Toronto has accepted Ottawa’s offer to use the Better Living Centre at Exhibition Place as an emergency shelter.
The deal also includes $5 million in operational costs.
The offer comes after Toronto sent a letter to Ottawa on Nov. 8 signed by Mayor Olivia Chow and city councillors requesting that federal armouries be opened, set up a reception centre near Pearson Airport, and make long-term investments.
On Wednesday, Chow released the official letter on X in response to the federal government’s offer.
Winter is coming. This cannot wait.
City Council is demanding the federal government open the armouries as emergency indoor accommodation.
Read our letter to @BillBlair and @HarjitSajjan: pic.twitter.com/sehFTom17S
— Mayor Olivia Chow (@MayorOliviaChow) November 22, 2023
“It is the responsibility of the federal government to support people who have been forced to flee their homes and have arrived in Canada looking to build a new life,” she said in the letter.
Toronto has been asking the federal government to fund and support the rise in asylum claimants that have nowhere to go with more pressure coming as temperatures continue to drop. Chow said in the letter the number of daily shelter needs over the last two years has grown from 6,000 to over 9,000. She highlighted that refugees make up 40 per cent of users.
She has criticized the federal government’s offer and is calling for more to be done.
Chow said on X that the city was already planning to open the Better Living Centre as part of their Winter Services Plan.
The city is already working to open the Better Living Centre. 200+ spaces is not a solution. We need more space and resources for this crisis, including the armouries, a reception centre and real funding to support the 5,100 – and growing – refugees the City is supporting,” she said in the tweet.
Chow said that the city’s shelter system was designed to respond to “local homelessness” and called the situation a “humanitarian crisis.”
Former nurse and activist Cathy Crowe thinks that the offer made by the federal government is “viable” but that Toronto “has the right” to negotiate for a better deal.
However, she said that Toronto and the surrounding municipalities need to also “step up.”
She highlighted that the asylum claimants who are primarily struggling to find shelter are Black refugees. Crowe said Black-led churches have stepped up to help provide spaces for the people left waiting outside the Central Intake facility on Peter Street last month.
“We watched a herculean effort by not-for-profit groups to do what the city should have been doing and now it’s almost December,” she said.
Crowe criticized Chow and Brampton Mayor Patrick Brown for not opening “potential municipal facilities” and said, “Enough is enough.”
A refugee asylum seeker died in an encampment outside a former shelter last week.
Brown called on the federal government to act, saying the situation was a “humanitarian crisis.”
Immigration Minister Marc Miller confirmed on Thursday that Peel Region Council ratified a deal to open a reception centre at Pearson Airport.
Brown said on X that the agreement will “save lives.”
“I thank Minister Miller for his hands-on approach to the asylum claimant crisis. I was hard on the federal government on this file (last week in particular) but credit where credit is due. They stepped up,” he said.