Asylum seekers sleeping on Toronto streets as at-capacity city shelters overwhelmed
CBC
Two weeks after the City of Toronto said it would begin referring refugee claimants seeking beds in its at-capacity shelter system to federal programs, asylum seekers who recently arrived in Canada are struggling to find places to sleep.
Birck Teklau arrived in Toronto from Ethiopia on June 3 hoping to claim asylum because, he says, of political persecution in his home country.
The 34-year-old says he's been sleeping on the streets ever since — after being turned away from the city's shelter system day after day.
"I tried many times.... They say that we don't have [a] place," Teklau said in an interview. "I never expected this from Canada."
And he's not alone.
Teklau was one of more than a dozen asylum seekers from Africa who went to city hall Wednesday hoping to bring attention to their inability to find housing.
The city says it needs more financial support from the federal government to handle increasing demand for emergency shelter by residents and refugees, but it's unclear when or if that additional money will arrive. In the meantime, dozens of asylum seekers are stuck in limbo, unable to access the city's shelter system and lacking support from the federal government.
On May 31, Deputy Mayor Jennifer McKelvie said the city's approximately 9,000-bed shelter system was at capacity nightly, and it could no longer cope with the high number of refugee claimants hoping to access a bed. She said the city had no choice but to start referring them to Immigration Refugees and Citizenship Canada programs — though there are currently no federal shelter programs that provide housing to people in Toronto, according to the city.
City officials say over the past 20 months, the number of asylum seekers in Toronto's shelter system has multiplied by more than 500 per cent, from a low of about 530 people a night in September of 2021 to more than 2,800 in May of 2023.
The city budgets each year for 500 shelter spaces for asylum seekers per night, but an additional 2,300 refugee claimants were being accommodated despite the city having no additional funding for them, the city said in a news release at the time.
As a result, hundreds of people seeking shelter — both refugee claimants and non-refugee claimants — are being turned away each day, according to Gord Tanner, the general manager of the city's shelter, support and housing administration division.
"We do admit people when there's space, but currently there's just no space," Tanner said in an interview.
The lack of open beds at city shelters has left local organizations struggling to help those in need.
Meserat Demeke, president of the Ethiopian Association of the Greater Toronto Area, said volunteers with her organization found more than 20 Ethiopian newcomers sleeping on the sidewalk Monday outside of a downtown homeless support centre.
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