Welcome to ShelterGate
Uncovering the scandal behind Toronto's dysfunctional, duplicitous and deadly homeless shelter system
It’s called ShelterGate for a reason. With the Watergate scandal of the 1970s, nobody died. But hundreds have died or been assaulted in the City of Toronto’s deceitful, dishonest and unaccountable emergency shelter system. Many more will lose their lives or be irreparably harmed and betrayed in the future. If that’s not a scandal, what is?
Why is this happening? Because those at the top, including Mayor Olivia Chow and members of Toronto City Council just don’t care. If they did, they would have changed this malevolent force of destruction and they certainly wouldn’t ignore the pleas from people who have been harmed by the failures of the system — people like me, and others who will not survive unless things are changed and quickly.
Toronto’s emergency shelter system has become a law unto itself. It ignores the City’s own mechanisms for making complaints and appealing decisions that affect shelter residents. It also violates long-established law, like the Ontario Human Rights Code. Those at the top think they can get away with it because nobody is watching. And because the toothpaste of scandal is very difficult to get back into the tube once it’s out, they are happy to keep the status quo, however destructive it may be to others, of course.
More to come soon…
- Exposing systemic deception
- Unmasking violence and risks to health and safety
- Demanding transparent and accountable management
- Championing a Public Inquiry into abuses and failures in Toronto’s Shelter & Support Services (TSSS)
It starts at the top with the Mayor and is carried on by a group of highly paid bureaucrats –mostly men– who have a vested interest in protecting and covering up a failed and unaccountable system that is out of control and recking lives every day.
Below are some of the key players in this deadly and violent system. You wonder who’s responsible for so many lives destroyed? Look at these faces.
A Survivor Speaks Out
I am a survivor of sexual assault. But I don’t think anyone can ever become a survivor of Toronto’s dangerous and dysfunctional shelter system. Once you’re caught in its grip, exposed day after day to the duplicity, irresponsibility and recklessness of the men who run it, the ever-deteriorating life of a victim becomes an inevitable and permanent state.
As someone who knows what it feels like to deal with the life-altering consequences of sexual violence, I will never again trust these people with my health and well-being. At every step, they turned a blind eye to my pleas for help and put me in harm’s way time after time. It started more than a year ago, when knowing my history as a survivor of sexual assault, they put me into a violent, crime-ridden and drug-infested shelter hotel widely known in the “system” to be for drug users. They told me it would be safe for me. I had no idea what I was walking into. I experienced a paralyzing retriggering that required urgent medical intervention. Knowing the damage they had caused by putting me there, TSSS senior managers offered no help, no explanation, no apology and no trauma-informed care. Misogynists could not have sent a clearer message if they had left a calling card.
I can tell you that if anyone makes a complaint about the misconduct of Toronto’s shelter system managers, or even a human rights complaint based on disability needs, as I have, they will find the roof falls in on them very quickly. The managers of the shelter system hold on to their jobs by keeping vulnerable people who depend upon them quiet and in line, and they have a whole arsenal at the ready to do just that. It’s the key to maintaining their jobs, which pay hundreds of thousands a year.
What about Mayor Olivia Chow? It’s clear she cares nothing about any of this. When I put my first experience with the shelter system in an email, her only response was silence. She doesn’t care about any of this. She’s one of those women who are there for other women when the cameras are on, but when the lights go off she returns back to her cloud of disingenuous indifference.
This is the leadership she brings to her job as mayor and it informs the destructive operating culture and conduct of the men running Toronto’s homeless shelter system.
It’s one of the reasons so many women are assaulted and raped in Toronto’s shelters and why violence is a pandemic.
Alarmingly, the median age of death among homeless women in Toronto is now just 36 years old. I’m older than that, but having been in and out of the hospital recently because of a serious and life-threatening medical condition, I don’t expect to be around much longer. The harm inflicted on me by the Toronto shelter system and all its apologists is a big part of the reason.
I do hope in the time I have left that I can make things better for others by exposing Toronto’s shelter system as the death trap it is.
Is this Place Run by Psychopaths?
Update on the retraumatization caused by the City’s reckless conduct in forcing a victim of sexual violence into a setting that caused her significant harm and required medical attention. Despite numerous complaints about the City’s mishandling of this matter that were sent to members of Council and top City officials, and confirmed by the victim’s doctor, the City is even today attempting to force her back into that hideous cesspool of drugs and violence.
The City’s Central Intake unit trivialized the serious medical implications of what it was doing and refused to deal with the further injury it would be inflicting on an already sick victim under medical care and whose medical condition is rapidly deteriorating, as her doctor warned the City earlier this week. The shift leader rudely terminated the call and hung up the phone. This is the way Toronto treats victims, not just of sexual violence but victims of its abusive shelter system. It is how people become sicker and then die when they turn to this malevolent imposter of help.