An eviction at the Moss Park encampment originally scheduled for Tuesday has been indefinitely postponed barring any safety issues that may arise, a city of Toronto spokesperson said Monday.
Kris Scheuer said the city’s outreach team has transitioned 188 people from living at Moss Park to inside spaces, and that they will continue to do so in lieu of a mass eviction.
Since April 29, Scheuer said the city has moved at least 617 people to shelters, hotels and other interim housing. Its goal is for Moss Park to be the 43rd cleared encampment since the beginning of the pandemic.
The decision to postpone the eviction came on the same day more than a dozen people who experience homelessness and two activist organizations said they are planning to sue the city in an attempt to end evictions in public parks during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In a statement released Monday, a day before the city said it would evict the residents of the Moss Park encampment, the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) said the lawsuit is meant to “prevent the eviction of all encampments without the provision of adequate and acceptable accommodation.”
“The city cannot use ‘bulldozer diplomacy’ to force encampment residents into dangerous congregate living situations where we have already seen hundreds of COVID cases, or send them to hotel-shelters far from their communities and supports,” said Brendan Jowett, a lawyer with Neighbourhood Legal Services, who is serving as co-counsel to the encampment residents. “They need to provide safe, stable, permanent housing to residents.”
Scheuer said encampments are not allowed in city parks, even though evictions had not been happening at the beginning of the pandemic because the city was focused on retrofitting the shelter system for safety and social distancing.
Scheuer also said that the city is continuing to find housing for people who are homeless.
Advocates, such as OCAP and Toronto Overdose Prevention Society say that the housing the city has provided isn’t enough, claiming that the housing is too far away from where residents’ support systems are, don’t allow visitors and have early curfews.
According to OCAP, there have been more than 600 cases of COVID-19 in the city’s shelter systems, and four COVID-19-related deaths.
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