brian Harris, the executive director of St. Felix Centre.
Two things were clear: first, Harris had no desire to participate. Second, Barnes staff had no intention of inviting certain people, including Diane Chester.
“I appreciate you’ve indicated that certain individuals and groups won’t be invited,” Harris pleaded with the Barnes people, “but how do we possibly expect to control who shows up?”
As it turned out, they couldn’t. Chester, despite not being invited, showed up to participate in the May 6 walk anyway. Barnes Management staff told Chester she could join the second group, but only if she stood at the very rear of the group. When Chester failed to follow this instruction, the Barnes community engagement facilitator stopped to ask Chester to return to the back of the group.
The ground rules were being violated with a lot more vigour for yet another group, which included Deputy Mayor Ausma Malik, as well as staff from the city and St. Felix Centre. A local father, who would soon become known to thousands as Ginger Bearded Dad, walked just a few feet from the group for blocks, recorded by someone the whole time as several police officers secured for the occasion, walking their bicycles, looked on.
Ginger Bearded Dad was not happy about the people shooting up at his child’s school. Just a few days earlier, Ginger Bearded Dad used his bellowing, angry voice to chase a drug user from the front door of the church next to the school as kids arrived in the morning.
Another staffer with Barnes Management Group asked Ginger Bearded Dad to “cease and desist.” That just made his voice, which could surely be heard for blocks, even louder.
“What happens when my child gets hurt?” said Ginger Bearded Dad, wearing jeans and a denim shirt, in a recording that exploded on X. “Who will be accountable for your group’s ideas? None of you. Shame on you!”
Malik and her group steered clear of Ginger Bearded Man. “You’re all good when you’re in groups with people with your own ideas,” he continued, following as Malik and others crossed a road. “But when someone has conflicting ideas, you’re all quiet. You have nothing to say!”
***
A month later, in June 2024, Toronto city council met to approve the Homelessness Services Capital Infrastructure Strategy, and the 2025 Shelter Infrastructure Plan as conceived by Gord Tanner, general manager of Toronto Shelter and Support Services. The report laid out a strategy that involved the city acquiring and developing 20 “new purpose-built shelter sites from 2024 to 2033.”
The total cost for these 20 shelters was estimated to be $674.5 million. Remarkably, the entire project is predicated on the city procuring the $674.5 million in funding from the federal government. In the meantime, city council was being asked to approve $89.5 million through the City Building Fund, to secure “up to five new shelter sites in 2024.”
As the report was being considered, a city councillor from the western suburb of Etobicoke, Stephen Holyday, noted some concepts in the proposal, including constellations of shelters that resembled garden sheds, were being installed in parks and other green spaces without constituents being consulted in advance.
Holyday tabled a motion to “include public consultation” as a mandatory part of the shelter strategies “prior to finalizing acquisitions, commitments and contracts.”
… The (City of Toronto) openly acknowledges it has made no good faith considerations whatsoever when it comes to the placement of the shelter in your neighbourhood.
Diane Chester, co-founder, Niagara Neighbours for Community Safety
During the debate that ensued on Holyday’s proposed amendment, a half-dozen councillors stood up to argue against it, including Ausma Malik. The common thread of their opposition was that while the city was experiencing a shelter shortage, it had a moral obligation to build more shelters, an obligation that trumped whatever concerns any community might have. Chester’s Niagara neighbours saw this as a position infused instead with a narrow and misguided moral authority, a kind of City Knows Best posture.
When Holyday’s proposed amendment went to a vote, it was eight for and 16 against. One of the councillors to vote against the Holyday amendment was Scarborough West’s Parthi Kandavel.
Four months later, when Kandavel found out through a tip from a senior city staffer that the first of those 20 shelters was going to be in his ward, at 2535 Gerrard St. E. — the neighbourhood where Jennifer Hedger lived — he wished he could have that vote back.
Kandavel wasn’t necessarily opposed to a shelter in his ward. He already has four of them, and he thought they were all ideally situated in the community. The one on Gerrard Street East was different.
“The four shelters we have all abut major arteries,” said Kandavel in a recent interview with National Post. “If discussion with the councillor had been built into the process, I would have been able to push back and show the shortcomings of the Gerrard location. It’s in the middle of a very residential area with a lot of families, 100 metres opposite a preschool. I was never given the space and place to give the city feedback about what it takes to make shelters work in our community and to push back on what doesn’t.”
City staff often promote the idea that those in need of shelters are from the same communities in which they are placed. In December, Kandavel’s constituents near the proposed shelter site on Gerrard received flyers from the city claiming that shelter demand in Scarborough was high. What this communication did not disclose is that, as of May 2024, 53 per cent of all people being provided accommodations in Toronto shelters are refugee claimants (up from 40 per cent in September 2023).
***
Parthi Kandavel’s constituents were even more outraged when they discovered that the city had paid $6.9 million for 2535 Gerrard St. E. The property had been part of a failed condo development prior to the pandemic and was listed for sale in 2020 at $4.3 million. Yet another neighbourhood could not believe how many millions the city was willing to spend on a community project it hadn’t had a say in.
The community leaders in the Gerrard Street East shelter’s neighbourhood have now created The Birchcliff Residents’ Association, which has about 350 members, and canvassing hasn’t yet begun. Kandavel says he’s wary of third-party consultants that want to “manage” his constituents, as opposed to genuinely engage with them.
He’s also determined to avoid having any of this dialogue occur via Zoom meetings. Kandavel said he’s insisted that the city meet with his constituents in person, which is now scheduled for Jan. 21 at a local church.
“We make all of these proclamations, equity statements, Indigenous and African and so on,” said Kandavel. “We have the world’s best acknowledgment statements, no one can top us in that. But how do we square that level of inclusivity with the way we actually include people (in community discussions)? That’s a stark gap.”
The city didn’t just deliver notices to the neighbourhood around the Gerrard Street East site in December, but to five other Toronto communities, mostly to the west and north of downtown.
Lily Cheng, the city councillor for Willowdale, selected for one of the five new shelters, quickly organized a community meeting with city shelter leadership a week before Christmas. The Willowdale shelter is to be built on a city-owned parking lot.
Curious to see the difference between an in-person community meeting and the Zoom meetings her community endured, Diane Chester decided to attend the Willowdale engagement session. She was surprised to hear what city staff had previously called “24-hour emergency shelters” now being referred to as “purpose-built shelters.”
There was no question-and-answer session built into the format. Nevertheless, Chester watched as Cheng handed a list of questions she’d received from her constituents to the director of shelter services at the meeting. It struck Chester as unplanned. The first question on the list was: Why did the city choose this site?
The director responded by referring to the parking lot — which, apparently, many in attendance used on a regular basis — as “vacant land.” Chester said the attendees didn’t hold back in their loud critiques of that assessment. Cheng couldn’t control the crowd. The shelter director didn’t answer any more questions.
Chester surveyed the neighbours who attended on the way out. To a person, they said they were appalled and felt silenced.
Earlier in 2024, Monica Waldman, a manager at Toronto Shelter and Support Services, suggested her division begin working on documents it could “share with community partners in future as a blueprint on how to navigate these toxic or heated community interactions.”
For residents such as Chester, such a blueprint does not exist. “If the city is going to determine the locations of respite sites or shelters without including those communities in the decision,” she said, “any engagement they conduct after the decision is made begins from a place of mistrust. The city is asking community members to accept these services in good faith when the city openly acknowledges it has made no good faith considerations whatsoever when it comes to the placement of the shelter in your neighbourhood.”