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Weekend Newsstand: October 31, 2015
Happy Halloween! Here is some news: the woman who spoke up about a racist experience at Aritzia is facing online backlash, Kathleen Wynne promises to bring Syrian refugees to Ontario, and homelessness in York Region is growing.
Samantha Grant is still experiencing fallout online from what she called a “shockingly racist” experience at a downtown Toronto Aritzia, and from her decision to go public about it. She overheard staff at the Queen West location speculating she couldn’t afford the coat she was looking at because she’s black. She called the company’s customer service line, but didn’t receive an apology for days. Now, the company’s president has called to apologize both for the incident and the way the company handled it, but there are still people online arguing that she doesn’t look black or that she was complaining in hopes of getting a free coat. “The hate that I have received from merely telling this story has been extreme and the last few days have been really hard,” she wrote.
As part of fulfilling the incoming Liberal government’s promise to resettle 25,000 Syrian refugees in Canada by the end of the year, Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne has renewed her commitment to bringing in another 2,500 people to Ontario by the end of the year and is looking into a “more ambitious timetable” if the federal government is able to provide extra funds. The provincial government has already pledged $10.5 million to the issue, and to bring in at least another 10,000 Syrians by the end of 2016.
While poverty in Toronto is often easy to spot—notorious neighbourhoods and public-housing complexes (that may or may not deserve their reputations), homeless people panhandling or sleeping on downtown sidewalks—it exists throughout the GTA as well, of course. York is home to a growing but harder-to-identify homeless population, one that is more spread out amid largely affluent neighbourhoods and that includes many people couch surfing but without permanent homes. There are just 130 shelter beds in the region for more than one million people. Last year, the Blue Door Shelters group, which runs most of the shelters in the area, had to turn people away about 4,000 times. And chronic homelessness, wherein someone goes from shelter to housing but then loses that housing and ends up back in a shelter, is also happening far too frequently.