Posted on 04/21/2022 9:52:10 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Three summers ago, and prior to the COVID pandemic, I wrote about the decay of Seattle, and I warned that Toronto could be next.
The day has come, and the warm weather hasn’t yet begun.
Crime is already rampant.
On Easter weekend in Toronto, a woman was pushed onto the Bloor-Yonge subway tracks by another female (since arrested) and a teen forced out of her car at gunpoint in what has traditionally been a quiet north Toronto neighbourhood.
There was also a $28.5-million bust of crystal meth and coke in a condo directly beside the Novotel hotel, where more than 220 homeless men and women, many with drug addictions, are being housed.
Toronto police touted it as the largest single-day drug bust in their history.
The drug stash and the dealer arrested had no doubt used the Novotel – where residents can take their illegal drugs with impunity– as a cash cow.
Never mind the other homeless hotels in downtown Toronto where illegal drugs are not only permitted but encouraged – or the plethora of safe injection sites around downtown where addicts are given clean needles to take their drugs, but “safely.”
Prior to the pandemic, I watched for hours the comings and goings of drug addicts outside one controversial safe injection site at Dundas and Sherbourne. The neighbourhood was a veritable Dante’s Inferno, full of drugged-out squatters and prostitutes plying their trade for a fix.
The Downtown Concerned Citizens Organization (DCCO), which has endured two years of lawlessness in and around the Novotel homeless hotel site, also put out a statement this past week that an area restaurant and the local Shoppers Drug Mart had experienced successive smash-and-grabs by perpetrators looking for liquor, cash and electronic equipment they could sell for drug money.
DCCO representatives have been sending monthly incident reports full of break-ins and assaults to the mayor’s office for two years.
They’re ignored, it seems.
Meanwhile, up in midtown Toronto – where the Roehampton hotel was turned into a shelter permitting drug addicts two summers ago – residents continue to express concern about the crime and their fear of walking the surrounding streets.
None of this fazed Mayor John Tory and his council, who claim the TTC is safe while violent incidents seem to occur every second day.
Two weeks ago, without a second thought, Tory and his would-be-woke councillors unanimously approved the continued use until Apr. 2023 of three problem downtown hotels — the Novotel, Strathcona and Hotel Victoria — to house the homeless.
Toronto’s politicians also gave the controversial Roehampton Hotel the green light to remain a homeless shelter until May of next year, if necessary. That so-called temporary fix is now heading into its third summer, and it can safely be said that residents of lawful communities where these shelters are plunked were sold a bill of goods.
They were told they were temporary. They were told the shelters would operate for two years at the most. They were promised that the safety of the surrounding community would be of utmost importance.
The cost of extending these leases plus meals, private security, extra staffing and a program to house refugees will top $130 million this year, according to city documents. It’s an obscene amount to protect the homeless from a pandemic that is pretty much over.
It’s especially obscene that council along with a mayor – who has announced he’s running for a third term – seem to no longer care about prudent fiscal management, even in an election year. But these initiatives — and the disturbingly lax illegal drug enabling sites within or around the shelters — have come with a far greater cost.
The residents of Toronto, who see the crime, filth and decay in downtown Toronto and even beyond that our politicians pretend doesn’t exist, feel helpless. Many have left the city for good and others refuse to come downtown anymore. Members of DCCO and residents living near the Roehampton Hotel fear it will be a long summer.
The drug addicts have been enabled. The drug and homeless industry know they can ask for pretty much anything they want and get it from Toronto council. The drug dealers are laughing at the prospect of having a steady flow of clients at these temporary shelters for another year.
Toronto’s politicians have adopted the best case of NIMBYism yet. As long as they don’t see it or experience the havoc as they whoosh by in their cars (and not on the TTC) why should they care?
It doesn’t affect them.
pretty funny, I worked with a guy from Toronto,
I will call him Pepe-Le-p
he was a very smart guy and I liked him.
He is now some google VP or something, but he said there is nothing good there.
Of course massive third world immigration hasn’t had anything to do with
Here comes the stars tumbling around us, and there’s the sky where the sea should be.
They are just now asking that question?
I’m from Vancouver and dont want to go there, even to visit my cousins. For decades, they arrogantly claim to be the “center of the universe” on TV etc, but they are the center of the sh*tverse. Montreal is already past the Seattle stage of downfall as well.
Now that it has been enriched with multicultural diversity, it's no longer bland or boring.
As a former Toronto resident we got 50km away to the country because we saw the writing on the wall ten years ago. The problem as in many cities, is fentanyl. Synthetic opioids from China delivered by Canada Post through the dark web is creating legions of violent dangerous zombie-like addicts that’s caused a massive crime wave on everything that isn’t nailed down. The city has helpfully created this hell hole by permanently renting two dozen three star hotels in all parts of the city and is filled them with addicts who get free room, board, meals and drugs. The crime waves within 2 miles of each one of these addict centres makes life completely untenable and dangerous for normal people. The other problem is completely woke, totally useless City Council that doesn’t give a flying crap about homeowners and quality of life issues. It’s all about virtue signalling to pressure groups and they will not respond property owners because they’re predominately white so muh colonialism and muh white supremacy. Toronto is Seattle four years ago and it will soon rival the feces spattered, needle strewn Seattle of today.
The lefty destruction will continue until low-information voters get a clue.
I worked north of Toronto (Vaughn) over 15 years ago. Then I came back to work in Ancaster. Everyone that lives out this way refers to Toronto as the God-forsaken Hell Hole.
I am only familiar with the homeless demographic in Vancouver and not other cities, but I wouldn’t say “third world immigration” has anything to do with it. The homeless appear to be drawn largely from two ethnic groups, the “legacy” longer established European or whites, and native or aboriginal Canadians. I was often in the downtown east side during my working days when I lived in that region, and going back 10-20 years this has always been the general make-up of the homeless. You would not see very many Chinese or Indo-Canadians; our black population is quite limited in numbers anyway and they didn’t seem to be a factor either. The homeless are pretty much jammed into areas around Chinatown in east Vancouver so at first a casual visitor might think it to have some connection, but (as with Seattle) it’s more of an unwelcome invasion and not a community-based problem.
Toronto could be different, I don’t know. The main cause of the large homeless population is a lack of effective mental health services exacerbated by drug abuse. The philosophy behind safe use sites is simply that safe use might involve less on-street injections and prove to be somewhat less harmful in health impacts. It is not intended to provide a solution as in an end to drug use. I don’t think it promotes drug use, people get into that somewhere else and it wrecks their life, causing them to drop out of society and become homeless. Then they gravitate to these larger urban centers where they can survive on the street. Probably like many parts of the western U.S., smaller cities in the region now have small clusters of homeless drug-addicted street people too. Trail BC, a small city of about ten thousand population, has about two dozen of them. Just about every large town or city in BC has a homeless drug-addicted population nowadays. They are causing the same sorts of random violent crime in those communities as the larger cities, albeit the pace of life being slower, interactions tend to be more one on one and often while annoying, not particularly dangerous.
As long as our two countries are flooded with illegal drugs this will continue. But it’s wrong to suppose that big cities cause these problems, the problems are out there all over our society, and the problems then collect in big cities as one by one these users decide they can eke out an existence there easier than in the small towns or suburbs. A quick look around the downtown east side in Vancouver shows that it is strength in numbers that attracts them to flock together, but once in that big homeless flock, their lives are pretty much over unless they happen to run into effective counselling, which seems to be very hit or miss.
There are other solutions we as a society could be taking, but our civil libertarian approach to allow such people to manage their own misery prevents those approaches from gaining any political support. You could I suppose build de-tox facilities and force the homeless into them, there to remain until demonstrably “cured” but I think the cynical answer to that is, wait for them to be jailed and it might sort of happen there instead (which of course it would not).
It's almost far enough.
“but our civil libertarian approach to allow such people to manage their own misery prevents those approaches from gaining any political support”
Sure, because they don’t “manage their own misery”; they steal to support their habits, and wreak havoc when they’re high (on the working people who provide their room and board) - so there could never be any political support for it.
There is no city libhole policies cannot destroy.
I like it. (And, if that's not a true story, it should be.)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
