City can keep criminals off TCHC wait list, province says

Torontosun.com
January 8, 2019
Antonella Artuso

The City of Toronto already has the power to bar criminals from its social housing units, the Doug Ford government says.

But Toronto Mayor John Tory insists the province needs to change its rules in order to squeeze out bad apples from Toronto Community Housing Corp. (TCHC) buildings.

While the two levels of government continue to disagree over who can do what, a TCHC building in the Danforth Rd.-Midland Ave. area was the site of the city’s first murder of 2019 and, if its sad history is any indication, not the last.

Julie O’Driscoll, a spokesman for Ontario Housing Minister Steve Clark, said in an e-mail Monday that the current Housing Services Act empowers managers for rent-geared-to-income housing to establish local priority rules for their wait lists according to community needs.

“Toronto has already set local priority rules for certain applicants,” O’Driscoll said. “If the City wishes to set rules regarding previous evictions history due to illegal activity, they are able to do so. The TCHC has a policy in place that allows them to evict someone immediately in situations involving criminal behaviour.”

Ian Dyer, 36, was stabbed to death on Jan. 5 after a fight at 40 Gordonridge Place, a notorious TCHC building.

Tory told the media Sunday that while the city is taking action on several fronts to confront violence on TCHC property, including the upcoming hiring of more than 100 special constables, the provincial government needs to make it easier to evict known troublemakers.

“In many cases we find that the very people involved in the drug activity are the same ones that have been involved in drug activity before, have been evicted from the building and they end up back in the building,” Tory said. “And we want to stop that. I mean I am fed up with the fact that the same people are causing the same problems.”

Most tenants in TCHC are hardworking decent people, and just a small minority are responsible for the illicit activity, he said.

Criminals should forfeit the opportunity to live in public housing but the provincial government has yet to grant the change in legislation required to evict them, Tory argued.