Toronto converts two community college dorms into refugee centres temporarily for summer

Theglobeandmail.com
May 23, 2018
Jeff Gray

Toronto officials say they are activating an emergency plan and converting two community college residences into temporary housing for refugee claimants, as a stream of asylum seekers overwhelms the city’s already strained homeless shelter system.

Asylum seekers arriving in Toronto as of Thursday and seeking shelter will be sent to the Centennial College residence in Scarborough, city officials say. A second site, at Humber College in Etobicoke, will open June 1.

The sites, which have been provided by provincial officials, have 400 beds each. The province is covering $3-million of the estimated $6-million cost to operate the new sites using Red Cross staff, the city says. But using the colleges is just a temporary solution, as they are only available for 75 days, until students return in August.

Paul Raftis, the head of the city’s shelter department, warned that if refugee claimants continue to arrive at the current pace, the new sites could be full within 60 to 70 days.

“Our concern is, if it continues at that rate, or speeds up, there will be nowhere to put individuals and they would end up on the street,” Mr. Raftis told reporters.

City officials say there are 2,700 refugee claimants in the city’s jammed shelter system and that an average of 10 arrive every day. Since April 19, 368 refugee claimants have arrived, they say, most after crossing into Quebec from the United States. Many in the current wave of refugee claimants are originally from Nigeria.

Once the two new sites revert back to college dorms, city officials warn they may have to shut city community centres or other facilities to accommodate refugee claimants if the flow does not abate or other solutions are not found.

The move to open the temporary shelters comes just days after Toronto Mayor John Tory announced refugee claimants accounted for 40 per cent of the city’s homeless-shelter system and repeated his demands for federal and provincial aid.

Mr. Tory warned last week that the city would need to turn a community centre into a refugee centre within seven days if no other solution was found. He has also demanded staff and support from the two other levels of government, the redirecting of refugee claimants to places outside Toronto and more than $64-million to cover the city’s costs.

Federal and provincial officials have said they were working with the city on contingency plans to deal with the flow of refugees, but Mr. Tory has complained the other governments are not moving fast enough. In a news release, he repeated his call for the federal government to take “immediate steps to permanently relieve this unprecedented pressure on the city’s shelter system.”

On Wednesday, Chris Brillinger, a senior social development official for the city, acknowledged the provincial election had slowed the response from Queen’s Park: “The fact that there isn’t a sitting government at Queen’s Park [has meant] our bureaucratic colleagues at the province have been working very hard … to respond.”