When in Parkdale, take a walk up or down Lansdowne and check out the current exhibit by Scott Sà¸rli at the storefront Convenience Gallery (conveniently located in the window of a former convenience store).
The information graphic, Common Sense Revolution, tracks Ontario welfare income for a single person against the number of homeless who have died on the streets of Toronto over the past two decades. The year 1995 is particularly striking, the year that welfare income begins to plummet, the year that homeless deaths begin to jump, the year that the Harris Conservatives were first elected.
While there is certainly a causal relationship between subsistence income and, well, subsistence, it is difficult to de-link with precision other causes of the rise in homeless deaths, specifically: the cancellation of construction of social housing by all three levels of government; the repeal of the Rental Housing Protection Act and its replacement with the Orwellian-named Tenant Protection Act; and the de-institutionalization of the mentally ill and developmentally disabled as the city’s hospitals were being closed and cut back.
Nevertheless, the intent and spirit of all of these social policy tools are for the sake of the Common Sense Revolution, and now we have data to demonstrate the results.
convenience
24/7 window gallery
58 Lansdowne Avenue, Toronto ON M6K 2V9
(at Seaforth Avenue, one block North of Queen)
