John Gilbert Layton was a Canadian academic and politician who served as the leader of the New Democratic Party (NDP) from 2003 to 2011 and leader of the Official Opposition in 2011. He previously sat on Toronto City Council, occasionally holding the title of acting mayor or deputy mayor of Toronto during his tenure as city councillor. Layton was the member of Parliament (MP) for Toronto—Danforth from 2004 until his death.
The Downtown Eastside (DTES) is a neighbourhood in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. One of the city's oldest neighbourhoods, the DTES is the site of a complex set of social issues, including disproportionately high levels of drug use, homelessness, poverty, crime, mental illness and sex work. It is also known for its strong community resilience, history of social activism, and artistic contributions.
Parkdale is a neighbourhood and former village in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, west of downtown. The neighbourhood is bounded on the west by Roncesvalles Avenue; on the north by the CP Rail line where it crosses Queen Street and Dundas Street; on the east by Dufferin Street from Queen Street south; and on the south by Lake Ontario. The original village incorporated an area north of Queen Street, east of Roncesvalles from Fermanagh east to the main rail lines, today known as part of the Roncesvalles neighbourhood. The village area was roughly one square kilometre in area. The City of Toronto government extends the neighbourhood boundaries to the east, south of the CP Rail lines, east to Atlantic Avenue, as far south as the CN Rail lines north of Exhibition Place, the part south of King Street commonly known as the western half of Liberty Village neighbourhood.
The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) was an anti-poverty group in Ontario, Canada, which promoted the interests of the poor and homeless. The group used publicity-generating direct action techniques such as squatting and demonstrations which could be confrontational, for example the 2000 Queen's Park protest. On May 13, 2023, OCAP decided at its annual general meeting to cease operations.
Evelyn Adelaide Gigantes is a former politician in Ontario, Canada. She served as a New Democratic Party member of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario on three occasions between 1975 and 1995 and was a prominent cabinet minister in the government of Bob Rae.
Sylvia Watson is a former Canadian politician. She was a Toronto City Councillor for Ward 14 Parkdale-High Park from 2003 to 2006 and the candidate for the Ontario Liberal Party in the 2006 by-election and in the 2007 general election.
Judi Ann T. McLeod is a Canadian journalist. Formerly a reporter for a series of newspapers in Ontario, she now operates the conservative website, Canada Free Press (CFP).
Margarette Rae Morrison Luckock known as Rae Luckock. She was a feminist, social justice activist, peace activist and, with Agnes Macphail, one of the first two women elected to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario, in 1943. A member of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, also known as the Ontario CCF, Luckock was elected to the Ontario legislature in the 1943 Ontario general election representing Toronto's Bracondale constituency (riding). She served as a Member of Provincial Parliament (MPP) until she was defeated in the 1945 Ontario general election. She became the Congress of Canadian Women's founding president in 1950 and became a victim of the Cold War's anti-communist hysteria when she was denied entry into the United States, because she travelled to "Red" China and invited Soviet women to visit Canada. She contracted Parkinson's disease in the mid-1950s and mostly was bedridden until her death in 1972.
Cathy Crowe, is a Canadian "street nurse", educator, author, social justice activist and filmmaker, specializing in advocacy for the homeless in Canada. She is a frequent commentator on issues related to health, homelessness and affordable housing. She is currently a visiting practitioner at Toronto Metropolitan University.
Cheri DiNovo is a United Church of Canada minister and former politician in Ontario, Canada. She served at the Emmanuel-Howard Park congregation in Toronto before entering politics and, since January 2018, is the minister for the Trinity-St. Paul's Centre for Faith, Justice and the Arts.
Michael Shapcott is Executive Director of the Sorrento Centre, a retreat and conference centre in the Shuswap region of British Columbia, Canada, that offers in-person and on-line events and activities. Previously, he served as Director of National Business and Community Strategy for Prince's Charities Canada.
Picture the Homeless (PTH) is an American homeless person–led rights organization founded in 1999 by Lewis Haggins and Anthony Williams. It focuses on human rights, housing, police violence and other social justice issues. It was housed originally in Judson Memorial Church, which still hosts its Longest Night of the Year memorial event, and was located for a time in El Barrio and 2427 Morris Avenue in the Bronx. It is currently based at 104B E 126th Street in Manhattan.
Annick Obonsawin is a First Nations Abenaki Canadian actress.
Multifaith Housing Initiative (MHI) is a charitable organization based in Ottawa, Canada. MHI's mission is to provide and promote affordable housing, to encourage harmonious relations amongst tenants of diverse backgrounds, and to mobilize the resources of faith communities and others for these purposes. This membership-based organization represents a working model of interfaith peace and collaboration at the local level in the effort to fight homelessness. MHI's goal is to provide secure and affordable housing because through this individuals as well as the community benefit from improved health outcomes, educational achievement, social inclusion, and economic opportunities.
The San Francisco Bay Area comprises nine northern California counties and contains five of the ten most expensive counties in the United States. Strong economic growth has created hundreds of thousands of new jobs, but coupled with severe restrictions on building new housing units, it has resulted in an extreme housing shortage which has driven rents to extremely high levels. The Sacramento Bee notes that large cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles both attribute their recent increases in homeless people to the housing shortage, with the result that homelessness in California overall has increased by 15% from 2015 to 2017. In September 2019, the Council of Economic Advisers released a report in which they stated that deregulation of the housing markets would reduce homelessness in some of the most constrained markets by estimates of 54% in San Francisco, 40 percent in Los Angeles, and 38 percent in San Diego, because rents would fall by 55 percent, 41 percent, and 39 percent respectively. In San Francisco, a minimum wage worker would have to work approximately 4.7 full-time jobs to be able to spend less than 30% of their income on renting a two-bedroom apartment.
The 2022 Toronto municipal election was held on October 24, 2022, to elect the mayor and 25 city councillors in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. In addition, school trustees were elected to the Toronto District School Board, Toronto Catholic District School Board, Conseil scolaire Viamonde and Conseil scolaire catholique MonAvenir. The election was held in conjunction with those held in other municipalities in the province of Ontario.
The Toronto Homeless Memorial is a memorial to people who died while living on the streets, or in homeless shelters, in Toronto, Canada. The memorial includes the names of those who died and is updated monthly.
The COVID-19 pandemic made homelessness in Toronto more visible, due to the rise of encampments in public parks. However, homelessness in Canada had been an issue of widespread concern long before the pandemic's arrival. A 2016 report found that at least 235,000 Canadians experience homelessness in a year, and 35,000 Canadians experience it on a given night. A Nanos survey found in 2020 that 72% of Canadians believed it was urgent to work toward ending homelessness in Canada. A 2020 report from the Wellesley Institute argues that there were disproportionately higher rates of evictions in Black neighborhoods, and that Black residents were among the worst hit by COVID-19. As part of its stay at home order in March 2020, the Ontario government instated a ban on evictions, however this was lifted with the emergency order in June 2020. The Ontario government however made evictions easier, according to some critics, due to its passage of Bill 184 which allowed landlords to bypass the Landlord and Tenant Board. One advocacy group deemed the cascading effects of Bill 184 'a bloodbath of evictions'. By December 2020, Toronto tenants were calling for a reinstatement of the moratorium on evictions. The crisis conditions of the pandemic lead to an increase in organizing against what many homelessness advocates deemed to be social murder of the city's unhoused. This ranged from legal lawsuits against the city's shelter system to calls for a city plan that would address the large numbers of unhoused people camping outside, to suits against encampment evictions, to large scale protests against the clearings of public parks. The Covid-19 encampments are best understood as emerging out of a longer history of urban informality in Toronto.
Carolann Wright is a Canadian activist and politician. Born in Nova Scotia, Wright lived in Toronto's Regent Park neighbourhood in the 1980s, where she was chair of the community residents association.
