Edward Keenan: Now`s the time to help Toronto`s homeless, not next winter
(The Star Fashion & Style)

It’s the first week of spring. Time for the city’s government to start thinking about next winter.I know, I know — the snow has barely melted, and as I wrote Wednesday, our politicians seem to have already checked out in anticipation of the fall election. But the city ombudsman’s report into cold-weather shelter services provided to the homeless demands immediate attention. The problems it lays out and makes bare cannot wait. By the time the new council is elected and seated, another year of our annual crisis will be upon us, and it will be too late.What Ombudsman Susan Opler discovered in her investigation of the winter respite services would be shocking if headlines in December and January hadn’t already made clear just how ill-prepared the city has been to deal with people’s need for a warm place to sleep. The who’s-on-first level miscommunication baked into the city’s three different, unco-ordinated communication portals and their inability to share referral information with each other or the public in real time would be comical if we weren’t talking about a system that determines whether a person has to spend the night outdoors exposed to minus 15 C temperatures. That many of the fixes are actually relatively obvious and simple to implement would be heartening if not for the fact that both the problems and solutions have been blazingly evident for decades.Stepping back to survey the bigger picture: In 1996, a coroner’s inquest into the deaths of three Toronto homeless men called for short-term shelter support and long-term solutions such as supportive housing. In 1999, Mayor Mel Lastman declared homelessness a “national crisis,� and said we needed more shelter beds and more long-term solutions such as social housing. Overwhelming emergency demand in winter led Lastman (in the late 1990s) and Mayor David Miller (in 2004) to open the armouries. At every turn, the need for short-term prepa ...