It’s that time of year again when we debate the terminology of the homelessness situation in Toronto. Cathy Crowe, the long-serving street nurse and anti-poverty advocate, reminds people often that this is not a cold-weather problem — people are suffering on the streets without adequate shelter in both the summer sun and winter ice — but something about the deep freeze of January makes the horror of the prospect of a night outdoors particularly vivid for the average Torontonian. It pierces our consciousness enough to provoke our empathy.And so when it dawns on all of us that people freezing on the streets is something we ought not to tolerate, naturally we start talking about terminology. Is this a crisis? An emergency? Many street advocates, such as Crowe, say it is — and they were joined by some city councillors at a press conference Tuesday morning to demand the city acknowledge as much by declaring a “State of Emergency.” Mayor John Tory, in a CBC radio appearance this week, declined to characterize the situation as a crisis — saying instead it was “urgent” — and responded to a question Tuesday by saying there would be no real-world effect to making an official declaration of an emergency. It would be purely symbolic, he said, and we ought to focus instead on housing solutions. Which is fair enough, as far as the sentiment goes. Except that it is very obviously an emergency, and if we had at any time in the past few decades actually implemented real solutions, we would no longer face such a dire crisis and its corresponding debate every year. I mean, it was in 1998 that Crowe’s Toronto Disaster Relief Committee first publicly declared a state of emergency on homelessness. The emergency level has not really abated at any point since then, and has only gotten worse. If anything, we’ve just grown so used to a full-blown humanitarian crisis unfolding all around us here in Canada’s most ...
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