0:00 Imagine this, it's Saturday, July 20 2019. You're near Victoria Street and Dundas Street, East and downtown Toronto. It's the middle of the afternoon and the sun is shining fiercely. The weather network has declared today as the hottest day of the year, with a high of 33 degrees Celsius feeling like 44 with the humidex. It's hot and you're sweating a lot. You make your way over to a Tim Hortons, hoping to sip on an ice cold beverage in an air conditioned shop while you wait for your ride to pick you up. You get to the door. In front of you there's a man in disheveled clothing sleeping on the sidewalk. He's taken refuge under the shade of a giant concrete pillar. His long unkempt hair hasn't been washed in months and his skin has turned pink. He uses a cardboard box as a makeshift mattress. In a hat near his face a few coins shine brightly reflecting the sun's deadly rays. In the past few years, Toronto summers have been getting hotter and hotter as global warming increases. The city's most vulnerable the homeless have had to deal with the worst of it. A few days after the global climate strike in September, Mayor John Tory announced that the City of Toronto had officially declared a climate emergency. Cathy Crowe has been a street nurse in Toronto for 30 years. She's been advocating for the mayor and the city to declare a housing emergency for years, but her demands have fallen on deaf ears. 1:29 Why I was pleased that he he did it. I think a lot of circumstances kind of all came together to make it like the perfect storm, no pun intended. So that it made it very favorable for him to do such a thing and there would be widespread support. So it's important. 1:46 She finds that our current efforts to help the homeless are not enough. 1:50 People are suffering. You just have to walk around Ryerson downtown core to see. And the most recent time that I did do that I took a longer walk around went under the underpasses down around I still call it the sky dome. All around there in different locations are encampments of people. Well it began when I was a student at Ryerson was during the Cold War. I got involved in activism as a nurse during that period of time, and then formed a group called Nurses for Social Responsibility. We began looking at a whole bunch of health issues and I was working in the community health area. And then finally, I chose to go work at a little organization that provided health care to people that are homeless and so I've been a street nurse for over 30 years since then. 2:44 Kathy has been concerned for the well being of people who are out on the streets of Toronto, especially during major climate incidences. She is known to criticize the policies of governments for the current programs. For instance, this past summer, one of the hottest Canadian summers recorded in history, the city replaced Toronto's cooling centers with a new program where people who are homeless go to designated public spaces for relief from the heat. Among these areas or local swimming pools, splash pads, libraries and community centers. 3:13 They argued that they've created something better. But of course all the people working frontline have argued that they've created something worse. Cooling centers need to be sites of respite and refuge. They need to have food like bag lunches are a hot meal. Splash pads are for children. 3:31 As Toronto continues to experience severe weather incidences, Kathy says the city is not adequately equipped to help Toronto's most vulnerable in the future. She wants the city to declare a housing emergency, just as they did for the climate crisis. 3:45 We have more weather incidences. We're not ready for them. As it stands now, when flooding happens, people that are homeless are flooded out of the Don Valley. My prediction is not good for for January. I mean for as early as this winter, things are going to be worse than they have been ever ever. And instead of declaring an emergency and trying to provide the resources to bring people in and protect them, the city workers right now are giving eviction notices to people outside that are sleeping around churches and in parks and under ravines. They literally are getting delivering a piece of paper that says if you do not leave by such and such a date, all of your stuff is going to be picked up and taken away. You can have people going door knocking you could have public health nurses going door knocking in some of the high rises that are really serious. You could operate 24 hour cooling centers in multiple locations. 4:43 Josephine Gray is a human rights organizer advocating for people's rights to having access to healthy food for more than 30 years. She has been working on a climate resilient food hub project for the city that provides healthy food and processes organic waste. As someone who has worked with and has been in low income single parent, she agrees with Kathy and that we need to do more to help the city's homeless in the face of the climate crisis. 5:06 I recall when Kathy was just beginning her work as a street nurse and watched her work with a lot of respected interests for many, many years, very supportive of her efforts with homeless people and street people. So it's a really important example that she provides around you know somebody with the expertise as a street nurse who also has, you know, the integrity and the courage to be directly engaged with the population. I'm very offended, that we have regressed so far in our ability to protect, uphold and defend our human rights in this country. It's outrageous. Canada is looked at globally as a champion for human rights. Yet meanwhile, in our biggest city, we have utterly failed. Complaining and admiring the problem is a waste of time. We know we have a problem. We need to be working collectively on solutions.