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%.
• Until 2012, the City published every shelter’s nightly price. Then the figures stopped — while the budget grew from $60.7 million to $898 million. No resident can check where it goes.
• 105,115 households wait for social housing; in 2025, 7.6 new applications arrived for every household housed. Toronto Community Housing’s own waitlist has been closed to new applications since 2019.
• When Coroner’s data was finally included, Toronto’s counts of homeless deaths were revised up 75–100%: 331 deaths in 2022, 300 in 2023. A homeless woman in this city dies, at the median, 47 years younger than a housed one.
• 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.

And of every candidate for every office in Toronto’s 2026 election — mayor, council, trustee, every race — we make one challenge, before we vote:

End homelessness before winter. Yes — before the election. Your term does not begin until November 15 — when winter has already arrived. Fifty-nine shelter residents died in 2024. Fifty-nine more died in 2025. Some of the people you are asking to represent will not live to see you sworn in. So do not tell us what you would do with a mandate and a salary. Show us now, while you are asking for our votes: organize your ward, your networks, your volunteers — and your rivals. Every candidate in every race, working together across campaign lines, coordinating your communities to get homeless neighbours housed, sheltered, and safe before election day. The evidence on this page says the barrier is not knowledge and it is not money — it is coordination. Coordination is the job you are applying for. A candidate who can move their community before holding any office has shown us a leader. A candidate who can only promise has shown us a brochure.

And live it for 30 days. Spend one month of your campaign inside the system you seek to govern: sleep in it, eat what it serves, carry the bagged lunch to your campaign office, ride the TTC to your debates, and live on $11 a day — the $343 a month Ontario Works pays a person without an address. Do it without taking a bed from someone who needs one: the Auditor General found 12,742 shelter bed-nights sat empty last winter, lost to process rules — ask the City for one of those. Then tell Toronto what you learned. We will record every candidate’s answer to this challenge — and every silence — side by side, for every race, before the vote — the register is live, here.

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.