Quickly, the community I represent has a number of very interesting dynamics. First, for a variety of reasons, through the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, a tremendous number of people who had been forcibly confined for mental illness were released into my community. Second, we have a high proportion of people who are newcomers to Canada in my community. Third, we have one of the last places near the downtown where there is still a large amount of affordable, private rental stock. We also have in my community a fairly high degree of drug use.
I'm actually probably the only person who represents a ward in the City of Toronto that has people from all five income quintiles in it, from the very top to the very bottom. The thing that's quite remarkable about my community is that people from all five of those quintiles advocate for more affordable housing. They advocate for more investment in community resources like parks, swing sets, allotment gardens. They advocate for harm reduction programs. They advocate, essentially, for social inclusion of people who have addiction, and sometimes concurrent disorders with addiction, because they recognize that someone who is recently on the streets after having served a jail term is a much more difficult person to house, a much more difficult person to integrate into the community, a much more difficult person to provide supports to, than someone who is in a treatment program, than someone who may be using a harm reduction strategy to try to manage an addiction problem they have, than someone who is treated as a member of the community rather than whisked off under some arbitrary sentencing scheme to become a non-member of the community and then return back to Parkdale with their lives broken.