The Ben Mulroney Show - The issue with Toronto shelters. We put the questions to a Toronto City Councillor

Episode Date: August 19, 2025

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That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P.com slash Mulruni. Welcome back to the Ben Mulanee show. My microphone was unplugged. I have no idea how that happened. But welcome back to the show. Thank you very much for joining us. There are a number of issues that are plaguing cities around this country. And one of them is, because we see it with our eyes and we see it with our ears,

that our fellow citizens in whatever city that you live in are grappling with issues of addiction and homelessness and mental health crisis. and all of these issues are related. Now, I fall on a very particular side of this debate, and I very much want to understand the other side. I think a productive conversation would help all of us. I need to hear from the other side of this debate in order for us to have an understanding of how we can move forward and where the solutions may lie.

And so we've put the call out to a number of municipal leaders across this country because this is a national, a national concern. If you have a beating heart, you care about your fellow citizens. And so I think that is the position that we all want to start from and hopefully have a better understanding

after these conversations about how we can move forward. I'm very pleased that Councilor Shelley Carroll of Don Valley North in the city of Toronto answered our call and was willing to come on and have this conversation. Councillor Carroll has been served on Toronto City Council since 2003.

and we welcome her to the show. Thank you very much for joining us, counselor. Hello, Ben. Thank you very much. So this is, look, like I said, you would have to be, you would have to be an unfeeling ghoul not to see the suffering of our fellow

Torontoians and not feel for them and not want better for them. And it feels a counselor like we are not on a path that is leading to better. And that's how, That's what I see with my eyes. That's what the listeners to the Ben Mulroney show tell me. How do you see it?

Well, we're trying to be on that path now. Just recently, we approved a plan for six new shelters, but it's not just a matter of building more. What we're doing is changing the way we serve people in shelters so that, A, they'll be willing to come in because they don't get served when they're living in parks or living on the street. And so what we've done is a lot of research and understanding to look at what's the best way to do it. We know that some of the shelters in our city are too large. We know that if you sort of cap it at 80, 80 or fewer beds is really the magic number. Because at that number, you can do real casework. And so, when you're making a new start, not making a new home you're going to stay in forever.

So just give me an example because I, you know, we can't get into these shelters. There's privacy reasons, obviously. But talk to me about somebody walks into one of these shelters and these new shelters. And we should, we should tell the listeners of the show because we have a national audience that the city of Toronto is embarking on, on, as you said, not just having these shelters all concentrated downtown, but spread out throughout the greater Toronto area. And we will talk, we'll talk about the issues around that very choice. in a few minutes, but before we do, walk me through what happens when somebody walks into one of these shelters? What's the pathway for them?

What are the options? What are the services available? Well, first of all, they go through intake at a central point because we want to try and put them in the right one. We want to put them close to the people that they're used to living near, if at all, possible. And we want to put them in a shelter that matches their services. You talked about addiction and mental health.

really about only about 25% of the people currently seeking shelter spaces in Toronto identify as fully addicted. 40% of them, though, identifies people with mental health challenges. And so we look at where are the supports for those, and if we can put them in a shelter that has those, we do. Once they walk in the door, the first thing that we do is look at where have you been in the most recent time. So if they've been sleeping in a park or sleeping out for a long time, they're probably in

rougher shape than someone that was able to couch surf and stay indoors, but now they're coming. And so right away, you want to place them in a bed, but also make sure that the shelter staff are now taking care to make sure that that person begins making his journey back to, you know, regular life and gets to know the ways of the shelter. Because if you get them to that point, then it's only a matter of a couple of days before you can say, okay, now that you're here, we have a caseworker that's going to be your friend here. And that person's job is to speed up the process of that person being able to live independently.

If we have a housing benefit that we can get them into housing, that caseworker is now going to make sure that this is a person who could handle that. Counselor, I want that. It's different for each person. Counsel, you know, this is an issue that is facing cities across this country. And, you know, there was a story out of Victoria, BC, and they have their own issues. They're tackling homelessness and addiction and mental health in their own ways. But there was a story where a sergeant with the Victoria Police Department said that the issue is isn't that some of these people are unhoused.

The issues that some of them, unfortunately, are unhousable. He said it isn't a housing issue. It's a drug issue. It's a mental health issue. People need off-ramps, treatment, long-term care, but we don't offer them any of that. Now, you just said that 40% of the people who are ingested into these shelters have mental health issues. Can we agree that we are nowhere close to having the mental health supports for these people who so desperately need them in any way, shape, or form? Everyone I talk to says we do not have nearly the capacity to help the people with mental health issues that need.

that's 100% true this country needs a far more robust mental health system and and that's a constant point of advocacy that we have and every city has with their province and then with the federal government because it's those two orders of government that deal with the health system and and that's why homelessness has become fundamentally a health issue sure people people make bad choices in their life and that can sometimes lead to you do falling on hard times, but when you have such a large percentage that are there because they fell apart over a mental health issue, that's a failure of the health system. Yes.

And so that is a big part of what we do. And, you know, in a way, they're rebuilding their mental health system by giving us piece by piece funds to, okay, you need mental health supports in your shelter system, we'll give you this amount of money and you provide this service. They're rebuilding it, but piecemeal, and they're rebuilding in their way that they're they are downloading to cities. But, Counselor, I think... The rebuild of a new mental health system.

We think they should just begin to look at their hospital system doing what they did 30 years ago. Counselor, I think the issue for a lot of people who will hear this conversation is everything that you're saying makes sense. But in the absence of that leg of the table, right, the mental health supports, every other leg doesn't serve the purpose that it is intended to serve. Meaning, when we talk about harm reduction as well, and that's part of this conversation, right? When we talk about the city that values and prioritizes harm reduction, if you don't have the requisite off-ramp for mental health supports, then a lot of Torontoians, a lot of people around this country believe that harm reduction is simply punting the ball and making it easier, more permissive, for people to take that path of least resistance, as I've heard drug addicts refer to it. they will always a drug addict will always take the path of least resistance they will never do the hardest thing and they will always choose drugs over anything else and when we make it easier for them to do that without giving them the requisite mental health option that all we are doing is subsidizing a drug use in this city and there was a story in the star that said that you know there's one harm reduction site street health that estimates that it distributes about 400 to 500 sterile crack kits a day, and that same manager claims that more people choose to smoke crack outside because the site only has three booths for supervision.

So if you look at the numbers, you're talking about hundreds of people every single day from this one site. They're being subsidized to do crack outdoors in the community where others are trying to live their lives. That, to me, is a fundamental issue with how we're dealing with the problem. Right. And that is happening in some major cities. For the city, though, in the absence of the addiction services

that should be being provided by those other orders of government, including recovery services, detox services, getting people out of addiction, in the absence of those things, what most of these did was vote that the opioid crisis was a health crisis, and the job one was preventing death. So harm reduction services are about preventing deaths. Now, those are being reduced. The province has taken away our ability to run any safe injection sites.

Those are all closed down now. None of those exist in shelters or independently at health centers. We don't disagree with the province of Ontario's new approach of having these health hubs, heart health hubs, that are going to begin to address addiction and reduce the number of people suffering an addiction. Great. Absolutely great. But they're not coming fast enough. They're not opening fast enough, but the safe injection sites wrote down. So, Councilor, I'm going to.

Providing harm reduction equipment. Yeah. And that is about preventing death, preventing disease, and relieving the burden on the hospitals. Counselor, I'm up against. Some of those harm reduction equipment, these people end up in the ER where we're all trying to get service as well. Counselor, I'm up against the clock. I want to thank you very much for coming in. I really want to make sure the next time you come on, we have more time to discuss this.

I think this is a really important issue. And I think having a productive, respectful conversation is the only way forward. I hope you'll agree to come back sometime soon. Happy to, because this is a topic that I think we all need to deeply understand. I really appreciate you're trying to understand. Hey, so what did you want to do? talk about. Well, I want to tell you about Wagovi. Yeah, Wagovi. What about it?

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