More than half of the refugee claimants sheltered by the city in motels, hotels and college dormitories are children, according to new data provided by the city on Tuesday.

Of those, 728 are under age 8, and 518 are between the ages of 8 and 15. Most are travelling in families of three or more.

In total, 2,332 refugees are living in those temporary spaces and are relying on the city for shelter beyond the summer. The situation has led to a standoff between the city and the federal government over aid, as Toronto continues to feel pressure from migrants arriving from Quebec.

That province recently announced its shelter system in the Montreal area would stop accepting new arrivals as it approached 85 per cent capacity.

Another 973 refugees rely on Toronto’s permanent shelter system, the city says. There was no age breakdown provided for those people, but the permanent shelter system is typically set up to accommodate single adults or unaccompanied youth.

There is currently no plan to rehouse an expected 800 people, including more than 250 children, living in the dormitories of two Toronto colleges when they are returned to student use in early August. Those spaces have filled quickly since they started to become available in May.

On Tuesday, Mayor John Tory continued to demand immediate help from the federal government over Toronto’s capacity crisis.

“Relocating just this population of 800 would require the emergency closure, for example, of multiple community centres across the city,” Tory told reporters. As he recently told members of Parliament in a letter, the city is not prepared to take that step.

“We have exhausted our available sites, our resources and our personnel,” he said.

Federal officials say they will work to triage refugee claimants to other cities once Ontario’s new government is sworn in. But it remains unclear how quickly that system can be put in place or how fast money will flow to manage Toronto’s capacity crisis.

In Toronto, 45 per cent of the shelter system is now occupied by refugee claimants, according to the data from the city. The capacity of that system, which does not count 24-7 respite and drop-in spaces but does include hotel and motel spaces for refugee families, has consistently been about 95 per cent.

On Monday, two refugee children occupied chairs in the reception area of Sojourn House, a refugee shelter near Queen and Sherbourne Sts., executive director Debbie Hill-Corrigan told the Star. Their mother was looking for a safe place to stay.

“Her kids were tired. They were cranky. They were sleeping on chairs that you can’t really lie down in, with blankets over their heads, while she waited hours while we called central intake to try to find somewhere for her to go,” Hill-Corrigan said Tuesday.

With a wait-list of more than 100 applications, Sojourn House is just one of many refugee spaces at capacity across the city.

According to federal data last updated in 2016, Toronto had the highest capacity of shelter beds of any city in Canada. Since then, Toronto has significantly increased capacity, to just over 7,000 beds, including hotels and motels. Montreal, by comparison, has an 1,850-bed system.

Federal officials have been publicly and privately questioning the city’s data and what percentage are actually refugee claimants. Patricia Anderson, a city spokesperson, said the city knows the clients identified in the system are refugee claimants. Anderson added that a survey done by the Toronto agency COSTI found that of 427 families in the system, 97 per cent were refugee claimants, most from Nigeria.

The federal government’s own data, analyzed and provided by the city, shows the number of claimants moving from Quebec to Ontario more than doubled between 2016 and 2017.

In a June 22 written response to Tory’s letter, Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen acknowledged that Toronto’s system is strained. But the letter, provided to reporters, offered few specifics on next steps.

The federal government previously announced immediate assistance of $11 million for Ontario, which is expected to flow mainly to Toronto. That money is to be disbursed by the provincial government, which has not yet been formed after the Progressive Conservatives’ election win this month.

“This is a very pressing issue for the people of Toronto and Ontario. We will have more to say about this in the near future,” said Simon Jefferies, a spokesperson for premier-designate Doug Ford, in an email Tuesday.

The money won’t be nearly enough to cover the city’s 2017-18 expenses, which city staff said will total $64.5 million by the end of the year.

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Hussen’s letter says “further funding towards Toronto’s request will be discussed as part of ongoing discussions.”

The letter also says the federal government has been working with the province on a plan to better manage the flow of refugees to other cities, as was done in Quebec. Hussen wrote the federal government is “ready to implement a similar system on an expedited time frame” but that it still requires the province to identify temporary housing sites.

It’s not clear if the province has identified those sites. All questions sent to the provincial bureaucracy Tuesday were referred to Jefferies for comment.

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