City of Toronto began to formulate plans to clear camps in January 2021
The City of Toronto spent months laying out plans to clear about two dozen people from a homeless encampment in a popular park last summer, building dossiers on those living there and involving hundreds of municipal workers in the process, internal documents reveal.
By late 2020, there were more than 50 encampments across Toronto, the documents show. The city had won a court battle that upheld a bylaw preventing camping in Toronto parks and began focusing on taking action against what it termed the “big four” encampments – including Trinity Bellwoods. On Jan. 22, Cook emailed the mayor’s office and the city manager a PowerPoint presentation called “Encampment work — proposed next steps.”
“We are working with the idea of providing a softer communication to encampment folks and following up with a legal posting after we have moved several inside voluntarily,” Dan Breault, the city’s lead on the encampment file, wrote to the mayor’s chief of staff on March 2, 2021. In a statement this week, spokesman Brad Ross said the city keeps documented records of encampment residents “to ensure that they are offering the appropriate services that meet their unique needs along with access to indoor space.”
“They had this massive surveillance program of the residents of Trinity Bellwoods Park that makes it really clear that they knew that people would respond poorly if they were rushed … They set up a powder keg and unsurprisingly it went off.”
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