[Janet Mason] Homelessness is the sharp point of inequality.

[Kimberley Tull] There's been so much revealed during the pandemic. Who has and hasn't. Who can, and can't be safe. Who can breathe and who cannot. What does it mean to be vulnerable? What does it mean to be on the margins?

[Maydianne Anrdade] This week on The New Normal: Guest host Kimberley Tull, the director of Community and Learning Partnerships and Access Pathways at the University of Toronto Scarborough, talks to guests about vulnerable populations.

[Janet] COVID has had this dramatic impact because people are frightened to be in the shelters. Toronto used to be a city where people who were well-off lived, you know, a block or whatever away from people who worked. It used to be a very integrated city.

[Kimberley] This is Professor Janet Mason from the Munk School at U of T, who is also a board member and board chair of the Fred Victor Agency. Her work focuses on ending homelessness in Toronto.

[Janet] Decisions we're making that we don't think have anything to do with inequality, and homelessness and things like that, really do. And it goes back to who these people are. They're just people and, as people become separated, then they don't live in the same part of the city. And then you have concentrated poverty and concentrated problems. It just builds on itself. And now you could see something like, "Well, I don't want to go to that part of the city because there's lots of COVID there," right? It's just this sense of separateness, of them not being like us.

[Protesters] Don't demonize the homeless for being homeless.

[Kimberley] When I'm hearing you, the word that's coming to me is dignity.

[Janet] Yeah.

[Janet] Yeah.

[Janet] Poverty is self-replicating. And you know, people live in, you know, places where there's violence, there's no access to services. There's no access to good employment. It's not the decisions that they make. We know who goes to university. It's people whose parents have gone to university. I mean, there's lots of statistics on intergenerational mobility and what supports that and what doesn't. And it doesn't have to do with decisions. And even if you look at the most vulnerable, the people who experience homelessness chronically, so many of those people can really have suffered from abuse their whole life. They are traumatized. They've made amazing decisions to stay alive.

[Kimberley] That's such a powerful statement. I actually got goosebumps when you said it. And I think it's such a beautiful way of stating it because it's: Against whose standards are we measuring this?

[Janet] Our sense of what makes someone a valuable human being. They have the same wants, the same needs, the same emotions, ah, that we all do. And they create community and they crave community the same as we do, and they are valuable because they give that back to other people around them.

We're talking about people. We're talking about people, right? We're talking about human beings who, who mean something to someone.

When we speak of homelessness, we often focus our attention to the downtown core. In places like Scarborough, we experience transit deserts. And during the pandemic, this has heightened issues around food insecurity and access to social services and supports, to name a few. This is just not a COVID problem, but a problem of historic underinvestment revealed and punctuated by the pandemic.

[Justin Rhoden] I think it was like Duncan-Andrade who says that hope is when moral outrage leads to action that causes change.

[Kimberley] This is Justin Rhoden. He's a third-year student in the international development studies co-op specialists program at the University of Toronto Scarborough.

[Justin] You know, oftentimes I think about, if you think about food insecurity, right? Or safe access to food, or you think about the technological divide, like these are things that existed before the pandemic even happened, right? And then the pandemic comes in, which, you know, you constantly hear this discourse of "We're all in this together." Like, I don't know who "we" and "all" is, but we're definitely not all in this together, you know? This context just exacerbates all of that, right? Or if you think about like food banks in Scarborough, for example, how when the pandemic came a lot of them had to close and it's like, you have a lot of low-income communities that rely on food. And food is not something, it's not like it's a computer or something. It's not a choice. You need it. Like you need it to survive. And I recall working with TAIBU. I worked with the learning program, which is, it's targeted as helping Black youth with achieving academic success. And just, like, being in that program, I engaged with a lot of youth and their parents, for example, who would talk about their experiences. I'll talk to the parents, you know and oftentimes they say stuff like, they don't know about, like, where they're going to pay the bills, you know? These types of things come in, like these stressors, you know, and you can see that they're overwhelmed. It just kind of shows you how vulnerable a lot of populations were already made before the pandemic, right?

[Kimberley] This is why I appreciate the name of this podcast being The New Normal, because, um, I was in the session the other day and we were talking about what it's like, people are saying, I can't wait to get back to things being normal. Well, for a lot of folks, what you just discussed, that's what normal look like. And that's not right.

[Justin] We're all in the world, we're all facing a pandemic, but it's like, we're not all coming from the same positions. Like, you have these different intersections, of, you know, like race. You know, for example, me as like a Black person, like a Black man, right? You know, I come from this unique position, but I'm also a student, a student at University of Toronto. So it's like, I hold, like, some type of privilege, but I'm also not equal. But then you think about, like, other people who for example, don't share like this type of privilege, don't share my positionality. I've actually read a lot of articles, I wrote a paper about this in one of my classes recently about, like, domestic violence against Black women In the context of the pandemic. Domestic violence was already an issue. And even just, like, months within the pandemic, a lot of people were expressing their concerns, especially professionals working in violence against women centres. For example, in those shelters, you know, they voiced their concerns that, for example, the physical distancing measures, or like the framework that the government used is exacerbating some of the conditions that people are facing, right? Like different people are experiencing different types of violences, you know, from, from a whole lot of structures that are one, COVID-related, but then also just, like, not COVID-related because these are ongoing systems and ongoing structures. Like, for example, I know it wasn't until like the summer that they had, I think like health professionals were saying that they need to have, like, race-based data, right? So all along, this is not a thing. And we know, for example, like every time you turn on the TV and you hear Doug Ford give his briefings, you know, like the evidence is there, the evidence of this, the evidence of that. And we know when you're talking about the evidence, they're referring to, like, the data. And it's like, if you're not even collecting data about, like, Black people, for example, then, you know, essentially then you could kind of just like absolve yourself of the responsibility that you know, that people are facing, like, very different circumstances.

[Kimberley] The pandemic has shown us who we are and shone a light on the systemic and structural oppression that has been designed to harm those furthest on the margins of this country. I hope we don't go back to normal. The new normal needs for us as a society to own these inequities and be accountable to each other and how we care for one another and how we collectively dismantle the systems and structures that support and enable these oppressions.

[Janet] One thing that made me hopeful, it was when I started to work more closely with the homelessness sector, ah, through Fred Victor, organizations like that. We need to see positive outcomes at the individual level. You can get overwhelmed by statistics, but one way to become hopeful is to work more closely and directly with people and see the hope that people have and the support that other people give them. And it actually makes you more hopeful.

[Justin] I think a lot about, various, like, articulations of hope.

I find hope in the fact that people organize and mobilize for the sake of justice, no matter how co-opted that might be in their head. There is hope in the fact that people will mobilize, that people will organize. And I also find hope within communities, local and global communities, for example, right? Then I also see hope in this moment because we could, it's something for all, it's for us to all reflect on and to keep reflecting on even while it continues, to kind of think about, how exactly do we build better futures for ourselves?

[Maydianne] I am Maydianne Andrade. This is The New Normal.