Chow calls for review of heat relief strategy as advocates demand city restore cooling centres
Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow will ask council this week to approve a review of the city's heat relief strategy, including whether the city should restore 24/7 cooling centres for unhoused people.
Her motion comes as Toronto experiences its first stretch of extreme heat this year, with recording-breaking temperatures soaring past 30 C and feeling more like the 40s with the humidity.
The city's heat relief strategy directs people to a network of more than 500 publicly accessible facilities that may have air conditioning. These include public libraries, community centres and swimming pools. But advocates say unhoused people cannot rely on such facilities and are demanding that round-the-clock cooling centres, which were closed in 2019, be brought back immediately.
Lorraine Lam, a member of the advocacy group Shelter Housing and Justice Network, said the extreme heat is a public health emergency and that unhoused people cannot wait for a review.
"We don't need another review. We know the heat is dangerous. Just open up the cooling centres now," Lam said.
"Frankly, I am very concerned that somebody might die in this heat."
The motion, entitled "Addressing Gaps in the City's Heat Relief Strategy," will go to council at its meeting that starts Wednesday. It says the review by the city manager would be done by the fourth quarter of this year.
"Whether you are housed or unhoused, we want to make sure everyone is safe," Chow told reporters on Monday.
Mayor acknowledges 'gaps' in city's response
Chow, who acknowledged that "there are gaps" in the city's response to hot weather, said the fourth-quarter deadline would be the latest that the city would receive the review.
Lam, however, said the heat relief network is "shamefully inadequate."
Lam said the city cannot rely on shopping malls, libraries and swimming pools to provide relief from the heat because they close at night and they are not welcoming and friendly to unhoused people due to security. There is no option for people to lie down and there is not necessarily access to food and water, Lam said.
"There are a lot of people outside with nowhere to go. People are having a hard time," Lam added.
Many people live in the city without air conditioning and they need the cooling centres as well, Lam said.
The city, for its part, said it has added 100 more shelter beds to bring people inside, deployed water trailers to parts of the city and provided outreach workers with water bottles to give to unhoused people.
Lam said the water trailers are a "very small Bandaid." There need to be trailers throughout the city, Lam said.
"We need to stop putting on Bandaids on a really big issue," Lam said. "And so there needs to be a long-term conversation about what water access looks like to all communities in the city."
In a statement, the city said it opened seven cooling centres during heat warnings prior to 2019.
A 2018 review of the centres by the city's medical officer of health found they were "not an effective strategy."
"They were only open on days when Heat Alerts were issued (16 days in 2018), usage was variable, not all were easily accessible in terms of travelling to a physical location and many people did not see themselves as meeting the criteria of a vulnerable person and would not seek relief in a Cooling Centre," the city said.
The motion to be considered by council includes recommendations that the city create a chief heat officer, provide funding to ensure front-line agencies can distribute at least 500,000 bottles of water, and collaborate with those agencies to identify high priority locations for surge capacity water trucks before heat events take place.
The motion also calls on city staff to ensure nurses are on call to support the "undisrupted operation of outdoor pools." Some city pools that had extended hours were temporarily closed on the weekend due to high humidex levels.
According to the city's own data, 10,251 people were "actively homeless" in Toronto in the last three months.
A total of 9,552 people used its shelter system on Monday night. An average of 148 people were turned away nightly from its shelter system in May.
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