Mr. Chair, quite recently, the City of Toronto asked for the use of our armouries in Toronto as temporary shelters for homeless...primarily refugees. To be very clear, there are 3,100 Canadian Armed Forces members. About 2,900 of them are in uniform. The rest are civilians who work in those armouries. The armouries are not vacant buildings waiting to be exploited for any purpose. They are places where people work. Our regiments and reserves operate from those places. We also run a cadet program out of those places. They are also places where our reservists train and are deployed from.
Quite frankly, I have tried to make this very clear. I had a long conversation with the mayor of the City of Toronto about that. In my very strong opinion, those armouries are not the appropriate place to house the homeless. There are other appropriate places.
As an example, quite recently, the City of Toronto actually closed five different temporary shelters for refugees before they asked us to open up the reserves and have us take them in there. We used those armouries, unfortunately, in 2004 and again in 2019. Homeless advocates said the conditions there were deplorable. I was there and I agree. In 2019, a man died there. It's an unsafe, unsanitary and unhealthy environment. We can do better and need to do better.
I believe the request to use armouries in these circumstances doesn't acknowledge how important those armouries and the reserves who work in them are to our safety and national defence. They are critically important.
We can do better, and we're going to have to do better.