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Town Ward Councilor Alex Bierk listens as Peterborough City Council debates a notice of motion brought forward by him and co-chair of the city's Homelessness portfolio, Keith Riel on Monday night. Photo: Evan Robins

Council Kills Motion to Provide Emergency Shelter for More Than 60 Unhoused; “We’ve done as much as we can”

Written by
Evan Robins
and
and
February 4, 2025
Council Kills Motion to Provide Emergency Shelter for More Than 60 Unhoused; “We’ve done as much as we can”
Town Ward Councilor Alex Bierk listens as Peterborough City Council debates a notice of motion brought forward by him and co-chair of the city's Homelessness portfolio, Keith Riel on Monday night. Photo: Evan Robins

Monday, February 3rd’s meeting of Peterborough City Council dragged past midnight and into Tuesday morning as an embittered council debated a Notice of Motion submitted by councilors Alex Bierk and Keith Riel which proposed allocating $150,000 from the City’s social services reserves to create an emergency shelter to address Peterborough’s ongoing homelessness crisis.

The motion came a little over a week after Bierk and Riel released a joint statement calling on Mayor Jeff Leal to declare the city’s homelessness crisis a state of emergency, and leverage his strong mayor powers to immediately open emergency shelter space for those still living out on the streets as the cold weather intensifies.

“The time for incremental steps has passed,” the statement, signed “Keith and Alex,” reads. “We cannot allow the inaction of the past months to persist while people’s lives are at risk. We need to act now, together as a council, to uphold our responsibility to care for all people in our community.”

In a response to the statement, Mayor Leal called Bierk and Riel’s demands “a misguided approach,” declining to use his strong mayor powers to create emergency shelter space and suggesting that Bierk and Riel should have gone through the steps of submitting a motion for council’s consideration.

That motion would ultimately be submitted by Bierk and Riel on January 31st to be debated at Monday night’s council meeting at the end of a long agenda which included the approval of the city’s 2025 Draft Budget Report.

While two delegates—Alex Wilding and Danielle Turpin—spoke in favour of the measures outlined in the Notice at the start of Monday night’s meeting, council themselves did not reach the item, number 14 on the agenda, until almost 11:30 PM. 

“It’s frustrating to be talking about something that’s this urgent this late in the hour,” Bierk told his colleagues upon moving the motion.

“Since the summer, coun. Riel and I have been faced with the data from our homelessness staff about the gravity of this situation in Peterborough,” Bierk, who is co-chair of the City’s Community Services Homelessness portfolio, explained. “There are about 50 to 60, sometimes 70 people on our by-name list [for housing in the Wolfe St. modular housing project] that are living unsheltered.”

With the cold February weather at hand, Bierk said that people are “using snow and blue tarps as their insulation.”

“I think they deserve better,” he said, “and I think that the argument that we’ve done enough doesn’t play here.”

Town Ward Councilor Alex Bierk urged his colleagues to adopt a motion Monday night which would instruct City Staff to open emergency shelter space for more than 60 people currently unhoused and sleeping rough. Photo: Evan Robins

“There is an absolute need for a secondary emergency shelter to be used on an as-need basis,” Riel, who co-chairs the Homelessness portfolio with Bierk, said. “There are 352 people on our by-name priority list who are homeless and marginalized. There are 66 people who are unhoused and living in tent encampments around the city.” 

Riel said he has “heard comments from council that we have done enough, and it’s a huge financial imposition on the taxpayer to house people,” and while he thanked his colleagues for their support of the Wolfe St. Modular Housing Bridge project and the Trinity Drop-in Emergency Shelter, he urged them to “Please support this much-needed resource.”

Speaking to the motion, coun. Matt Crowley said it “left a really bad taste in [his] mouth,” that there had been “an article in [The Examiner] calling out the mayor.”

Coun. Matt Crowley initially opposed Bierk and Riel's motion, taking issue with the way it "all went down," but later came around in support at the Monday night meeting. Photo: Evan Robins

Though Crowley said he had “expected to look at this and after reading it, I thought there's not enough information here for me to make a strong decision,” he said he was ultimately swayed by Danielle Turpin’s delegation, in which she talked about close friends and family experiencing homelessness, and an elderly woman who had been discharged from the hospital only to be forced to go to the Trinity Overflow Shelter.

While the councilor emphasized that he “didn’t like how it sort of all went down,”—a point later echoed by coun. Kevin Duguay, who was calling in remotely from a trip—Crowley acknowledged that the motion was “here now,” and took the opportunity to grill City Staff about the logistics of the proposed plan.

When asked by Crowley whether the $150,000 amount cited by Bierk and Riel was “realistic,” Community Services Commissioner Sheldon Laidman admitted that “We haven't done any kind of investigation or analysis.”

Laidman did claim to know that “from our existing shelter contracts that we have in place that [the emergency shelter] is not going to provide much of a service at all, to be honest, for any significant length of time,” but added that “if Council passes this motion, Staff will do our best to work with our partners to see what service they could provide.”

Hearing this, Crowley moved to submit an amendment to have Staff return to council in September with an enhanced emergency winter plan.

“My thought is this is a conversation that we should have had in November, October, possibly even September,” Crowley explained, “because here we are in February bringing a notice of motion saying, ‘Oh my God, it's so cold! We need to open an emergency shelter!’ and then what?”

“By the time we get anything open we could be into spring,” he said.

Crowley’s amendment sent the horseshoe into disarray as the mayor opened the speakers’ list for commentary.

“It’s 20-some below,” coun. Riel interjected. “There’s 66 people camping outside right now, not next September.”

Co-Chair of the Homelessness portfolio, Keith Riel, did not mince words with his colleagues Monday night, asking coun. Lesley Parnell "what price you put on a human life." Photo: Evan Robins

“We’re looking to try and house people that are in peril right now!” Riel shouted across the room, as Crowley tried to call a point of order. “Councilor Bierk and I have been talking to Staff since August and September of this year to get a plan in place,” Riel continued, “because we could see this coming.”

“I don't have a crystal ball,” Riel said. “All I have to do is go down to Rubidge and Reid and see the 16 tents that are parked there right now. That’s the reality I see every day.”

“I'm offended by the Commissioner when he tells me this is a huge surprise and we don't have a plan in place, because we’ve talked about it,” said Riel. “If you vote “Nay,” you can live with—and I can’t go to bed thinking about—people living in these kinds of conditions.”

Both he and Bierk maintained in their January 22nd statement and throughout the meeting that they had been in discussions with Staff about a winter strategy since the summer. 

At 11:59 on the morning of February 4th, Bierk said on X (formerly Twitter), that City Staff had cancelled their bi-weekly homelessness portfolio meeting with Bierk and Riel for that day following the February 3rd meeting.

As debate continued over Crowley’s proposed amendment, Councilor Joy Lachica weighed in to voice her support for Bierk and Riel’s initiative.

“I’m the Town Ward Councilor,” she said. “I care as deeply as Councilor Bierk and Councilor Riel, who hold the portfolio, but I'm right there with them and I'm right there with those folks in tents that are freezing.”

“It’s on our hands as city leaders to deal with these emergencies,” Lachica implored, noting that despite the potential cost of establishing a temporary emergency shelter, the city had just been informed that it was to receive $10.7 million from the Housing Accelerator fund.

“This is a manifestation of our housing crisis that these people are unhoused,” she said, “If we cannot figure out an emergency situation for them, then I don’t know where our heart is.”

Coun. Joy Lachica spoke out in favour of her wardmate's proposed motion, noting the severity of the temperatures outside and council's mandate to help Peterborough's unhoused population. Photo: Evan Robins

Befor voting, coun. Crowley clarified to Riel that the ammendment was not intended to replace the emergency shelter initiative, merely add a caveat tobetter prepare the city for next year. On a vote, the ammendment passed unanimously, returning council to the primary speakers’ list.

Coun. Gary Baldwin spoke first to the primary motion, asking Staff whether it was true that people were being turned away from the Trinity Emergency Shelter every night. 

Laidman was noncommittal in his response, but concluded that he thought “it’s safe to say that our shelters are generally at capacity.”

Baldwin continued in that line of questioning, asking about individuals who might elect to sleep outside in tents rather than use the shelter system, and speculating about what might happen “if we get a Chinook or something.” Laidman continued to be evasive, deferring many answers on the basis that they could only be answered after the outcome of the motion was known.

To conclude his ramblings, Baldwin asked whether providing adequate shelter space for all unhoused people might make the City responsible in the event that someone were to die in the cold.

“I get the feeling that the City would be responsible if some unfortunate person was to succumb to the elements or something outside because they weren’t availing themselves to a shelter,” the councilor mused. “That would speak to, you know, potential liability.”

Councilor Gary Baldwin grills a delegate at Monday night's City Council meeting. Baldwin came out against Bierk and Riel's Notice of Motion, citing concerns the City might be legally liable for exposure deaths were they to provide emergency shelter space. Photo: Evan Robins

At this point, the mayor weighed in, claiming that “the AMO Report said ‘quit spending money on ad hoc responses to this issue, solve it by building permanent housing’,” and that his strong-mayor directive from earlier that day to expedite a Brock Mission project would do exactly that.

“There have been some accusations that I really don’t appreciate,” said coun. Lesley Parnell, speaking to the Notice of Motion. “We have, as a council, as Staff, as taxpayers, have done quite a lot in this area.”

Parnell flatly stated her opposition to the motion, claiming that “We could give [community services] $2,000,000 more tonight and there'll be a whole bunch more people coming in to look after next year, that’s just the way it is.”

To the motion to provide emergency shelter for more than 60 people living on the streets, Parnell said that “we’ll never be able to satisfy absolutely everybody,” and that “to imply the taxpayer…has not helped, it’s not fair.”

The councilor went on to claim that the Trinity Emergency Shelter is “not sustainable,” and implored her colleagues to think of the neighbourhoods in which a temporary shelter might be placed, claiming that she knew the location which Bierk, Riel, and City Staff had been contemplating and it “will not go over well.”

“We have done as much as we can do,” she repeated.

Coun. Lesley Parnell claimed that council and City Staff had done "as much as [they] can" to address the homelessness crisis, despite more than 60 people on the City's priority housing list being currently unhoused and outside the shelter system. Photo: Evan Robins

“I’d like to know what price you put on a human life,” Riel retorted. “If you don’t want to go along with [the motion], I guess you can go home to your warm bed and live your little life the way it is.”

“I’m sorry, I’m not built that way,” he declared. “I think differently, I feel differently, I want to help these people.”

“Yes we’ve done our fair share," Riel told Arthur over the phone on February 4th, “but still, when you have 66 people out in the cold there’s still work to be done. For someone to make that kind of comment—that we’ve done enough—well maybe they can sleep at night, but I can’t.”

After Riel concluded his comments the motion went to a vote just before midnight. Councilors Haacke and Duguay—both remote—had to audibly voice their dissent. 

Ultimately, the motion failed 4–7, with Councilors Baldwin, Beamer, Duguay, Haacke, Parnell, Vasiliadas, and Mayor Jeff Leal voting against.

As spectators streamed out of the gallery there were audible jeers of “shame!”

ReFrame 2025
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