January 20, 2026 at City Hall
Good afternoon councillors and everyone participating in person and remotely. My name is David Meyers. I use he/him pronouns, and I’m a Black disabled Toronto settler. I work at the Centre for Independent Living in Toronto (also known as CILT) and am speaking on behalf of CILT and the GTA Disability Coalition, which we convene.
Toronto is estimated to have about 570,000 residents with disabilities and more than 1 in 4 Torontonians are people with disabilities. Despite our numbers, as my colleague Wendy Porch said earlier, disabled residents remain pretty deprioritized in most city strategies, programs, and budgets. We don’t see ourselves reflected in this budget very much. More and more disabled folks report finding it impossible to thrive in this city, due to inaccessibility. Many have turned to food banks and mutual aid platforms to close the huge gap left by inadequate income security programs. I know you’ve heard the stories from your constituents. It is a bleak story of exclusion for disabled people across our city.
Nowhere is our community’s exclusion more harmful than in the area of housing and homelessness. Toronto’s affordability and housing crisis and our homelessness emergency are key drivers of our community’s precarity. In just a few years, disabled residents have become 4 times more likely to experience homelessness. Just in a few years, four times! And this is growing trend, at a time when Toronto’s housing and shelter stock remain overwhelmingly inaccessible and getting worse by the year. As you know, we lose more accessible stock than we gain, year after year. We hear this story ourselves from our community.
While homelessness is a mass disabling crisis, our partners at Toronto Shelter and Support Services and Toronto Alliance to End Homelessness tell us that day by day, disabled folks are still routinely refused shelter spaces in our city’s shelters and provided no alternative options once they are refused, because inaccessibility is a structural problem in our city. And so there’s no place for them to go. So, a lot of folks are left on the streets to fend for themselves to maybe end up in encampments or end up outside of TTC buildings, et cetera. And this is becoming worse and worse for our community.
Yes, everyone knows that building deeply affordable, supportive and accessible housing options is a critical policy solution, we all know. We must find more revenue tools in order to pay for the fair city we want to have for community. But we must also find shelter spaces now that provides some access for unhoused disabled people. We have stock, yet some of the stock is woefully inaccessible structurally because of how old they are and how they were built. We must have shelters with some capacity to be renovated or retrofitted so there’s some access for disabled folks who may use wheelchairs or scooters or other devices to access a safe shelter space as a human right. And we hear stories from our community all the time, that people don’t have those options, and have no place to go.
I have a few budget asks, on a more positive note:
On poverty reduction spending, we welcome the 2.6million enhancement to the Rent Bank as a step in the right direction, the increase to the Rent Safe Program, the $48M committed to MURA as Celia said earlier, is inadequate but it is something. It needs to be built on year after year in order to come close to addressing the overwhelming need that there is in community. We need more revenue tools that can actually move this process forward and some bold decisions by council to actually make those decisions.