Sixteen years ago, I wrote an article for Toronto Life magazine in which I anticipated what Toronto would be like in 2050, given the impact of global warming and the fact that we were doing almost nothing to stop it or even slow it down. I admit I was a tad apocalyptic. The idea was to jolt Torontonians into taking global warming as seriously as they took the best place in town for fusion cuisine. A tall order, and a worthy challenge.
The magazine recently republished my piece on its website, in a section called “From the Vault.” I read it over to see how my prophecies have held up, now that, according to me, we’re half-way to Armageddon. Unfortunately, I think I did pretty well.
In 2050, I wrote, Toronto will be like a Third-World city, “hot, poor, and overcrowded.” So far, I’m two for three – Toronto isn’t poor yet but it’s hotter and more crowded than ever before. I wrote that people from even hotter climates will emigrate to Toronto as environmental refugees, and that has been the case. Many of them now line up each night at the city’s homeless shelters. I wrote, rather poetically, that “packs of wild dogs will patrol the parks, where the homeless will sleep and vultures will roost in the dead trees.” Toronto’s 9,000 homeless people are now occupying 270 encampments in the city’s parks, ravines and under its bridges. Hundreds are dying from extreme heat and smog, and if the vultures haven’t moved in yet it’s mainly because we still have enough fossil fuel for ambulances to pick up the corpses.
I devoted a lot of space to the homeless, because my research indicated that people living at street level suffered the most from extreme heat and smog. In 2005, Toronto experienced 41 days of temperatures higher than 30 degrees Celsius. Environment and Climate Change Canada now estimates that that number will reach 66 by 2040, and temperatures will regularly surpass 40 degrees and persist for weeks at a time.
Earlier this month, Toronto experienced five straight days of plus-30 temperatures, with the Humidex soaring above 40. The Globe & Mail quoted Rafi Aaron, of the Interfaith Coalition to Fight Homelessness, saying that the heat wave plus smoke from northern forest fires represented “an emergency situation" for the city’s homeless population. "In the last 10 days,” Aaron said, “when twice Toronto had the worst air quality in the world, people were told not to be outdoors. But if you're unhoused, you have to be outdoors."
In the decade before 2007, an average of 1,700 people died in Toronto each year from heat exposure, extreme cold, and smog, including seniors, infants, and 112 homeless persons. Monica Campbell, who worked at the Toronto Board of Health, called the deaths Toronto’s “burden of illness,” and acknowledged that “things will get worse.” This year we can add record forest fires to extreme heat and humidity. Last year, 187 homeless people died of exposure to heat and cold in Toronto, and this year the city is on track to beat all previous records.
In 2006, around 3,700 people made use of Toronto’s handful of homeless shelters. Today there are 60 such shelters, and 8,700 people are going to them every night (except on weekends, when, for lack of staff and funding, some shelters are closed). That number doesn’t include the “hidden homeless,” people who don’t have homes of their own, but are staying with family or friends or just not showing up at shelters. Country-wide, the number of hidden homeless people is thought to be between 150,000 and 300,000.
It was Alan Fotheringham, the veteran journalist, who, in Maclean’s magazine in the 1970s, first dubbed Toronto “the Big Smoke.” Rumour had it that he got the idea from Australian Aborigines, who referred to urban areas as “Big Smoke” because of the air pollution such conglomerations produce. But Fotheringham applied the term specifically to Toronto because, he said, Toronto was all smoke and no fire, all sizzle with no steak, a city of bluster without substance.
A lot of people are hoping that has changed since the 1970s, and that more will change before 2050. They are pinning their hopes on Toronto’s new mayor, Olivia Chow. When Chow was campaigning for the position in May of this year, she announced that, if elected, the first thing she would do would be to alleviate homelessness. “On any given night,” she said, “200 to 300 people are turned away from shelters.” She wanted to increase the number of shelter spaces, saying she would do so by raising the transfer tax on houses that sell for between $3 million and $4 million by one percentage point, with an increase of another percentage point for every million dollars after that.
In any city but Toronto (and Vancouver), relying on houses selling for more than $3 million would be an empty promise. But in Toronto that represents 2 percent of all houses sold. Last year, 15, 651 houses were sold in Toronto: 2 percent of that is 312 houses. If Mayor Chow lives up to her promise, that will put almost $10 million into the city’s homeless coffer every year.
When I handed in that Toronto Life article in 2007, almost all of the references to homelessness were cut; homelessness wasn’t a big issue then. It is now. Mayor Chow’s election platform reflects the fact that all kinds of numbers are going up fast, and they are all connected: heat and smog alerts, smoke from forest fires, deaths from respiratory illnesses, and homelessness. I predict that they will continue to rise, despite efforts in the Big Smoke to keep them down. And rereading my 2007 article tells me that predicting the worst case to be the most likely scenario is a pretty safe bet.
These large numbers numb us. We seem to be able to gloss over statistics, but it's much harder to ignore the personal story of an individual or family.
The writer did a great job that it read like he wasn't part of the city but purely just wrote a detailed history in civilization