On the afternoon of New Year’s Eve I stand, in shock, looking at the scene before me in one of Toronto’s 24-hour overflow warming centres. A young woman huddles under a blanket on a mat on the floor, inches away from dozens of other people.

It is freezing in here. She closes her eyes, trying to shut out the noise, the cold, and the horror of having to be here. A man tries to make his way through the mats, (there are no aisles between them). He stumbles and kicks her as he passes. It looks as though he may fall upon the other people, huddled where his feet are trying to walk.

It is crowded, and tonight it will be more so. There are only two bathrooms stalls, without a door to separate the space from the rest of the centre. Tension is running high. It feels unsafe.

People who work in this community say this is the worst they have seen it. The word “catastrophe” is used often, and it’s appropriate. These places are hell holes at night. How, they ask, to even convince someone to come in here?

If I am to take honest stock of my experience of being here, for even 15 minutes, I can see how hard it would be to risk the violence, disease and claustrophobia of one of these 24-hour centres when faced with a choice between this and the deadly temperatures outside.

When I worked in the anti poverty movement in the mid-’90s, I came here often, for meetings. The people I worked with warned that this apocalyptic scenario was coming. When I look around now, it looks like Dickensian London, a refugee camp or a humanitarian disaster in a Third World country. It’s not what people imagine when they think of an affluent city in Canada.

Every morning, these last weeks, we find ourselves shocked by the cold, and over and over again, we hear the calls, from people who have worked in this field for decades, for the armouries at Moss Park and Fort York to be opened to the homeless. These calls are ignored, with the mayor saying the use of the armouries would not be “safe” or “adequate.” Could he honestly use those words to describe the scene I saw on New Year’s Eve?

The armouries have showers. They have space. And they’ve been used before.

The armouries were opened in 1996, 1998, 1999, and 2004. Mayors Barbara Hall, Mel Lastman and David Miller all made calls to the federal government, asking for them to be opened, the first time prompted by the death of three homeless men. What is John Tory waiting for? A similar tragedy? To be sure, that is on the horizon.

We have no national housing strategy. We have a shelter system that is dangerously overcrowded. When these cold weather centres are closed in the spring, the catastrophe remains. We are in the middle of a genuine crisis. None of this is news, and none of it is spurring enough action.

Instead, we treat the cold snap as a sudden emergency with makeshift solutions, such as these 24-hour drop-ins. As Joshua Tepper, a family physician who works with Seaton House and the Inner City Health Team says, “Almost every year I see our homeless freeze to death on the streets of our city. We live in Canada. It’s not a shock that we have cold spells. How are we not more prepared for this? How is this a recurring crisis?”

We have a homeless population in need of shelter year round, and a shelter system that cannot contain the need. There is really no excuse for these ongoing band aid solutions.

Who are we, if we can wake up in the morning, decide it’s too cold for our kids to go outside and play, and then do nothing about the people who are living and sleeping outside with no safe alternatives?

Someone is going to die. We need to wake ourselves from our inertia. These conditions are our responsibility to change, this horror is on our heads. We need real, lasting systemic change.

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In the meantime, it’s too cold to stay alive out there, and the overflow options available to the homeless to go inside are inhumane. Mayor Tory, have the decency and strength to reconsider your position. Make the call and open the damn armouries.

Sarah Polley is a Canadian writer, director and actor whose films include Away From Her and Stories We Tell.