LEVY: City 'overwhelmed' by refugee claimants
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A briefing note to Monday’s budget committee says Toronto can no longer accommodate an ongoing influx of refugees wanting to be housed in the city’s shelter system.
“Toronto’s shelter system is in immediate danger of being overwhelmed,” says the seven-page update from Paul Raftis, general manager of the city’s Shelter, Support and Housing department.
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Raftis notes –as we’ve heard before — that an average of 18 new refugee claimants are seeking accommodation in city shelters daily and from the beginning of last September to the end of the year alone, 2,066 irregular migrants have turned up at Toronto’s shelters.
Despite adding more than 2,500 shelter beds at the city’s own cost, there was a shelter wait list of 330 people as of Jan. 9.
The total cost to house, feed and provide supports to the refugees hit $67.1-million in 2017 and 2018. The feds have only reimbursed the city in fits and starts to the tune of $26-million.
As Raftis states, some of that money has come of out of city reserves — set aside to deal with other social service emergencies — and $60-plus million could have been used for “other services” that help the homeless and near-homeless find housing.
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Besides reimbursing the remaining expenses outstanding from 2017 and 2018 — some $43-million — the city is looking for another $45-million in stable funding from the feds to deal with the costs in 2019.
Not one person on the budget committee asked a single question about this briefing note Monday.
That’s not at all surprising considering most of them would prefer to tune out the fact that the current shelter crisis is in large part because 40% of the beds are being occupied by the very refugees Prime Minister Justin Trudeau welcomed to Canada with open arms in January 2017 — with no plan to accommodate them.
That was a huge factor, together with the very public media conference that same month by many council members reiterating that Toronto is a Sanctuary City.
Raftis notes that despite repeated requests by the city to the province and feds to adopt a regional strategy that would offload some of the refugee pressures outside of Toronto, not much has happened.
A federal “pilot” only housed five to 10 families beyond Toronto’s borders and now the feds refuse to go any further with a regional response unless the province joins the discussions. The province has said beyond the $3-million contribution it made to Toronto in May (for temporary housing in two college dorms) it will not “financially support” the housing of refugees.
So Trudeau and Border Security Minister Bill Blair have essentially hung Toronto out to dry.
As the briefing note states: “The city has effectively been left to shoulder the costs and to manage the continued influx of refugee claimants seeking shelter in a system that has reached a saturation point.”
SLevy@postmedia.com
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