More than 200 unhoused people died in Toronto last year, city data shows

A total of 216 people experiencing homelessness died in Toronto last year, according to new data from the city.

The data released by Toronto Public Health (TPH) on Friday shows there were 4.2 average deaths of unhoused people per week last year. 

According to the city, the number of deaths in 2021 rose significantly from 2020. Seventy-two more people died last year than in the previous year, when 144 unhoused people died. The number of deaths has more than doubled since 2017 — the first year that the city collected such statistics — when 101 people died. 

A full 55 per cent of the deaths in 2021 were due to drug toxicity, the data shows. Other causes of death include heart disease, accidents, complications from diabetes, hypothermia, liver and lung disease, organ failure, suicide and cancer.

The city says 132 out of the 216 people who died were residents of homeless shelters. It has yet to release the number of people living outside who died. 

For Gru, a shelter hotel resident in Toronto, the numbers are "awful" to hear.

"There are no words," he said. "There is just a deep, deep sense of loss that these are people like you or I who ended up in a position where they couldn't afford rent or they couldn't afford their mortgage. Homelessness in Canada is a death sentence, really."

Homeless advocates say the numbers are staggering, but not surprising. They say the city has enforced policies that created unsafe conditions for unhoused people. And they say the solution is permanent housing and harm reduction supports, not policing and clearing encampments.

Doug Johnson Hatlem, a street pastor at Sanctuary Ministries of Toronto, said on Saturday that Mayor John Tory, the city's Shelter Support and Housing Administration (SSHA), and city councillors should all be held to account for their policies on homelessness, given the "unacceptable" number of deaths of unhoused people last year.

"It's a crushing number," Johnson Hatlem said. 

"All three — council, Toronto mayor's office and SSHA spent an incredible amount of their time and their political capital insisting that they were in the right to beat people into submission to get inside for what they were calling safe indoor shelter. Their priorities were completely out of whack."

In 2020, the first year of the pandemic, there was more of a spirit of "we're all in this together," but in 2021, Tory's attitude was "we're going to do what we want to do and we're not going to listen to people," Johnson Hatlem said. The city failed to engage with people who were unhoused and their advocates and instead chose to act on behalf of wealthy people and those who don't want to see homelessness in their backyards, he said.

"The problem will not just ever go away until people are housed. And so, we saw a 50 per cent increase in deaths and it's an enormous number that somebody has to take account for," he said.

"It's not an acceptable number. I think a great majority of these deaths were preventable," he added. "It's always been a crisis that we have people who died homeless on the streets of Toronto. At this point, it's a five-alarm fire, and the people who should be treating it as a five-alarm fire are not doing so."