‎If over 3,000 people sign a petition to a mayor asking him to save homeless lives, does he hear?

If hundreds of intelligent and passionate citizens plead to their city councillor to do the same, do they hear?

Apparently not. That's been the experience in Toronto.

The petition in question asked Mayor John Tory to open one or both of the federal armouries for emergency shelter.

Winter always brings a heightened sense of urgency for Toronto's homeless yet few useful solutions. This year, the evidence that we need more emergency shelters has never been stronger.

While we wait, seemingly forever, for a national housing program to be announced homelessness has only worsened.

Across Canada people have been abandoned outside. In Toronto, hundreds, maybe a thousand people are forced to live outside in parks, ravines, under bridges and on city sidewalks. The situation meets the World Health Organization definition of a humanitarian disaster.

On November 22, National Housing Day, the federal government released on Facebook its 60 page, six-month consultation report outlining what Canadians said they want to see in a national housing strategy. The process itself was modern and utilized a hashtag (#LetsTalkHousing) social media, a web portal, stakeholder meetings and roundtables to gather their findings. In total approximately 9,000 people participated in the survey or submitted ideas.

I cannot glean one new piece of information from it.

It regurgitated facts that are well known to the government: "Close to 35,000 Canadians will experience some form of homelessness on any given night."

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Eighteen years is a long time. I woke up this morning to realize that 18 years ago, on October 8, 1998 the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee launched its State of Emergency Declaration declaring homelessness a national disaster. Today, the entire country awaits a national housing program to alleviate the disaster.

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You don't have to go to Rio to witness contaminated water, food shortages and opportunistic diseases and infections.

We have it all here in Canada. According to research by the Council of Canadians, there were at least 1,838 drinking water advisories in Canada as of January 2015. Of these, 169 were in 126 First Nation communities.

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NIMBY, the acronym for "Not In My Backyard," refers to people's objections to an unwanted development coming to their neighbourhood.

I call it discrimination. It's a vile form of speaking and acting fuelled by ignorance, fear and hate. NIMBY has been used for years against people of colour, people with disabilities, people with mental health issues, the LGBTQ community, various religious groups and people who are homeless.

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I began to use the term street nurse around 1990 as a political term more than anything. It says to people: "Look, here in Canada, homelessness has become so serious that an entire nursing specialty called street nursing has developed."

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We didn’t need to see the Hollywood film Spotlight to know that investigative journalism makes a difference in the court of public opinion and social policy. Spotlight is the 2016 Oscar-winning film that chronicles the Boston Globe’s Spotlight team, which exposed the conspiracy between the Boston Archdiocese, lawyers and government officials to hide the extensive pedophilia by Catholic priests.

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Faces on Places: A Grotesque Tour of Toronto by Terry Murray (Anansi Press, 2006) is one of my favourite books about this city. It’s a handsome pocketbook, a guide to Toronto’s old buildings and the stone menagerie that inhabit them. Did you know that gargoyles, griffins, winged lions, angels, gods and goddesses, kings and queens, deer and polar bears have been watching over Toronto for more than a century?