The Decibel - Mayors call for help with ‘humanitarian crisis’ of homelessness

Episode Date: August 15, 2024

A coalition of mayors across Ontario are pleading for help in what they call a “humanitarian crisis” on their streets. They say the issues of homelessness, drug addiction and mental health are beyond their capacity to handle, and they need a more sustained and well-funded support from higher levels of government.Burlington Mayor and Chair of Ontario’s Big City Mayors Marianne Meed Ward joins us to talk about why cities went public with their plea. Then, the Globe and Mail’s Queen’s Park reporter Jeff Gray talks about how this fits into the longstanding struggle between cities and provinces over funding social services.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

Ontario municipalities are struggling. There are too many people unhoused, living in encampments or other unsafe conditions. And they're struggling with mental health and addictions issues. What is happening on our streets across this province is an unprecedented humanitarian crisis. That's Marianne Mead-Ward, the mayor of Burlington, Ontario, at a press conference last week. Municipalities across the country are dealing with the growing issues of homelessness, tent encampments, and the opioid crisis, from big cities to small rural communities. And mayors are saying they cannot handle this on their own. Last week, the Ontario Big City Mayors Group, which represents several municipalities,

launched a campaign asking for more help from the provincial and federal governments. So today, I'm talking to Mayor Marianne Mead-Ward of Burlington. She's chair of the Ontario Big City Mayors Group that launched this campaign. She'll explain why municipalities aren't able to handle these issues on their own, what they're asking for, and what mayors like her are seeing on their streets. Then I'll speak to Jeff Gray, The Globe's Ontario politics reporter. He'll tell us what this says about the relationship between municipalities and provinces and whose responsibility it is, ultimately, to deal with these issues.

I'm Rachel Levy-McLaughlin, and this is The Decibel, from The Globe and Mail. Mayor Meadward, welcome to The Decibel. Thank you for having me. You're the head of this group representing several mayors in Ontario that are dealing with these issues around homelessness and addiction. Can you give me a picture of what the crisis looks like from a mayor's perspective? When you look in Hamilton, for example, there were 1,592 homeless people. Kingston, 1,900 individuals receiving some type of service related to homelessness.

London, 1,750 individuals experiencing homelessness. That's just a small snapshot. Across the province, there are 1,400 different encampments, and there are, in some cases, a dozen or more people living in those encampments. And there are, in some cases, you know, a dozen or more people living in those encampments. So that gives you a picture of the magnitude, and it continues to grow and increase. And so that's part of our concern and the urgency for dealing with this now, especially before winter comes. But this is an issue that our caucus has actually been focused on for a number of years, starting back in 2021, when we developed a white paper with some policy

options and presented it to the government. So this isn't a new issue for us, but we've just seen an enormous increase in the number of people who are unhoused and struggling with mental health and addictions. How have you seen it change on the streets of Burlington are unhoused and struggling with mental health and addictions. How have you seen it change on the streets of Burlington? Well, we're seeing people pitch tents. We haven't seen permanent encampments. We have a very proactive, compassionate approach. And at the moment, we have the ability for folks that we see on our streets to offer them either a shelter bed or if our shelters are full to put them up in a hotel room until we can figure out transitional housing and ultimately permanent housing. So we've been able to manage, but I know that we could get overwhelmed very

quickly, just like other communities. And why aren't cities equipped to handle these issues on their own? Well, we simply don't have the resources. And our really single source of revenue is property taxes and user fees. And of course, that's an issue right away for folks who have no money and are living on the streets in the first place. And property taxes were never intended to address homelessness, to address mental health, addictions. Those are provincial and to some extent federal responsibilities. And they have the resources to deal with these issues, but more importantly, to develop a comprehensive plan that will solve it for all communities. If you make an investment in one community, for example, for supportive housing or services for mental health and addictions, but not in the neighboring community, you'll draw everyone from that community over to access those services.

So a piecemeal approach is not going to work. We need a comprehensive action plan that allows people to stay in their own communities and get the services they need right at home. And have you, as big city mayors, have you had to sort of spend your own city money on these issues? Oh, absolutely. We believe it's more important to deal with this humanitarian crisis that we see unfolding rather than to wrangle over jurisdictional issues and who's going to pay because people are dying in our streets, overdosing, dying from exposure. And so municipalities have stepped up using taxpayer dollars and diverting those from what they were originally intended for to help. And we've seen proven success. In one case in London, after they opened a supportive housing unit, and there was federal and provincial investment in that as well, but also municipal dollars, they saw a 74% reduction in hospital visits.

So we have done everything we can, and we're asking the government now to help us to implement these solutions and give them proper funding to roll them out in all communities across the province. And who do you turn to now for support sort of in the provincial government? Well, the challenge there is that there's no single ministry that has carriage of this issue. We have Minister Tabolo, who is terrific, has an extensive background, very compassionate individual. This is the Associate Minister of Addiction and Mental Health in Ontario, right? Exactly. And credit to this government, that ministry portfolio did not exist prior to this

government coming in. So they at least recognized that it would be helpful to have someone to have eyes on this. But there are 16 different ministries that this issue touches. And Minister Tabolo does not have staff or the ability that I'm aware of to direct other ministries. That's not how it works. And so who's the one person that can bring together all of the different departments and ministries with appropriate resources, funding and staffing to get the job done? And so that's what we're asking for. And it's not about creating a brand new ministry and infrastructure. It's about appointing a single point of contact that can implement an action plan. We really believe that

that would be an appropriate, easy solution to start as a first step. And that individual calling together an action table to implement policy recommendations that have been there for some time. As you mentioned, this does seem to be largely about funding. And I just want to talk through a couple numbers that we got from Ontario and the federal government. So a spokesperson for the Ontario Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing said they've boosted their annual allotment for community and supportive housing by 40% and that they pledged around $400 million over three years towards mental health and addiction services. The federal government pointed to over a billion dollars that they spent on mental health and addiction services in Ontario. Why isn't that

enough? Do we still have encampments? We do. And that tells you right there is that it's still unfolding on our street. And I would also say that a funding announcement is not an action plan. It doesn't deal with this comprehensively for every community. If you are one of the lucky communities to get funding, that's great. We don't begrudge any community getting that support. They need it works now, even for mental health and addictions, we have to wait for a funding envelope to open. We have to hope we meet the criteria. we have to put in an application, hope that our application is successful and hope that we get what we asked for. All of those steps and the fact that there is no guarantee and no certainty, how can you plan for a major multi-year capital project on a hope and a dream of getting some of those dollars that are being dispensed by federal and provincial governments? So we need a comprehensive plan nationwide, but let's start in Ontario and perhaps lead the way,

that solves this issue for every community comprehensively. And your group is calling on the public to lend their voice to this as well. I'm just curious why take this to the public? So the public has actually taken this issue to us. I will tell you that I get so many calls from residents when they see tents in Burlington, when they see people living on the streets or living rough in our parks and our ravines, they call me and say, what are you doing? I'm very concerned about the well-being of this individual. And it is a very compassionate response. And they want me to do something about it. They don't want to hear that it's not a municipal responsibility or we don't have the resources. And so we act. And every mayor is hearing that from our community is that this

is something that needs to change. We're hearing it from our businesses downtown, where in some municipalities where encampments are down in their, you know, in the core of their business district, businesses are threatened with having to close because customers aren't coming down, they can't access the businesses. That's one of the reasons is that the community has asked us to do something. But the other is that governments have shown, and this government in particular has shown, that it is responsive to public input. And if enough people raise their voices and say, look, we need you to act, we want you to act, we've seen the government change, we've seen the government step in and act. So we are hoping that that will also happen in this situation. And, you know, we're grateful for the

steps that they have taken, for sure. But it is not an action plan. It is not sufficient to the need. And what happens if you don't get the funding that you're asking for? People will continue to die on our streets. Mayor Meadward, thank you so much for being here today. Thanks for your interest. Really appreciate it. After the break, I'll talk to The Globe's Ontario politics reporter, Jeff Gray, about the longstanding funding battles between municipalities and the province over social services. Jeff, good to have you back with us. Thanks for having me.

So you've covered both municipal and provincial politics. And so I'm wondering if you can sort of walk me through who is responsible for these issues around homelessness and addiction. Well, I mean, this is the central argument that the mayors have made, and it's not a new argument. It's something that various mayors have talked about over the years, which is that cities have been forced to take on a whole bunch of duties that they weren't ever intended to be responsible for. The province is the entity that runs the health care system. The province runs the social assistance system. But cities have been asked to do all sorts of things over the years,

and in particular over the past couple decades, have seen a lot of responsibility dumped onto them without the money that you need to actually carry out those responsibilities. And the mayor of Burlington, Mayor Mead Ward, said that property taxes that the municipalities are getting are not designed to pay for these types of supports. What's the story there? So, yeah, property taxes, you know, the argument the mayors make are an instrument that isn't suited to do things that, say, a welfare state should be doing. Property taxes don't go up with the economy the way income taxes do. The other thing about property taxes is they're regressive whether you're rich or poor you pay your property tax based on the value of your home of your property but income tax of course we structure the income tax system ideally on paper that richer folks pay more so that you have a redistributive effect there. So cities have always complained that they don't have the resources to do all sorts of

things that they're asked to do. Homeless shelters, all sorts of programs that they run. And as a result, if you look at a city budget in Ontario, cities actually are kind of flow through vehicles for funding that is delivered from other governments. And then the city delivers the program now if we want to nerd out and go way back into history like this this complaint about hey we're the city we don't have enough resources to do these things you want us to do this is not a new issue this is a very old issue if you go back to uh the depression welfare what we refer

to as social assistance for people, relief, they called it then, that was solely a city responsibility. So what happened in the 1930s was every single municipality in Ontario went bankrupt, went insolvent, could not raise enough taxes to pay the bills for all of these people, a huge number of people who had no job and needed relief, right? So what the Ontario government did of the day in the 30s is they basically took over the finances of all municipalities. They created this thing called the Ontario Municipal Board. Back then, it was set up to oversee the books for all of these delinquent municipalities that had all gone bankrupt.

So you had this kind of restructuring in the 1930s. And for the next decades, the provincial government wrote checks for a lot of what municipalities had to do. So beyond the sort of health care and social assistance and things like that, you know, in the 1980s, what was then Metro Toronto, half its road budget was paid for by Queen's Park. The provincial government. Yeah. When you get the 80s and 90s, governments start to pull out of this business. They don't want to be writing checks anymore for municipalities. Everybody is tightening their belts.

And people start to talk about the conservative government of Mike Harris in the 1990s. You also have the liberals in Ottawa, Kretchen, Paul Martin, pulling back the transfer checks that they give to provinces. So you have a whole pulling away from funding all this stuff. And we have a downloading of it onto municipalities. And in the Toronto context, what you have happen is a lot of this stuff ends up the sole responsibility of the city. Even though they're not necessarily getting the right funding to pay for these things. Yes, one would say almost because. Right.

I mean, it took it off the province's books. They could say, look at our budget isn't so bad anymore. But the problem had been swept under the rug and left to municipalities to take care of. So then you have all these sort of cost sharing battles, which is sort of what this is echoing now today. Ambulances in Ontario are shared service and they fight over who should pay for what public health. You know, these are all services that municipalities deliver, but go looking for checks from other governments. And homelessness, obviously, is a big one. And that's their focus now. So how significant is it that the municipalities are making these requests as part of this public facing campaign rather than sort of in behind closed door meetings?

Yeah, I mean, I think cities do have meetings with the provincial government. They obviously have met with relevant ministers, and they have a series of asks that they must not have been getting anywhere on. It's a tactic they've used before, for sure. I think it maybe reflects the urgency of the situation and the amount of feedback these mayors are getting in their communities. You're getting a lot of people who are seeing a lot of people in desperate situations on the streets in cities that 10 years ago wouldn't have had anywhere near this kind of problem. And the other thing is the cities have been fighting with the provincial government on another set of similar issues, which had to do with how much money they can ding developers for when they want to build a new housing development or

whatever, how much money they can get out of them to build pipes and roads and all the stuff they need to serve that development. They're called development charges. Cities have increasingly relied on them. And that's been seen as a barrier to building all this housing that we always talk about how we need all this housing. So they've been fighting that battle. They have obviously the mayors have switched to this issue, which is, you know, everyone agrees is a super urgent social issue. I mean, this is a problem that, you know, used to be a big city problem. And now it's an everywhere problem. What's it like for the municipalities to balance the relationship with the higher levels of government? I mean, there's always a tension for speaking out, you know, being a mayor that will

come out and say, this government's terrible, and they're shortchanging us, versus they're great partners, and we really want to work with them. I think governments usually, even when they hate each other, use a lot of very sycophantic language, you know, thank the minister, you know, thank you so much for this 14 million dollars that will transform our homeless system. You know, there's a lot of that kind of language. That's the language you hear in press conferences. Right. I mean, this is they are they have to be careful. They don't bite the hand that feeds them.

It's the only lifeline they have. So they have to be very diplomatic since so much of your funding comes from this government. So Jeff, Mayor Meadward talked about setting up a single ministry to deal with these issues and about getting long-term funding, developing an action plan. How feasible do you think these requests are? I think the issue of creating one minister with the power to do all this, that's going to be difficult. The health ministry, I mean, that is the single biggest thing that the government does, is run the healthcare system. So you're not going to have somebody who will trump the Minister of Health. So how they structure

that or figure that out, you know, maybe if you have an action plan that everyone agrees on, and the cities are happy with the framework that you lay out, you've got a way to move forward. The funding issue also will be difficult to sort out, partly for the same reason, is you have a bunch of ministries and you have the provincial government with its own priorities. And it has increased the sort of pocket of money that the cities like, which is money that is just sent to them without them having to apply. And it'd be, you know, just routine funding for homelessness. The government, to its credit, has increased that envelope quite a bit to $700 million,

a $200 million increase per year. And that money is given to the people who operate the homeless shelters and everything else. And they don't have to ask for it and do a little dance to get it every year. But to put that in perspective, 700 million sounds like a lot of money. But the City of Toronto alone, its shelter department has a $800 million budget. So it sounds like it would be difficult to get a lot of these through, but I'm wondering how likely it is that the provincial or federal governments would deliver on these requests. cities singing from the same songbook. They're actually all at this big conference with the Association of Municipalities of Ontario in Ottawa this weekend. And, you know, it may be that something is announced there that the government says something uses that as an opportunity to, you'll also hear, I think, more of these requests at that conference where municipalities do have a chance to meet with provincial officials and each other.

And they say, and there's no reason to doubt them, it's their number one issue now. Jeff, it's always great to talk to you. Thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. That's it for today. I'm Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. This episode was produced by Kevin Sexton. Our producers are Madeline White and Michal Stein. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer.

And Matt Frainer is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening.