Council was told security hired to prevent encampments wouldn’t make arrests. One councillor is questioning why city documents say otherwise. And a new report says the City of Toronto has no records on how the security plans were carried out.
Here are some highlights from the report by the city’s municipal auditor general.
Tory MPs complain that they were ‘diverted’ to the Oct. 22 meeting, and are ‘blindsided’
This is the key finding from the auditor general’s report. It says the meeting was “held as a committee of the whole” but then proceeded as an “emergency meeting” and was “devoted almost solely to the issue of homelessness and housing.” It adds the decision made by city staff and referred to in the report to delay the Oct. 23 move-in deadline, “was made by the Executive Committee (at the Oct. 22 meeting) and acted on in a direction from the Executive Committee,” said the auditor general.
The report says the meeting agenda notes that an earlier Oct. 22 meeting was “adjourned to accommodate the need to conduct due diligence on Oct. 24 and address the city’s concerns regarding the lack of a plan for accommodating the homeless and the increased number of reported tent encampments in the city.”
But it says the executive only made the emergency motion that morning, with a note that the earlier meeting was adjourned “due to ‘the lack of a plan for accommodating the homeless and the increased number of reported tent encampments in the city’.”
The auditor general also says city staff’s note referring to the Oct. 22 emergency meeting as “a committee of the whole, rather than an emergency meeting” is misleading.
It also says in the auditor general’s report that city staff attended a “pre-meeting”
