Homelessness advocates are criticizing the city’s cold weather policy and demanding Mayor John Tory take action to protect street-involved people this winter, following the deaths of two men who were found outside on successive frigid mornings.
On Monday, emergency crews were called to a shipping yard at Davenport and Wiltshire in the city’s west end just before 9 am to find a man in an abandoned delivery van. He was pronounced dead at the scene. It’s not yet known how or when he died, but police say he was approximately 60 years of age.
Then on early Tuesday, paramedics were called to a bus shelter at Yonge and Dundas where a man was found wearing only a T-shirt, jeans, and hospital bracelet. He was taken to St. Michael’s Hospital, where he later died.
In response to the deadly incidents, protestors with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty stormed into Tory’s office at about 1:30 pm Tuesday afternoon to demand the city declare an extreme cold weather alert and open up more shelter space.
“The city has to do something. We are in a massive crisis right now. Two people dying in the last 48 hours is too many,” OCAP’s Zoe Dodd told reporters outside the mayor’s office, while 10 other protesters waited inside. “We need this mayor, who says he wants to be serious about homelessness and poverty, to actually do something. We need it today.”
Tory did not meet with the protesters, but they left his office around 2:30 pm when his spokesperson issued a statement saying he had directed the city manager to open two warming centres for the homeless “immediately.” It’s not clear how long they would stay open, but the spokesperson said Tory and city staff would monitor the situation closely.
Despite the mayor’s decisions, advocates are still asking why the city didn’t declare a cold weather alert earlier this week. The declaration of an alert triggers additional services for the homeless, including the opening up of more shelter beds and the activation of two warming centres on the east and west side of downtown. The normal restrictions for admission to shelters are also relaxed, and city and non-profit agencies are directed to step up outreach efforts in order to encourage homeless people to come indoors.
In the past, the city’s shelter administration was responsible for declaring an alert whenever the temperature was forecast to be -15 ° celsius or lower. But under a new policy council approved last year, authority for declaring an alert was transferred to Toronto Public Health. The criteria for declaring an alert was also expanded to take into account wind chill and “other weather conditions.”
According to Environment Canada, the temperatures overnight Sunday and Monday hit -22 °C and – 21 ° celsius with the wind chill factored in, but Public Health didn’t issue an alert on either day.
In an interview Dr. Howard Shapiro, Toronto’s associate medical officer of health, said that Public Health decides whether to call an alert on any given day by checking the Environment Canada 24-hour forecast between 6 or 7 am. The temperature, wind chill, and other conditions are considered.
The weather earlier this week didn’t meet the alert criteria, “although it did approach it,” Shapiro said. He stressed that extreme cold alerts are not intended to “prevent all hypothermia deaths,” which can occur at relatively high temperatures, even those above 0°C. Instead the system is mean to prevent “health impacts from the cold when the weather is very extreme.”
“The system that we set up is trying to be a balancing act between getting services in place, but not doing it too much that it becomes routine or too taxing,” he said. He called the two deaths this week “unfortunate,” but maintains that Public Health made the right decision.
But Cathy Crowe, a veteran homelessness advocate and street nurse, says Public Health should have declared an alert Sunday night. Not only were temperatures low enough to pose a threat to anyone sleeping on the street, she argues, but it was the first cold snap in months, making it especially dangerous.
“People are not prepared,” she said. “They may not have belongings, appropriate gear.” Crowe met with Shapiro in December November and urged him to lower the threshold for when an alert should be called, but she says she was told there was no evidence to support doing so.
Speaking to reporters on Tuesday morning, Mayor John Tory said he didn’t know whether an alert should have been called, and that the decision was up to the medical officer of health. But he declared that homeless people dying outside was unacceptable.
“The death of anyone on the streets of Toronto, any single person ever, is one too many. We have to redouble our efforts,” he said. “We have to make sure that the cold weather alerts are being declared, and what goes with that of course is some extra facilities and shelters to help people.”
The mayor said that beyond the threats posed by cold weather, there is a need to reform the overall shelter system, which he described as “over capacity” and unable to cope with the high number of clients who have mental health issues. According to city statistics shelters continue to operate at 94 or 95 per cent occupancy, despite a 2013 council directive to lower crowding to 90 per cent.
City staff is expected to update council in March on the state of the shelter system, and Deputy Mayor Pam McConnell is working on a poverty reduction strategy that will be unveiled this spring. Tory acknowledged, however, that neither initiative would have an immediate impact.
On Tuesday afternoon, the city issued a press release saying additional homelessness services were being put in place in anticipation of a cold weather alert being issued Wednesday morning. Temperatures are expected to reach – 30 ° celsius with the wind chill.
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