Canada's major cities have faced the humanitarian disaster of homelessness for decades, but the COVID-19 pandemic laid bare a massive deficit in social programs and widespread inattention to human rights. Are municipal public services designed to essentially produce displacement? Or can we do something to end the growing problem of urban homelessness in Canada?
In Displacement City, outreach worker Greg Cook and street nurse Cathy Crowe illuminate this infrastructure of displacement through prose, poetry, and photography. Contributors to the book, including those with lived experience of homelessness in Toronto, report on the realities of the situation and how people responded: by providing disaster-relief supplies and tiny shelters for encampments, by advocating for shelter-hotels where people could physically distance, by taking the city to court, and by rising up against encampment evictions. The book provides particular insight into policies affecting Indigenous peoples and how the legacy of colonialism and displacement reached a critical point during the pandemic.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments
Foreword
Introduction
Cathy Crowe and Greg Cook
Part I: We Are [Not] in This Together
1. "Displaced Again and Again and Again"
Nikki Sutherland
2. The Housing Crisis and the Indian Residential School Legacy
Blue Sky, Leaders from the Houseless Community, Sandra Campbell, and Leigh Kern
3. Inconvenient Bodies and Toronto’s History of Displacement
Lorraine Lam and Greg Cook
4. Displaced There, Displaced Here
Jenn McIntyre and Steve Meagher
5. Dystopian Realities
Michael Eschbach
Part II: Fighting Back
6. Responsibility Downloaded: How Drop-in Centres Stepped Up and Pushed Back during the Pandemic
Diana McNally
7. Surviving COVID-19 in the Shelter System
Brian Cleary
8. Social Murder: We Need More than Band Aids
Roxie Danielson
9. Slipped through the Fingertips of the System?
Greg Cook and Dredzz
10. The Toronto Encampment Support Network Fights Back
Simone Schmidt with Photos by Jeff Bierk
11. Wish You Were Here
Zoe Dodd
12. Fighting Ableism
Jennifer Jewell
Poem: Our Wilderness
Zachary Grant
13. Palliative Care in a Pandemic
Trevor McNally and Naheed Dosani
Profile: Building Tiny Homeless Shelters
Canadian Human Rights Commission
Poem: Lord We Pray
Zachary Grant
Graphic by Michael D.
Part III: COVID-19 in the Courts
14. In the Parks and in the Courts: The Legal Fight against Encampment Evictions
A.J. Withers and Derrick Black
15. COVID-Life
Sarah White
16. Two Metres
Doug Johnson Hatlem, Noa Mendelsohn Aviv, and Geetha Philipupillai
17. Homelessness, Housing, and Human Rights Accountability
Leilani Farha
Poem: There Is a Development Proposed for This Site
Zachary Grant
Afterword
Author Bios
About the Author :
Greg Cook is an outreach worker at Sanctuary Toronto. He partners with many community groups to advocate for a more just society. He is on the steering committee of the Shelter and Housing Justice Network and volunteers for the Toronto Homeless Memorial. He has worked on two documentaries: Bursting at the Seams, about the shelter crisis, and What World Do You Live In, about police brutality.
Cathy Crowe is a recipient of the Order of Canada and a pioneer of street nursing. She is currently a public affiliate in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at Ryerson University. She has fostered numerous coalitions and advocacy initiatives that have achieved significant public policy victories, including the 1998 Disaster Declaration. She is the author of A Knapsack Full of Dreams and Dying for a Home and producer of the Home Safe documentary series. Her work is the subject of the documentary Street Nurse, by filmmaker Shelley Saywell.
Robyn Maynard is a Vanier scholar, the winner of the SSHRC Talent Award, and holds a Faculty of Arts & Science Top Doctoral(FAST) fellowship at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Policing Black Lives: State violence in Canada from slavery to the present.
Shawn Micallef is a columnist at the Toronto Star, co-owner of Spacing magazine, and the author of Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto and Full Frontal TO.
Review :
"Anyone who visited downtown Toronto during the pandemic knows the devastating and powerful impact it had on the city’s homeless. Outreach worker Greg Cook and street nurse Cathy Crowe have a deep knowledge of the people behind the statistics and the headlines, and here create a better understanding of how policies affect people. In this powerful book, they have collected poetry, photography, essays that tell the stories of front-line workers, advocates, people who are unhoused. These include experiences living in the shelter system, displacement, the legacy of residential schools and the experience of the Indigenous population. A unique and powerful account."
- Deborah Dundas (Toronto Star)
