Marci Ien, MP
Toronto Centre, Ontario
430 Parliament Street
Toronto ON M5A 3A2
March 7, 2022.

Dear MP Marci Ien,

The Shelter and Housing Justice Network (SHJN) is a network of homelessness and housing advocates, shelter providers, healthcare professionals, faith leaders, legal workers, and researchers who have come together to address the issue of homelessness in Canada on a local, provincial, and national level. Operating under the mantra of “shelter rights, housing rights, human rights” SHJN seeks immediate action and long-term sustainable solutions in the shelter and housing sectors.

We are writing you today because homelessness has reached catastrophic proportions in Toronto and across Canada. People have been left to freeze to death on the streets of Toronto, Montreal, Labrador, Winnipeg. It is the inhumane housing policy of this federal government that has led to this humanitarian emergency.

In the City of Toronto, the emergency shelter system has collapsed, and the situation is about to deteriorate further with the closure of the shelter-hotels. People have nowhere to go. In your own riding, the epicenter of the homelessness disaster, a homeless man was recently found dead in a bus shelter, suspected cause of death is hypothermia.

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The vacant properties at 214-230 Sherbourne St. are back up for sale on the market. City Councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam passed a motion at last City Council meeting requesting staff to report back to Council Wednesday, March 9^th on the feasibility of purchasing the property for rent geared to income housing.  Bids are due by Friday, March 11^th.

This may be our last chance to win this site for social housing before it could be lost to private condo developers! This site sits in the epicentre of the housing and homelessness crisis in Toronto. It is the site of the freezing death of Drina Joubert in 1985. It is less than 150 yards from the bus shelter where a man died of suspected hypothermia on February 4^th of this year. It is one of the last corners of the neighbourhood that is not a condo development. If this corner is lost, it will have an enormously negative impact on the community and its services. Continue reading →

On February 4th 2022, it was reported that another homeless/unhoused man was found dead in a bus shelter at the corner of Shuter and Sherbourne St in the downtown east end of Toronto.  It is suspected that he died of hypothermia.  He died only 120 meters from the large, vacant property at 214-230 Sherbourne St., that advocates have long demanded be expropriated and turned into desperately needed social housing.

Every month, about 14 people are dying unhoused in the City of Toronto, including an Indigenous woman who died at one of the shelter hotels and someone who recently died near the Don Valley. The shelter system has collapsed and the City of Toronto is unable to provide even the basic life-saving measure of safe shelter. There are well over 8,700 people who are unhoused, with emergency shelters full, hundreds of people sleeping outside, with many thousands more forced to sleep in unsafe situations or couch surf. There are over 1,500 unhoused people that the shelter system cannot accommodate.

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