Faith leaders in Toronto are joining outreach workers, students and local residents in a march through the city’s downtown core on June 24 demanding no person in Toronto be forced to sleep outside.

This group will gather at 10:30 a.m. in Nathan Phillips Square outside City Hall for the Interfaith Walk and Rally for Housing Justice, organized by Crisis in Our City in partnership with the Mary Ward Centre. The walk hopes to draw notable attention to Toronto’s shelter crisis, where demand consistently exceeds capacity and often leaves individuals with no option but to sleep outdoors. 

Participants will proceed through downtown and return to Toronto City Hall to deliver a petition urging Mayor Olivia Chow and City Council to provide safe, low-barrier indoor spaces, real-time information on available shelters, as well as a comprehensive plan to prevent people from being forced onto the streets. 

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The event will highlight connections between homelessness, human dignity, Indigenous land and displacement and the right to housing. Organizers are describing the walk as a call for a dual focus on visibility and exploring concrete solutions, while bringing together frontline advocates and interfaith communities to emphasize Toronto’s responsibility to ensure everyone has access to fair indoor refuge.

The planners point to the recent early closure of the Better Living Centre near Exhibition Place, a shelter that housed around 300 people, as a stark example of the collaboration’s current priorities. With multiple shelters closing and the unhoused being cleared from public spaces like Union Station as the city co-hosts the FIFA World Cup, they are urging Toronto leaders to take immediate action by repurposing empty spaces for safe sleeping.

“Crisis in Our City  has been looking at locations like the third level of the parking garage at City Hall as an empty space that could be used  for people to sleep in if the federal government would approve it. The Armoury on Jarvis and Queen has also been used in the past to fit around 400 beds,” said Eugenia Lapania,  the advocacy and outreach support worker of the project.

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Both Lapania and Fr. Prakash Lohale, the social justice animator for the Mary Ward Centre, hope to reveal to citizens and city leaders the stark contrast between Toronto’s heavy investment in FIFA World Cup delivery and tourism promotion versus the displacement and invisibility of local unhoused residents.

“ We’ll be out Nathan Phillips Square, a location covered with FIFA decorations. There is a big contrast between our city spending so much money on this event and trying to get the city clean for tourists and the reality of our unhoused people,” Lapania said.  

“I’m not sure if people have noticed, but since (the tournament) started, there are fewer unhoused people on the street — but where are those people actually going?” 

As Toronto’s global sports party continues and its marginalized find themselves on the outside looking in, Lohale emphasizes the chance to promote visibility amidst a growing moral crisis. As he prepares for the walk on June 24, he reflects on the late Pope Francis’ words, which echo the social teaching of the Church.

 “At the World Meeting of Popular Movements in 2015, he spoke plainly, ‘Land, lodging and labour — these are sacred rights. It is important, it is well worth fighting for them,’ ” he said. 

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For Lohale, it’s a cause he hopes Torontonians will think about long after they put the remote down.

“We want people to see that the measure of the city is not having a skyline that hosts this great sporting event or the attention it receives from the world. I think the measure of a city is instead how it treats those who are most vulnerable,” he said.