The Death of an Asylum Seeker and the Shelter Crisis in Peel
January 22, 2025 at 04:01AMIn this immigration feature for The Local, Fatima Syed reports on the growing number of asylum seekers landing in Peel, a regional municipality in the greater Toronto area, and the overwhelmed shelter system that’s unable to help them, let alone the growing unhoused population already in the region. At the core of Syed’s reporting is the heartbreaking story of Delphina Ngigi, a Kenyan woman and mother of four who arrived in Canada in February 2024 with the hope of declaring asylum and finding a shelter to stay temporarily. But on her fourth day in Canada, she died, literally waiting for assistance.
Peel has had a compassionate and responsive approach to helping asylum seekers and used to have a “no turn away” policy. The region has turned numerous hotels into crisis shelters and provided social work and health care support. Its active community has stepped up to help asylum seekers in various ways. Still, without a dedicated system and more funding, space, and resources, this approach is unsustainable.
Social work isn’t an exact science: it’s about people and how systems and institutions respond to their evolving needs and wants. Having a welcome centre is “a good thing but it’s not a solution,” Chapman says. Will it have an updated list all the time of space availability in every shelter across the region, maybe the province? Are there backup plans in case shelter spaces run out again? Will the federal government better coordinate with municipalities next time there’s a spike in asylum seekers so they’re not caught off guard? Will asylum seekers know what to expect once they walk out the doors of the airport?
“Never have I seen geopolitical events and other things taking place in the world have such a dramatic and direct impact on work we’re doing on the ground in Canada,” Hastings says. “Globalization feels so real in Peel because when things erupt in other parts of the world, you see it on your doorstep because . . . Peel sort of absorbs the world,” he says. “I can’t imagine a bigger melting pot of different people all coming together in the same community.”
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/01/21/the-death-of-an-asylum-seeker-and-the-shelter-crisis-in-peel/
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