[urbanclient]

core part of the housing first approach that works so well elsewhere

I'm not sure it is. Housing first by definition means housing is provided without requiring treatment, as opposed to treatment first or housing contingent on accepting treatment or sobriety.

We're talking about mandatory treatment regardless of housing situation. Can range from being court-ordered to health professional-ordered.

BC, Alberta, and Saskatchewan allow for mandatory treatment for varying criteria. Alberta's laws changed, but full implementation has not happened yet. I don't see why Ontario can't change policies and/or law to make it easier to get homeless addicts treated, even if it's against their will.

And to be clear, I support housing first in many cases of homeless, it's the severe addiction + disruption / waste of public resource cases who eventually interact with the criminal justice system (even if charges are withdrawn/no conviction) who refuse treatment that should warrant mandatory treatment or institutionalization, whatever you want to call it.

Housing can be second in that case. You don't need housing first if you're forced to live in a healthcare facility.

 

[nfitz]

I agree, but I would also argue that in Toronto, local politics is pretty far left - not quite Vancouver levels thank god, but almost.

I'd argue the world over that generally urban politics is more to the left, provincial politics are are more centre, and federal politics is more right. It's a function of the type of problems that each level has. Yeah, we get mostly Conservative governments in Ontario - but most of those are Red Tory type governments, and not the more right Harper and PP's of the world.

I'm not sure Toronto is pretty far left though. In the eight municipal elections since amalgamation, there's been six where card-carrying Conservatives won, and two where card-carrying NDP won. Liberals are at zero. Interestingly in the nine Old Toronto elections from 1972 to 1991, eight were won by card-carrying Liberals (Crombie, Eggleton, and Rowlands), and the other one was by Sewell who ran as an independent provincially - and I have no idea if anyone knows what party he supports - though safe to say he's not on the right. (yeah, NDP's Chow took the one by-election).

My own observations about homelessness is that when I returned to Toronto in 2004, just after 6 years of a conservative mayor/council, it was worse than what it was when I lived here in the late 1980s after 15 years of Liberal control. Then it seemed to improve somewhat, to about 2012, and has just slowly got worse since then - with Covid being the icing on the cake. It would be interesting to compare my anecdotal observations with hard-to-come-by data.

The real fixes have to be at the provincial level. If you just fix Toronto, then it becomes a magnet for those living nearby in the rest of the GTA.

I'm not sure it is. Housing first by definition means housing is provided without requiring treatment, as opposed to treatment first or housing contingent on accepting treatment or sobriety.

Couldn't you do both?

How much rehab capacity is in Ontario. Using PMPs numbers, you'd need tens of thousands of spots. So it would take years, and it would only be the most extreme examples initially (which surely is where the fundamental TTC problem is). So you deny anyone else housing first?

At the same time, would you release someone from rehab into a situation where they don't have housing - that's a recipe for a fail.

We're talking about mandatory treatment regardless of housing situation. Can range from being court-ordered to health professional-ordered.

BC, Alberta, and Saskatchewan allow for mandatory treatment ...

I haven't spent much time in AB or SK, but to me, the number of serious drug addicts I see wandering the streets in BC is a greater percentage of the homeless than I see here. It certainly appears to be more visible. It doesn't seem to be better in, for example Vancouver, than Toronto.

I'm going towards mandatory treatment of the hardcore cases, but if BC is an example ... that sways me the other direction!

 

[picard102]

I agree, but I would also argue that in Toronto, local politics is pretty far left - not quite Vancouver levels thank god, but almost. Most local politicians are card carrying NDP. A lot of these sociological studies are grounded at the local level and funded by City of Toronto to justify their ever increasing social budgets.

Provide evidence for your lies.

 

[pmacpherson68]

Provide evidence for your lies.

again... not lies. run it through AI. you will see it yourself. (in case you really dont feel like it, well here it is):

The City of Toronto does not fund a fixed, publicly listed number of sociological studies annually. Instead, it funds social research, data analysis, and program evaluations on an ongoing basis through various departments, particularly the Social Development, Finance and Administration (SDFA) division.

Key details regarding the City's funding of social research include:
SPAR Monitor: The Social Policy Analysis & Research (SPAR) unit of the City of Toronto produces a biweekly newsletter (the SPAR Monitor) that highlights four to eight items of interest to social researchers, including new statistical or policy reports on poverty, seniors, youth, children, and health.
Research Partnerships: The City partners with local Post-Secondary Institutions (PSIs) on research, including a recent pilot focused on eight specific research projects to support COVID-19 recovery.
Social Capital Studies: The City has supported major social research projects, such as the Toronto Social Capital Study, which involved surveying over 3,000 residents in 2018 and over 4,000 in 2022.
Community Funding: Through the Community Investment Funding program, the City funds non-profit organizations to undertake community-based research and evaluation, with 171 organizations involved in the Community Service Partnerships program.
Targeted Studies: The City conducts or funds studies on specific areas such as housing, poverty reduction, and resident satisfaction, which are used for policymaking.

In addition, organizations like Social Planning Toronto regularly produce reports on social issues in Toronto, which are often funded by or developed in partnership with public grants.

 

[urbanclient]

Provide evidence for your lies.

I think it's more accurate to say city residents tend to be left wing, not necessarily the politicians. If we set aside municipal elections, which have terrible voter turnout (and left wing people have lower turnout), I would bet most eligible voters would identify as left-wing. Strategically voting for the Liberals doesn't make you a centrist if you hold more archetypal NDP values.

Also being left-wing is not mutually exclusive with NIMBYism and being car-brained IMO.

And for provincial and federal elections, it's true that cities tend to be more left. Ridings in old Hamilton and old Toronto often vote NDP provincially and federally.

Here is a 2025 provincial election map:

 

[urbanclient]

So you deny anyone else housing first?

Of course not, read my previous posts. There were some people taking an absolutist against involuntary treatment several pages back, if not in the last page.

Conservatives captured the most ridings, and the Liberals ran a center right campaign.

Yes but we were talking about old Toronto no? The core of the city.

And again, the urban left-wing bias is showing on Urban Toronto: the OLP would not be considered centre-right by many people. I say that as someone who openly accused the OLP and OPC of being two sides of the same coin (e.g. privatization of Ontario Hydro). Matter of fact, I would not consider the OLP to be centre-right for the 2025 campaign.

Some Urban Toronto members talk about Federal Conservatives being hard-right or borderline far-right. Yeah, by that calibration, everything right of the NDP is right of centre.... It's just an exaggerated perception of political polarization. Similarly, a right-wing person might believe all left-wingers are leftists or even far-left.

One thing I wanna add is that the Ontario Liberal Party has historically been more right-wing fiscally than the Federal Liberals. Consummately neoliberal and not really leftist at all.

Also there is this academic pedantry of what constitutes a leftist and what constitutes a liberal. To the average person, both tend to be left-wing. One being more left than the other doesn't necessarily mean small L liberal-identifying people or big L Liberal party is centrist or centre-right. "Ummm actkually, you have to be a socialist / anarcho-communist to be considered left/far-left."... "Any party that doesn't support my X, Y, or Z belief is inherently anti-egalitarian, oppressive, or at least centre-right"

There are analyses from both sides in the US that conclude the other side is becoming more and more radical, while their side is staying put.

The polarization paradox: Elected officials and voters have shifted in opposite directions | Brookings

Republicans and Democrats continue to pull away from each other in ways you may not expect.

www.brookings.edu

"(Mis)perceptions of Partisan Polarization in the American Public"

https://academic.oup.com/poq/article/80/S1/378/2223197

Yes please let us all know you don't know how AI works.

Regarding AI, @pmacpherson68 isn't wrong, their just too lazy to quote and cite whatever sources they found right now. They did make a post earlier with a Fed gov. source I believe.

My point though, is you can ask AI to give sources that support both sides of any argument. Not directed at anybody in particular, but maybe that's better than being complacent with confirmation bias.

 

[Northern Light]

I agree, but I would also argue that in Toronto, local politics is pretty far left - not quite Vancouver levels thank god, but almost. Most local politicians are card carrying NDP. A lot of these sociological studies are grounded at the local level and funded by City of Toronto to justify their ever increasing social budgets.

Ok, before you get gets yourself banned, rightly so..............

This statement needs correcting.

Lets start with Council, there are 8 or 9 members of Council who have NDP affiliation, plus the current mayor. (out of 25),

The rest include, 1 Green, 7 centrist Libs, 1 centre-left Lib, most of the rest have ties to Conservatives or are very blue Liberals.

Second, there has never been an NDP/left majority on Council since amalgamation.

Third. As at this year, the megacity is 28 years old. During that time, Toronto has had an NDP affiliated Mayor 9 years. (7 Miller, 2 Chow)

That means it has a had a Mayor backed by Liberals, Conservatives or both, 19 years or more than double the time the left has held the top office.

The former leader of the Provincial Conservative party was mayor for 9 of the last 11 years, and preceded in office by Rob Ford, so Conservatives have held that office for 15 out of the last 17 years.

 

[urbanclient]

Homeless people and the TTC exist outside of the core.

Sorry, I was going off @nfitz talking about old Toronto municipal elections.

Multiple times it has been proven to cite sources that do not contain the claim their attributing to it.

The tool is only useful if the user bothers to verify that the sources support the claim. Just because LLMs hallucinate sometimes does not mean they should be dismissed as wholly unuseful. If you can't be bothered to skim through the literature cited, then obviously LLMs won't work for you.

This is almost the same argument made against Wikipedia, which eventually exceeded Britannica in accuracy while being vastly larger. Similarly Wikipedia won't be useful if you don't verify sources.

It's fun to dunk on the person yelling, but I don't think what they're saying is totally wrong, even if partially inaccurate. Setting aside affiliations of municipal politicians... Ultimately whether or not the residents, public service, city departments are left-leaning is a matter of perspective. A self-identifying Marxist might say Toronto is economically right-wing. A Thomas Sowell type would consider Toronto very left-wing. ChatGPT (used below) has been shown to be left-leaning.

More human than human: measuring ChatGPT political bias - Public Choice

We investigate the political bias of a large language model (LLM), ChatGPT, which has become popular for retrieving factual information and generating content. Although ChatGPT assures that it is impartial, the literature suggests that LLMs exhibit bias involving race, gender, religion, and...

link.springer.com

The political preferences of LLMs

I report here a comprehensive analysis about the political preferences embedded in Large Language Models (LLMs). Namely, I administer 11 political orientation tests, designed to identify the political preferences of the test taker, to 24 state-of-the-art conversational LLMs, both closed and open...

journals.plos.org

You can ask Gemini or use Google's AI mode to get similar results and sources.

so let me get this straight. there is NO evidence that City of Toronto, Board of Health, Education and Housing are left leaning? This is really your stance and you are not trolling?

I really feel gas lit. lol

You're thinking too black and white. You made too broad of a claim and got corrected. But I don't think anyone can outright deny (or easily prove) academically that public servants and their departments are left leaning without jumping down a rabbit hole to analyze policy implementation in each department.

HOWEVER, I don't think it's a stretch to assume Toronto public service tends to be left-leaning in general, since residents tend to be left-leaning. Also, I know at least one federal public service union has openly encouraged their Toronto members to vote NDP or Liberal depending on the election.

IMO, some local policies are obviously left-leaning, one example would be harm reduction and (now-closed) safe injection sites.

Also here is an opinion piece that I know you'll love @pmacpherson68 :

Philip Cross: Toronto has become a monolithic, suffocating liberal swamp

The most obvious symptom is how media elites and intelligentsia have come to believe their perspective is an objective account of reality, says Cross

financialpost.com

 

[facepalming_brooklynite]

Sorry, I was going off @nfitz talking about old Toronto municipal elections.


Just because LLMs hallucinate sometimes does not mean they should be dismissed as wholly unuseful.

Sorry, I have yet to see an LLM-produced text that does NOT hallucinate sources. It's a text-prediction machine, it doesn't understand anything about the content (unlike Wikipedia editors)

 

[urbanclient]

Sorry, I have yet to see an LLM-produced text that does NOT hallucinate sources. It's a text-prediction machine, it doesn't understand anything about the content (unlike Wikipedia editors)

You're behind the times, and maybe you haven't paid to use any yet. Vibe coding is common now. LLMs also help with preliminary research and tracking down hard to find research papers, often functioning better than academic search tools used by universities (e.g. Omni). Especially if you remember the gist, but not the name or author.

 

[facepalming_brooklynite]

You're behind the times, and maybe you haven't paid to use any yet. Vibe coding is common now. LLMs also help with preliminary research and tracking down hard to find research papers, often functioning better than academic search tools used by universities (e.g. Omni). Especially if you remember the gist, but not the name or author.

You may be right on the coding part, I can't judge that. But I am an academic and I completely disagree with your assessment of LLMs as an academic search tool. A few weeks ago I had a text that cited two books that were purportedly written by me, but which do not exist! it combined my name with other words that are likely to be mentioned near it, but the result was useless nonsense.
Anyway, this is off-topic

 

[nfitz]

Please go ahead and tell me Im wrong about what is very very obvious. Deny facts. Deny history.

And fail to offer any actual practical suggestions to solve the homeless and drug use problems on the TTC.

Take your AI back to the USA.