Vulnerable city hopes for help on housing, health
Many community advocates are skeptical that election will deliver what Brampton needs
At Chinguacousy Park in Brampton, residents are trying to enjoy the last days of summer on a sunny Thursday afternoon. Dozens of children are here, their parents looking on. Seniors sit on benches enjoying lunch.
Voting day is fast approaching but many are trying to put it out of their minds. Their focus has been on making it through this year, at a time that has proven to be difficult for many in the community, park-goers told the Star.
“We’re all anxious to get back to normal,” said Joyce Temple-Smith, a retired Brampton resident who has lived in the area for 30 years. She counts herself lucky to have been able to stay home, knowing how many workers in the city were getting sick.
Brampton was Ontario’s epicentre for COVID-19 infections during the third wave. The area has a high percentage of temporary essential workers, often employed
in the city’s manufacturing corridor, which includes two Amazon fulfilment centres. Many workers have few sick days available to them — sometimes none.
And there is a feeling locally that a lack of social and health-care services made the pandemic worse. There is one hospital
in this city of about 600,000, a city that is second in growth in the GTA, behind Milton, according to Statistics Canada.
Today community members and service providers are doubtful the election
result will bring the funding and investments the city needs.
“We’re essential workers. There’s a reason why we’re seeing the transmission … a lot of the kind of systemic issues and chronic underinvestments in this community are really showing,” said Jaskaran Sandhu, a Brampton-based political strategist at recently launched State Strategy.
“To have an election called within the pandemic has left a bad taste in a lot of folks’ mouths here,” he added.
Among the issues that come up is child care, but $10-a-day daycare programs, like those pitched by the NDP and Liberals, do not fit everyone’s lifestyle, especially temporary workers, Sandhu said.
“I grew up in a family where my father drove an airport limo, and one day you’re at work all
day and off the next day. There’s 12-hour shifts, night shifts. A universal child-care plan doesn’t necessarily assist families in a community like Brampton.”
While most local candidates in the Brampton region (home to five federal ridings) talk about housing affordability, there remains a lack of affordable housing, said Sandhu, adding that building a few extra units won’t address the core problems either.
“Brampton is incredibly young and incredibly diverse, and home to a lot of new Canadians who need a lot more services and support. So the accessibility to your MP is actually critically important here,” he said.
Lack of affordability is blamed for undermining residents’ ability to live well in cities like Brampton. Significant, highlevel investments and deep policy changes are needed to change that environment, said Kwame McKenzie, the CEO of the Wellesley Institute, a Toronto-based research policy think tank.
“When you calculate it, it becomes fairly clear that the majority of families in the GTA do not have enough resources to live a healthy life,” he said.
The Institute published a report in September that shows in order for a family to thrive in the GTA, the household income would have to be between $103,032 and $136,428 after tax. The report found that close to half of households of four with children in the GTA do not make enough to meet this threshold. According to the 2016 Census, the average household income in Brampton was $85,038 after tax.
To be considered affordable, housing must cost 30 per cent or less of before-tax household
income, according to the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation. In 2016, 33 per cent of Brampton residents — and 43.5 per cent of renters — were spending more than that share on keeping a roof over their heads.
The affordable-housing scarcity has worsened in the last few years, with poorly maintained buildings being priced higher than ever before, said Ted Brown, the CEO of Regeneration Outreach Brampton, a non-profit that addresses food insecurity, community health and housing. In July, the federal government announced it would put $120 million toward affordable housing in Brampton; that money is being used to build a 26-storey building with 302 units.
But building some affordable units is not a solution that addresses the root causes of unaffordability, said McKenzie, naming rent fixing and rent controls as other possibilities. He notes that not only is Brampton expensive to live in, but a lack of social supports means that residents often pay for mental-health services out of their own pockets to avoid waiting or going without.
Currently in Ontario, access to mental-health services is often reliant on employer benefits, which temporary workers do not have. David Smith, CEO of the Canadian Mental Health Association Peel Dufferin, said that mental-health concerns related to the pandemic and the need for services are only exacerbated in regions, like Brampton, that lack substantive social supports.
Access to mental health is an issue several local candidates have addressed. Liberal candidates have noted that the party is promising $6.5 billion across the country for mental-health services along with creating a crisis line; Brampton’s Conservative candidates have pointed to the party’s platform which includes a “boost” in funding, a national hotline and incentives for employers to provide coverage. The NDP has also made mental health a platform priority, promising it would provide coverage for all Canadians. (The Greens are running only one local candidate, in Brampton Centre, but the party has also promised boosting mentalhealth services.)
Smith’s CMHA has been inundated with mental-health-related calls, with their calls having increased to 60,000 from 45,000 calls annually. Smith points to a study from 2017 from researchers at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and non-profit group ICES that indicated the Central West Local Health Integration Network, which covers most of
Brampton, had the lowest number of psychiatrists (4.2) per capita in the province — Toronto had 61.
A rise in mental-health concerns, exacerbated by the lack of affordable housing, also leads to increased emergency room visits, since there are few other places community members can go, said Smith. The largescale investments the city needs at the federal level are too many to count due to a lack of funding over the years, he added: “In Brampton, it’s everything. We’re below provincial averages on everything.”
With the upcoming election, many residents feel no political party will truly work to fulfil the very clear needs of the community, said Gagandeep Kaur, an organizer with the Warehouse Workers Centre, a Peel-based advocacy group.
She pointed out that the economic importance of the region, which relies on an oftenexploited temporary workforce, should be front and centre this election.
“Because one thing that this pandemic has shown, is that if we don’t have a fair distribution of resources, it’s not only Brampton that will suffer, but the entire nation can suffer,” Kaur said.
Instead of holding an election, the time and resources should have been used for preparing communities like Brampton for the fourth wave, she said.
“But here we are in this election and talking to workers, I think they are worried. It doesn’t matter what party comes into power, they don’t want to be treated in the same way they have been all along.
“They hope that they keep in mind what we all went through … and the regions that need that support are provided with that support.”