A tent encampment sits in Marilyn Bell Park on Toronto’s waterfront, on Feb 20.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
The City of Toronto is proposing a new approach to dealing with homeless encampments in parks, saying it will emphasize human-rights-based supports and use forced clearings only as a last resort.
Last year, a report from Toronto’s ombudsman criticized the city for “significant unfairness” in its 2021 direction to clear encampments in downtown parks. This week’s proposal represents the city’s response in the form of a set of guidelines that would make clear that encampments will only be cleared as a last resort, and only when certain conditions are met.
“We’ve moved our focus away from enforcement,” said Gord Tanner, the city’s general manager for shelter and support services. “We know there are better options. Instead, the city now takes the approach that involves outreach, collaboration, and exhausting the available tools and options to assist people in encampments to move indoors.”
Last March, Toronto Ombudsman Kwame Addo found that the city “chose speed over people” when directing the clearing of large encampments at Trinity Bellwoods, Alexandra and Lamport Stadium parks in June and July of 2021. What followed were violent clashes between police, security guards and encampment residents and their supporters.
“Our investigation found the city displayed insufficient regard for the people it moved out of the parks,” Mr. Addo said at the time. “It failed to live up to its stated commitments to fairness and a human-rights based approach to housing.”
The city’s new proposal would focus on bringing supports directly to encampment residents and helping them to move into indoor spaces. This includes “enhanced outreach and housing services, income supports, harm reduction supports, health and mental health care services,” says the report.
The guidelines also emphasize that “people are able to participate, where possible, in decisions that directly impact them.”
According to the proposal, enforcement, including clearing encampments, would only occur in circumstances where the sites pose a public safety or health risk to people living in encampments or other members of the public, or in cases where “other reasonable tools and options have been exhausted.”
The city’s Economic and Community Development Committee will consider the proposal next week. Ahead of that meeting, Mayor Olivia Chow wrote a letter to its members appearing to throw her support behind the new guidelines.
“By working together to rethink how we provide shelter and housing services, we can increase access to safe, secure housing and shelter for people,” she said.
The city has seen a surge in homelessness in recent years. On the average day last month, Mr. Tanner said 225 people were turned away when asking for a shelter bed. As of earlier this month, there were 256 encampments at over 130 city parks, according to the city.
“Whether unhoused or housed, every resident deserves to be treated with dignity, and every resident has inherent rights that have to be respected,” said Alejandra Bravo, a city councillor and chair of the Economic and Community Development Committee.
“While there’s significant public pressure to remove encampments – especially in parks – safety is the condition for removal,” she said.
Still, community advocates said that the proposal does not go far enough.
“While emphasis is being put on meaningful engagement and a ‘human rights approach’ to encampments and their residents, there continues to be no clear definition of what either of these mean, or how they will be deployed,” said Diana Chan McNally, a community and crisis worker at All Saints Church Community Centre.
Greg Cook, a long-time outreach worker at Sanctuary Ministries of Toronto, said the shift away from enforcement is a “positive” move, but he called the guidelines themselves disappointing.
“There’s not really anything substantial that’s going to make the well-being and lives of people in encampments much better,” he said.
“People need things like clean drinking water, places to shower, food, safe heat sources. There’s nothing in the protocol about any of those things.”