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Toronto on strike: No daycare, camps or pools, but the homeless are happy

Posted: July 13, 2009, 5:26 PM by Rob Roberts

Pools are shut, 52,000 children have had their swimming lessons and summer camps cancelled, and basketball courts have become temporary dumps. But at least one group is happy and well looked-after: the city’s homeless.

“We love it now,” said Chris Dunkan, 25, who is staying at Seaton House, a shelter for 600 men on George Street in downtown Toronto. “They don’t cook right now so they give us out food vouchers. Everything else is basically the same. We get clean towels and sheets. The laundry gets done.”

With the city’s 57 daycare centres locked and restaurant inspections, for example, suspended during a strike by unionized staff, the City of Toronto has redeployed dozens of managers from Public Health and Children’s Services to work in the nine homeless shelters that the city owns. But not, in most cases, to cook.

So every day since the strike began 23 days ago, Seaton House has handed out hundreds of vouchers, worth $7 or $10 each, for Pizza Pizza, Swiss Chalet, Harveys, Tim Hortons, Ho-Lee Chow and Metro, the grocery store. At Seaton House, the men eat a cold breakfast: cereal, toast, bagels and juice. After 9 a.m. they get the first food voucher, plus two TTC tokens. At 3 p.m. Seaton House hands out another voucher for dinner.

Today Nasser Obsieh, 33, emerged from the shelter, peeled his $7 gift card off its cardboard backing and walked the four blocks to Pizza Pizza, corner of Church and Dundas streets, where he ordered a slice of pepperoni pizza, a Coca-Cola and an iced tea.

“It’s a great idea,” Mr. Obsieh -- who survives on Ontario Disability Support Payments because he hears the voices of ghosts -- said of the food voucher program. “It helps me enjoy fresh food and these are some of my favourite restaurants anyway.”

John, another Seaton House resident spending his coupon at Pizza Pizza, said this beats the hostel food in every way.

“We get to choose what we eat and when we want to eat,” he said. “Lots of people have TB, you don’t have to be standing in line and deal with some of the unpleasant stuff.”

Clearly the homeless don’t deserve to suffer any more than anyone else does, during this walkout. They didn’t cause it. Still, it is an interesting reflection of our city’s priorities, that we cannot open even a single swimming pool during the strike, but we do everything we can for the homeless.

They seem quite comfortable. On Friday I watched a group of men toss around a football on George Street in front of Seaton House, while pickets watched. Today I watched one man smoke a crack pipe on the fence just outside the shelter.

Another man drank a beer.

A third man lit a cigarette in front of the main door. He then yelled to a police officer walking by, “Hey, buddy, tie your sneakers.” He threw his empty cigarette pack and butt on the ground. Ronaldo, the Seaton House supervisor, came out and swept the butts and the cigarette carton into a dustpan.

Rob Andrusevich, a city spokesman, today defended the city’s policy choices of locking daycares and redeploying staff to homeless shelters.

“The children have a roof over their heads,” he said. “In this case Seaton House is the roof over peoples’ heads.”

Seaton House has several sections. Shelter occupants get the coupons. Residents of The Annex, where the city runs a “harm reduction program,” are still getting hot meals, Garry Blowes, who lives there, told me. Mr. Blowes has been on both sides of the strike: he worked 25 years for Metro Toronto.

“I threw it all away for booze,” he said. “I’m not proud of it, but I’m so sick I can’t leave. I have cancer and emphysema.”

Even during the strike, he added, the city has continued its policy of giving him and other residents a glass of wine every 90 minutes. Mr. Blowes said he has bought food vouchers, at half price, from some of the other men.

“A lot of these punks are so ungrateful,” of what the city does for them, he said.

A striker talks to a man outside the Seaton House today. Photo by Brett Gundlock, National Post

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