‘Time to act is now’: Big City Mayors discuss housing, homelessness crisis

With housing and homelessness at a crisis point, top municipal politicians from across Ontario are in Chatham-Kent to talk strategy, and implore senior governments for more help.

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Ontario’s Big City Mayors (OBCM) held a caucus meeting Friday in Pardoville, near Blenheim, to discuss these and other critical issues, such as mental health and addictions.

OBCM is made up of mayors from 29 municipalities with populations exceeding 100,000. The organization represents mayors from 70 per cent of Ontario’s population.

Burlington Mayor Marianne Meed Ward is the current chair, while London’s Josh Morgan is vice chair.

Meed Ward said the organization has been advocating on the issues for several years.

“The time to act is now,” she said. “This is a humanitarian crisis that is affecting every single municipality, large and small. People are dying in our streets and it doesn’t need to happen.

“We are standing ready as partners. . . . We can’t do this alone and we need the government to help us.”

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Meed Ward said there are concerns about the Building Faster Fund criteria, and municipal discrepancies with Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. data, noting “when real money is being tied to that data, it needs to be correct.”

In addition to funding, she said policy changes are needed, given the widespread impact across various departments.

“It’s a public safety issue. It’s a public health issue. It’s a housing, homelessness issue,” she said.

Creating an action table would go a long way, she added, along with a “point person,” since multiple provincial ministries are involved.

Morgan said housing that has wrap-around service supports is an effective method, which helps cut down on emergency room visits and other front-line needs, including contact with police.

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“These can be transformative,” he said. “What we have is a scale problem. We are trying solutions across different municipalities that are working.

“We need government to help scale those. Pull them all together, help us co-ordinate all the different solutions.”

Windsor Mayor Drew Dilkens said it doesn’t matter which municipal organization is lobbying, the challenges are the same.

“We have this collective problem that we need to come out together,” he said. “When I looked back at the decentralization of mental health-care back in the 90s, we’ve seen a progression in each of our communities that I don’t think mayors were talking about.

“We are where we are, but we have to fix the problem.”

More details about the caucus discussions are expected in coming days.

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“We come together as one voice to the province, but we learn from each other. And that’s so important,” Chatham-Kent Mayor Darrin Canniff said. “It’s essential we do this to improve our communities.”

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Ontario’s Big City Mayors

The group’s goals include:

• Forging relationships with the federal and provincial governments, municipal organizations including the Association of Municipalities of Ontario and the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, and other stakeholders.
• Meeting government ministers and representatives to voice the perspective of big cities and work to achieve shared goals.
• Taking public positions on key issues and opportunities affecting big cities.
• Sharing information, research and resources among members and with other governments and organizations.
• Participating in government policy consultation processes.

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