Apartment building for refugee families set to open in Toronto's west end
CBC
A west-end refugee settlement centre is set to open an apartment building for newcomers starting later this month.
Romero House has been providing transitional housing to refugee claimants who have arrived in Canada without private or government sponsorship since 1991, its website reads.
It's now leasing 2387 Dundas St. W. with the help of city funding, and will house nine refugee claimant families and three house coordinators sometime in mid-October.
Romero House executive director Francesca Allodi-Ross told CBC Toronto that the 100-year-old building was recently renovated, but for a time it was largely vacant, purchased previously by a buyer as an investment.
She said her team is grateful "to be able to offer this beautiful space… to families fleeing horrible, horrible things from around the world in this housing crisis."
The opportunity came about when the building's current owners, a refugee family from Bulgaria, offered Romero House the chance to lease the building.
Owner Nikoleta Tchepileva said when she first came to Canada, no one helped her at first.
"And then my Bulgarian community helped me. And then I found the Canadian friends and they build they've been to me like a family," she said.
"So I told them, if someone help us, we have to help and and do what is correct to live here in Canada."
She said she and her husband want to use the building as a way to give back to the community. They previously leased the space to Eva's Initiatives for Homeless Youth and once that agreement ended they went searching for a new tenant and came across Romero House.
"This is the perfect organization to help, to work with them, to see anything what we can doing in our possibilities to help the refugees, people like us. We are all the same."
About 12,100 people are in city shelters and emergency accommodations, with approximately 53 per cent of them being refugee claimants, a City of Toronto spokesperson told CBC News in a statement. Every day more people land in Toronto needing support.
Allodi-Ross said the past few years have been tough for organizations like hers because resources are stretched thin.
"It's been hard on frontline staff to have to tell people, 'I don't know where you're going to sleep tonight. Try the airport lounge, try the subway.' It's hard."
More Alberta seniors are now eligible for a provincially funded RSV vaccine.
More than 100 workers at a steel plant in eastern Ontario are being laid off either temporarily or permanently, as a company with facilities in Quebec and Ontario cuts its workforce due to challenging market conditions — including U.S. tariffs.
A small town northwest of Thunder Bay, Ont., has become the unlikely home for hundreds of foreign workers, but many may have to leave the community they've embraced after the end of a federal program put in place to fill gaps in Canada's labour market.
There's mixed reaction in Waterloo to an injuction allowing police to detain, arrest and charge anyone who is participating in unsanctioned street parties in that city this weekend.
Diabetes Canada is excited about Prince Edward Island's new pharmacare deal with the federal government, but hopes the province will reevaluate copays on diabetes supplies, says a senior manager with the organization.
After 26 years of accommodating guests from across the world, Faith Embleton says she and her husband Ken are ready to sell their bed and breakfast.
A group of big-name companies including Google, Meta and Dow have signed a pledge to support tripling the world's nuclear energy capacity by 2050, a signal of the technology's growing resurgence in popularity.
Five years on, Toronto-area doctors and public health officials are looking back at what they've learned since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic — and most agree the early experience will prove useful if the city faces another infectious disease crisis.
City staff would like Londoners to take a good look around their home and ask themselves a direct and possibly difficult question: Could everyone in your family survive at home, without leaving and with no other help, for a full 72 hours?
Liberal Leader Mark Carney will officially become Canada's next prime minister within a few hours, taking the reins as the country barrels toward a general election and continues to fend off verbal and economic attacks from U.S. President Donald Trump.
Recent cyberattacks in Newfoundland and Labrador should have been a wake up call for the federal government about the reality of an increasingly hostile world, says one cybersecurity expert.
A recent CBC News analysis found that Nova Scotia is rapidly losing some of its most affordable apartments, but housing experts say there are ways to prevent that.
Premier Susan Holt is defending her decision to not use electricity exports to Maine as leverage against U.S. tariffs, arguing the move might cause long-term pain for New Brunswickers.