Surprisingly, Cllr Holyday rises to second the motion. He studied architecture in school and was inspired by Moriyama's work. This is the first time I've heard Holyday express something other than concern for businessmen and hatred for trees and the poor, so it is deeply moving.
Since Council's last meeting in here, the A/V system has been upgraded and everyone is still kind of figuring it out, which will no doubt be a continuing source of mild amusement today. Councillors still routinely pressed the wrong vote button (there are 2 buttons) until that system was changed, so, yeah.
There is a very pleasant new "waiting for people to vote" chime.
I would prefer the Jeopardy! theme
Cllr Pasternak asks to break early for lunch as he and Cllr Colle are inviting everyone to a little Rosh Hashanah thing. I briefly panic and Google "rosh hashanah 2023"—it's not until next week but I guess since Council won't be back until October they're having it now.
Now, the City Manager is presenting on the city's refugee shelter crisis. Since COVID travel restrictions lifted, the number of refugees and asylum seekers in need of shelter has skyrocketed.
The shelter system is perennially full and turns hundreds of people away every night at the best of times.
The City Manager says that "we have not taken a hard response to this", saying that they have expanded their "temporary response" for housing refugees. Earlier this year they decided to start turning away refugees & asylum seekers and not offer them spaces in the regular shelter system; some advocates for unhoused people called for Shelter, Support & Housing Administration head Gord Tanner's resignation.
(Note that when it comes to the regular system, the city has been steadily closing the extra hotels it leased during the beginning of the pandemic and returning to putting more people in less space.)
The City Manager says the federal government needs to respond on a regional level as well as creating a dedicated facility near the airport. (Other municipalities in the GTHA have experienced the same thing.)
> In this piece on the housing crisis published the same day (In this piece on the housing crisis published the same day, Milton mayor Gord Krantz says, “The federal government is the top of the food chain. They downloaded on the province and then the province downloads on municipalities. We’re the end of the food chain.” This is a timely reminder that when city services fail, they are effectively downloading services to individuals and community organizations.
The federal and provincial government "downloaded" housing to the city, and the city has downloaded it to Black churches and community organizations.
Lmao. Cllr Crisanti spends so much time speechifying that he runs out of time to ask questions of staff. Nunziata is like, too bad, so sad.
Cllr Holyday wants assurance that what the city is proposing—reimbursing churches for housing refugees—won't become a precedent.
Prediction: it will totally become a precedent.
(The city manager explains that the churches aren't eligible for the funding that can be provided by the federal government.)
Holyday asks, what's changed that we're dealing with this now? The city manager is like, well, global unrest blah blah blah. (Note: this will be severely exacerbated as climate change makes large parts of the world uninhabitable, etc.)
Cllr Thompson wonders what would have happened if Black churches and organizations hadn't stepped up to house the (predominantly East African) asylum seekers, and muses (as others have) about the apparent disparity between treatment of Black African refugees vs. people from Europe, the Middle East, etc.
Chow rises to make her speech, hearkening back to the waves of Irish immigrants fleeing famine in the 19th century, the "boat people" from Southeast Asia at the outset of her political career, more recent waves from Syria and Ukraine, and now many people fleeing state homophobia in countries like Uganda and Nigeria.
(I have to leave soon for my annual endocrinologist appointment, will we wrap up this item by then? Probably not lol)
Chow recounts seeing a family, with a young son and a heavily pregnant mother, who had nowhere to sleep but a church office. Some serious Biblical echoes.
Holyday has a motion asking to try to get the federal government to pay the $750,000 first and if that fails, pay it ourselves. As ever, concerned for "property tax payers". (Spoiler: the federal government will not pay it.)
And now I have to go. Check @GraphicMatt's feed for updates.
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