Homeless death rate ‘staggering,’ activists say
‘Our city is failing,’ councillor says of data showing average of more than 2 deaths per week this year
Homeless people in Toronto are dying at a rate of more than two per week on average, according to disturbing new data collected by the city.
From January to the end of March 2017, a total of 27 homeless deaths were tracked in an expanded research initiative led by Toronto Public Health and supported by about 200 health and social services agencies. The median age of the deceased is 51.
“It’s a sign that our city is failing,” said city Councillor Joe Cressy (TrinitySpadina). “It seems to me in a city as wealthy as ours that to have dozens of people dying on the streets is wrong, it’s disturbing and it’s a failure on all of us. While we might not be able to prevent the loss of every life, we certainly can prevent many of these if we do more.”
Advocates for the homeless have long maintained that efforts thus far to accurately count the dead have underreported the true scope of the tragedy.
Previously, the city recorded deaths only in city-administered shelters; that number for all of 2016 was 33.
The death rate for 2017, if it continues at two per week through December, would top 100 — the most ever recorded in Toronto.
“While we hoped the new numbers would not be much higher, the results thus far are not unexpected,” said Paul Fleiszer, manager of surveillance and epidemiology at Toronto Public Health, referring to the new data. “Unfortunately, the real number may even be higher because we are at the early stages of the project and still getting more agencies to come on board to the reporting system.”
As a comparison to the 27 deaths recorded in the first three months of 2017 by Toronto Public Health and its partners, volunteers with the Toronto Homeless Memorial recorded 11 over the same period.
The memorial is an unofficial record of homeless people in the GTA who have died since the 1980s. Deaths are vetted and the list maintained by outreach volunteers, such as street nurses and social workers. There are more than 850 names on the memorial; its highest annual death count was 72 in 2005.
Cathy Crowe is a longtime street nurse and distinguished visiting practitioner at Ryerson University’s department of politics and public administration. She said the new numbers from the city confirm that previous death counts have been historically under-reported — something advocates for the homeless and health workers have been saying for more than a decade.
“This is a wake-up call,” Crowe said. “Doing this research is just not for the sake of counting. It is to identify ways to prevent deaths . . . I can tell you absolutely that access to emergency shelters, harm reduction, warming centres and better-funded drop-ins are key.”
Fleiszer said the homeless are one of the city’s vulnerable populations “because they are more at risk for adverse health outcomes and contribute disproportionately to early death and other morbidities.”
Fleiszer highlighted the age of the decedents.
“The young age at which homeless people die is reflected in the current data that shows the median age is 51 years. This means that half of this group is in fact younger than 51,” he said.
The city’s tracking system is collecting information such as age, gender, unofficial cause of death and the location of death, history of homelessness and whether the deceased is of Indigenous heritage. Individual-level data, such as names, will be kept confidential. The data for all of 2017 will be released in an annual report early next year.
The city began its expanded death monitoring in January, 11 months after a Star investigation found that the province and most Ontario municipalities have no mandate to track homeless deaths comprehensively, if at all.
The Star chronicled the life of Brad Chapman, a homeless Toronto man, who died at age 43 in the hospital following a drug overdose in August 2015. Because Chapman did not die in a city-administered shelter, and his death was not deemed suspicious, he became an invisible statistic.
Leigh Chapman, Brad Chapman’s sister, called the 27 deaths recorded to date by the city, “staggering.” A registered nurse, she said city councillors must act on the findings.
“They can’t just pass the motion to track the deaths, and that’s the end of it.”