The Shelter Declaration

The Shelter Declaration — Toronto’s shelter and homelessness system

We, the undersigned, live in Toronto. Some of us have slept in its shelters. All of us pay for them.

Here is what the public record already shows:

• A shelter bed costs Toronto $49,640 a year, as reported by the city’s Auditor General. Housing First support — an actual home, with help — costs $20,367, and $6,311 after the savings it creates.
• In winter 2023-24, Toronto lost 12,742 shelter bed-nights to process rules — while an average of 174 people a night called for a bed and went unmatched. That is the city’s own audit.
• Ontario Works pays a single adult without a home $343 a month — its shelter allowance only exists once you already have a home to pay for. That is 13 cents of every poverty-line dollar.
• This year, federal homelessness funding for Toronto was cut 68%.
• None of this is a mystery. Toronto’s homelessness is the product of five specific policy failures, most built in a single 1990s window — which means it can be unbuilt by policy too.
• Scotland put 2,154 people straight into homes; 83% are still housed. The model works when governments actually fund it.

And here is what the record cannot show, but we can: we have lived this system, worked inside it, and listened at its doors. What we have seen and heard does not match what the public is told. That testimony is being gathered, with consent and care, and it will be heard.

Therefore we demand, of every level of government and every officer with the power to act:

1. A full, independent investigation of the homelessness-serving system — the system as a whole, and each and every component, supplier, agency, and organization within it. We accuse no one. We demand the investigation that would let the truth accuse or acquit — by the officers who exist for exactly this: the city’s Auditor General, Ombudsman Toronto, the Ontario Ombudsman, the Federal Housing Advocate.
2. Full financial transparency. Every public dollar that enters this system, traceable to what it bought, published where any resident can read it.
3. Reform to what the evidence already proves: a system that houses people instead of warehousing them — because the record above shows housing people costs less than what we are doing now.
4. A public answer. Not a statement — a response, on the record, to each of these demands.

Sign if you’re with us. And if this system has touched you — file. A complaint with your name and a file number is a voice that cannot be averaged away. We will show you how, and help every step we lawfully can.

Every figure above carries a primary-source receipt; the full receipts publish with this project’s research pages.