False airs of New York, trendy boutiques, starred restaurants, a renowned university centre, flourishing start-ups, a very popular film festival… Toronto, a priori, has everything to make you dream: this city of three million he inhabitants, the second largest financial center in North America, is the beating economic and cultural heart of Canada. But it is enough to stroll there, to go beyond the agitation of the white collars, to see emerging, in the street, another reality: a man shouting at the top of the rambling remarks, beggars in wheelchairs, or even, in the evening, these teenagers massed under the porches of buildings to escape the cold.
Toronto is in bad shape and now lives to the rhythm of violence due to the mental health problems of part of its population. In April 2022, a young woman is pushed “for free” onto the subway tracks. A few months later, another woman is stabbed on the tram. On March 25, in the metro again, a 16-year-old teenager was stabbed to death in an attack “unprovoked”, according to police terminology. The list is endless, and the crisis so serious that the mayor, John Tory (conservative), in office since 2014, has sounded the alarm over this ” epidemic “ which strikes, after that of the Covid-19, other North American metropolises, from Chicago to Montreal, from Atlanta to Vancouver.
On January 23, shortly before being forced to resign because of a hidden extramarital affair, Mr. Tory had asked Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to hold a “national summit on mental health”. His arguments: in 2022, the demand for psychological services in Ontario has increased by 50%; more than one in two young people in the province say they suffer from a mental disorder.
Rejecting the responsibility for the lack of financial resources on the government of Ontario and on the federal authorities, responsible for the field of health, the municipality has above all relied, until now, on safety. During the winter of 2022-2023, 80 additional police officers were deployed on public transport. The police budget, the municipality’s main financial item, increased by 48 million Canadian dollars (32 million euros) in 2023, to the detriment of that allocated to employment and social services, down 4 million. dollars, and that of the housing service (− 2.5 million).
The importance of postcode
At the Center for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, the old building that houses offenders and murderers who have escaped prison for proven mental disorders is placed under high surveillance. By opening the doors to his secure office, psychiatrist Sandy Simpson agrees that the Covid-19 pandemic has aggravated, here as elsewhere, the psychological precariousness of a section of the population. But this specialist makes a diagnosis specific to his city: “We are talking about crimes due to mental health, we should rather be talking about crimes related to poverty. When you have to wait ten years to get social housing, when the number of inhabitants keeps growing without increasing the number of doctors, nurses or social workers, thousands of people are left to their own devices. themselves, without resources or access to care. »
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