Nearly $2 million spent on clearing encampments should have gone to housing, advocates say
CBC
Toronto spent nearly $2 million to clear encampments in three city parks this summer and homeless advocates say the amount doesn't include the hidden cost of displacing and scattering vulnerable people during a pandemic.
Advocates said the city should have spent the money on permanent housing and supports for unhoused people, which would have been a more compassionate approach to homelessness in Toronto. They added the total costs are likely much higher than the city has reported.
The city released the final costs of its violent evictions on Friday in a news release, saying the money was spent to enforce notices under Ontario's Trepass to Property Act, provide security, carry out landscaping and erect fencing in Trinity Bellwoods, Alexandra and Lamport Stadium parks.
Trepass enforcement cost a total of $840,127, while landscaping and remediation of park grounds for public use cost $792,668 and fencing cost $357,000. Police, including some on horseback, pushed dozens of people out of the parks mainly in June and July. Several people, including encampment supporters, were injured in clashes with police and several others were arrested and charged.
Doug Johnson Hatlem, a street pastor with Sanctuary Ministries of Toronto, said on Saturday that it is important to note the city is trying to make poverty invisible and has used taxpayers' money to push homelessness out of the public eye. In the process, it has traumatized people who were living in tents and had formed communities.
"That kind of enforcement is violent, immoral and completely out of bounds to begin with," Hatlem said.
"Fencing people in, using police with batons and horses, that's the first thing that's wrong with it. But the fact that it cost $2 million to remove 60 people, and that comes from the city's own numbers, is just beyond the beyond in terms of obnoxiousness. People could have been housed for years with that much money."
