Toronto shelter system close to collapse

City pledges N95 masks as locations hit by cold weather, COVID outbreaks and staff shortages

Toronto’s shelter system is at a “boiling point,” advocates say, and is nearing collapse.

Although the city is moving to expand capacity and provide shelter residents with better personal protective equipment (PPE) as cases surge, concerns remain that more needs to be done — and quickly.

While extreme cold weather this week increased need, COVID-19 infections continued to thin out available staff. This convergence of challenges led to dropped calls on shelter intake phone lines and lack of bandwidth to provide proper care for some infected residents, advocates told the Star.

Shelter occupancy was full or near it all week, during which temperatures dropped to injurious and deadly depths. Inside, infections spread — shelters were instructed last week to keep infected residents on site, as isolation sites no longer had room.

On Thursday, as Toronto shelters grappled with 359 COVID-19 cases and 48 active outbreaks, the city announced it would distribute more than 310,000 N95 masks to shelter residents, or 14 days’ supply, according to a news release — something advocates had spent weeks fighting for.

“It’s a huge win,” said Cathy Crowe, a nurse and activist. “The discrimination was too obvious, they had to do something about it. You can’t give N95s to workers and not to shelter clients.”

Crowe said each time she and other advocates approached the city asking for N95s to be given to shelter residents — an appeal which began with the rise of Omicron and greater need for better masks — they were denied and not offered much in the way of explanation.

The hope is that this will abate outbreaks amid the “signs of collapse and chaos” in the shelter system, Crowe said.

“I’m in touch with a man staying at a shelter with an outbreak of about 30 cases,” she said. “He has COVID-19 for the second time. In some cases, services that would normally go in, like healthcare, don’t go in when there’s an outbreak.”

This is worrisome as shelter staff typically don’t have the training to manage the sickness COVID-19 can lead to on their own.

Toronto shelter resident Jacqueline Hillier told the Star she had to isolate for four days after testing positive with COVID-19, during which time she said she endured long waits for water and washroom use.

“After my boyfriend and I were put in isolation, nobody came to check on us for 18 hours,” she said. “I had to use a plastic bag to urinate in. Nobody came. I didn’t get a drink of water until the next day.”

Outbreaks can sometimes lead to shelters not taking new referrals, Crowe said, further choking capacity.

On that end, the city announced Thursday it would expand shelter capacity by converting two community centres into emergency shelter space.

The news release did not say how many beds this would open up and a city spokesperson told the Star Thursday this information would be announced once the new sites are ready to open.

“That’s concerning,” said A. J. Withers, a housing advocate and adjunct faculty at York University. “They have opened new sites that have just been for 12 people before. That isn’t very much.”

If there will be a significant amount of new spaces opened, that would be an important first step to addressing the current shelter system’s crisis, Withers said.

Getting people out of the cold so they don’t die or lose fingers and toes is paramount at this moment. Ultimately, though, Toronto’s unhoused population needs more non-congregate settings, singleroom housing where isolation is possible, to avoid outbreaks, said Withers.

But the good opening up new sites could do might be undermined by shelter system understaffing. Withers said people trying to secure spots in shelters have experienced great difficulty recently, finding their calls to intake lines increasingly going unanswered.

‘‘ After my boyfriend and I were put in isolation, nobody came to check on us for 18 hours. I had to use a plastic bag to urinate in. Nobody came. I didn’t get a drink of water until the next day.

JACQUELINE HILLIER TORONTO SHELTER RESIDENT