Ariel Tozman –
The City of Toronto is sounding the alarm about its overwhelmed shelter system following federal and provincial cuts to housing programs for asylum seekers.
The federal government slashed Toronto’s tranche of the Interim Housing Assistance Program (IHAP) earlier this year, a move the municipal government has said will leave a projected shortfall of $107 million to shelter refugee claimants.
The Ford government is reducing the city’s share of the Canada-Ontario Housing Benefit (COHB), a rent supplement for low-income households, from $20 million to $8 million next year. COHB is the primary benefit to help people in need exit the shelter system, which turns away hundreds of people each evening
“We have been at capacity for quite a bit of time,” said Francisco Vidal, executive director of Sojourn House, a 24/7 emergency shelter and transitional housing program for refugees in Moss Park.
According to the city, two-fifths of people in the shelter system are refugee claimants. Hundreds of thousands of asylum applications are pending in Canada; processing times for some claimants average 44 months or more.
“Refugee claimants continue to arrive…highlighting the need for sustainable federal funding to ensure a coordinated response among municipalities,” Vera Dodic, the Toronto Shelter and Support Services’ director of refugee response, wrote in an email.
Toronto is asking for its COHB allotment to be increased to $54 million. The city says this would relieve pressure on the shelter system by allowing at least 300 households per month to secure permanent housing.
Without more financial support from the federal or provincial governments, Mayor Olivia Chow has warned, the municipality may have to cut critical services or raise taxes. Asked how likely it is that Toronto will roll back services for vulnerable asylum claimants, Dodic said “next steps will be determined through the budget process.”
A city report from 2023 shows 39 percent of Toronto’s homeless shelter and response sites are in Ward 13, which covers the Downtown East.
“Shelter [stays] are by design brief, rare and non-occurring, that’s the vision … and it’s anything but,” Vidal said. He said the average post-pandemic shelter stay at Sojourn has risen from three to six months to two years.
As of this article’s publication, Toronto has yet to reach an agreement with the federal government over its IHAP allocation, though Vidal said the city notified Sojourn House that federal-provincial funding for this year had run out.
“Unfortunately, some of our clients had been…pinning their hopes on being able to get some of those allocations,” he said, describing the cuts as a “double-edged sword.”
Toronto’s housing department distributes the COHB among shelters on a first-come, first-served basis. Medical and accessibility needs that could put someone at risk the longer they stay in the system are also taken into account, Vidal said.
Clients will stay put in shelters to improve their chances of moving up the waiting list for the “very few allocations.” So the notice that Toronto’s share of the COHB has run out for this year has actually been a reality check, he said, generating flow out of Sojourn House.
City staff work with shelters to identify people who can benefit from the program and are ready to move into housing, then refer their applications to the province.
Mayor Chow said the federal government is supposed to reimburse Toronto for about a quarter of what it expects to spend on housing refugee claimants, though she is pessimistic that it will pay up. Ottawa recently ended a nation-wide IHAP program that houses asylum seekers in hotels.
Vidal said assisting asylum claimants to exit the shelter program has become challenging because of the lack of affordable housing, lack of employment opportunities and some landlords’ xenophobic attitudes.
According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 131 million people were forcibly displaced last year. Per the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada website, the country “faces a significant rise in volumes of claims,” resulting in “increasing pressure on the asylum system.”
