Brampton legal threat led by Rowena Santos & Patrick Brown against downtown church program puts Peel's encampment plan in jeopardy

“From 2017-2023 I was living in tents, in and out of shelters, detox and panhandling for money. I had lost all care for myself. The only time I would shower and eat was at Regeneration, during the winter it would be a warm place to sleep (during the day). Regeneration became a lifeline. The staff there would show me love and genuine care, something I didn’t know how to show myself. More trauma and grief unfolded during these years, and I wanted my life to end. In September 2023, I found myself in the hospital due to drugs but with the help of my mom and Regeneration, I was in treatment at Teen Challenge by October. It was here that I learned to love myself and see how God was always working in my life. What the staff does at Regeneration is what God calls us to do. Love one another.”

A testimonial on Regeneration Outreach’s website makes clear just how valuable the organization’s services can be to Brampton residents.

People can drop in for a meal prepared by volunteers inside the kitchen at Grace United Church in downtown Brampton.

(Regeneration Outreach)

For decades it has been a beacon of humanity, kindness and humility, run out of an iconic downtown church.

Now, the alarming treatment of Regeneration Outreach in Brampton underscores the struggles of Peel Region officials trying to help those suffering with homelessness and addiction. 

Regeneration has a long history of serving vulnerable individuals by offering a wide range of programs, including essential services, providing breakfast and lunch, haircuts, clothing and laundering as well as programs to help people connect with critical healthcare services.

Despite this life-saving work, Brampton Councillor Rowena Santos, Mayor Patrick Brown and their fellow council members have taken steps to upend this work. 

During a special meeting of city council on July 17, Councillor Santos tabled a motion directing the City solicitor to send a legal letter to the Grace United Church and Regeneration Outreach, demanding they address what has become a “serious health and safety concern”.  

In the motion, which was approved unanimously, council is “requiring action to be taken to address the concerns immediately or face further legal-action.”

Staff at Regeneration Outreach told The Pointer this legal threat was sent without any warning or consultation with them to find amicable solutions to the issues impacting downtown Brampton. 

"In the past, we had a really good partnership and relationship with them, so it was very saddening to know that they were having meetings and conversations about us without consulting us or having any conversation with us,” Jenna Robson, the director of operations with Regeneration Outreach, said. "We are bridging the gap for people who have fallen in the cracks, who are victims of the crisis that we're currently living in…We are supporting them and doing the work that the system has failed in.”

The number of Peel residents struggling to find housing, or living on the street is steadily increasing, and heavy-handed moves like those taken in Brampton and efforts by the PC government under Premier Doug Ford only make the problem worse, critics say. 

"Since there was legislation brought down by the Province, including Bill 6, Bill 9, and Bill 11, multiple omnibus bills allow municipalities to take a more forceful approach to encampments—basically clearing them,” Michelle Bilek, founder of the Peel Alliance to End Homelessness, told The Pointer. “The bill also provides direction for municipal officials to take actions through security or their police forces to fine if needed, take people to jail, and incarcerate them.” 

Bilek says, to their credit, Peel Region officials have been trying to take a “very different approach”. 

With cold weather on the horizon, the Region is continuing to fine-tune new protocols for helping homeless residents through a “human-rights based approach”. The new policy was approved by the Region in June, and was supported by Moyo Health and Community Services; Regeneration Outreach (a month before it received its first legal letter from the City of Brampton);  CMHA Peel Dufferin; and The Compass food bank. 

While welcomed by Peel’s most prominent social service advocates, it is at odds with Premier Doug Ford. Following the provincial election, the PC government introduced bill 6, new legislation that created stricter penalties for those living in encampments or caught using drugs in public. The bill, which received Royal Assent in June, instituted $10,000 fines and jail sentences. Around the same time, the PCs introduced separate legislation to close safe consumption sites across Ontario, a move that eliminated spaces for those who use drugs to do so safely, and out of city parks and alleys—a move that was lambasted by critics, warning it would lead to more deaths and increased drug use in public. 

“We all want urgent resolution of encampments. We all agree that nobody should be forced to live in a tent. But the Premier’s policies won’t reduce encampments – in fact, they will likely make things worse. They will lead to more people in prison for the crime of not having a home, more people dying from overdoses in alleyways, and homelessness will spread further into all corners of communities,” Tim Richter, President and CEO of the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness declared. “We should be protecting our most vulnerable citizens, not locking them up.” 

Last year, 8,637 residents accessed Peel’s emergency shelter system, a 36 percent increase from the year prior. The growing number of vulnerable residents has meant the region’s shelter system is forced to operate up to 400 percent over capacity, and has led to skyrocketing costs for taxpayers for overflow shelter spaces in hotels.  The Region is spending over $50 million on these overflow spaces. A report that went before regional council last week detailed how the region has gone $5.5 million over the $50.2 million budget  due to the increased demand for overflow spaces; and $2.7 million over budget for Peel’s share to assist asylum claimants. This led to the need to delay a critical wrap around support programs to next year in order to avoid going into a deficit position, the Peel Spending Report outlines. 

Numbers reported by the Association of Municipalities of Ontario show that in 2024, there were more than 80,000 Ontarians experiencing homelessness, a number that officials said has grown by 25 percent in two years. AMO anticipated that without any significant intervention, homelessness in the province could double in the next decade.

Of these houseless residents in Peel, a small minority live in encampments, approximately 150 according to Peel’s Point in Time Count conducted last year. 

The Region of Peel has relied heavily on hotels to accommodate the growing number of asylum claimants seeking shelter in the region.

(Alexis Wright/The Pointer files)

In April of last year, Peel’s Encampments Working Group and Steering Committee started designing encampment policy and joint protocols to coordinate the roles and responsibilities of Peel Region, the local municipalities of Brampton Mississauga and Caledon, along with Peel Police, and the Peel Outreach program. 

In the fall of 2024, Brampton and Mississauga began piloting the new policy framework with the creation of Encampment Response Teams composed of municipal and regional staff, police, Peel Outreach, and other service providers. This pilot approach has been met with “good results”, a regional report highlights. The team's task is to meet weekly and to review all encampment sites, assess health and safety risks, and determine further steps. The policy also instituted that public land and facilities are now “no encampment zones”. In these areas where public safety risks are high, bylaw officers, with the assistance of police and other partners, can dismantle encampments after non-compliance notices have been issued.

According to the policy, eviction and dismantling is meant to be a last resort. 

“Voluntary relocation by encampment residents is the preferred approach,” the report explains, adding a plan for removal can be expedited should there be health and safety risks that can not be mitigated or voluntary efforts have been unsuccessful. “When consulted, encampment residents said they easily understood and accepted these rules; therefore, the zones help prevent new sites from being established and they help preserve important public spaces for their intended use. Selective designation of these ‘no encampment zones’ ensures that accessible alternative sites are available, which increases voluntary compliance and the defensibility of any forced removals should they become necessary.”

The Region has made it clear that while the new protocols—approved by regional council in late June—follow what the PC government has legislated, it is also mindful that “the human-rights centred approach is most consistent with direction from courts.”

This is a reference to a case in Kitchener, where the upper-tier municipality of Waterloo Region attempted to evict residents from a downtown encampment. A Judge blocked the Region’s efforts to kick encampment residents off a property because without adequate shelter system capacity to house the approximately 50 residents of the encampment, the Region would effectively be removing them from their home without anywhere else to go, violating their Charter right to shelter.

It’s a ruling Premier Ford, and many local mayors—including Patrick Brown in Brampton—have shown themselves willing to violate. In the fall of last year, 13 local mayors wrote to Ford—at his request— demanding he use the notwithstanding clause to override these charter rights, should the municipalities choose to dismantle encampments.

This is another example, like what is happening with Regeneration Outreach, of a clear disconnect between the staff and frontline advocates directly involved with those experiencing homelessness, and the politicians who make the decisions that guide policy direction and the use of taxpayer dollars. 

In 2022, Brown ordered a security company to raid an encampment and disperse people who were sheltering there just north of downtown. He then said he was heartbroken a year later when a man died at an encampment in Mississauga while waiting for an open bed at a nearby shelter. 

This history, and the ongoing attack on Regeneration Outreach, raise questions about whether the local municipalities can be trusted to carry out the compassionate approach championed by the Region of Peel.

According to recent reporting, another letter threatening legal action was sent from the City of Brampton to Regeneration Outreach just last week. 

Data from the City of Brampton show between July 28 and September 12, 15 encampments were found within the “no encampment zones”. The discovery of these encampments led to the removal of over 200 yards of waste, and 68 inactive encampment sites have been restored to their original condition. 

According to the report, the removal of these encampments “led to benefits, including greater willingness among encampment residents to consider shelter and housing options.” The City provides no data to show how many individuals were transitioned to shelters or other housing, or provided with other supports. 

As part of the new regional plan, a request for an increase to the housing department will be coming forward as part of the 2026 budget discussions. According to a regional report, costs to operate temporary shelter space for encampment residents, peer support programs, along with the money to redemediate sites once they have been cleared is approximately $15 million. If approved by regional council during budget discussions in the coming months, it would allow the full implementation of the new coordinate encampment response to be completed in the first quarter of the new year. 

A breakdown of the funds needed to support the new Region of Peel encampment protocols next year.

(Region of Peel)

No level of government is solely responsible for the housing and homelessness crisis currently plaguing municipalities across Ontario. Locally, there have been repeated failures by local elected officials to adequately invest in affordable housing and homelessness solutions. 

In 2018, councillors endorsed a 10-year housing and homelessness road map, titled Home For All, with ambitious targets designed to meet a desperate need. In total, the plan established Peel needed 7,500 new units annually, with at least 2,000 of them affordable, and another 5,500 at market rate. Across 10 years, the plan suggested public sector involvement to deliver 10,000 of the 75,000 units needed in Peel by 2028. 

When staff presented the plan to council on April 5, 2018, it was wholeheartedly endorsed. Councillors voiced their desire to see the province and federal governments pitch in, suggesting ways to increase the affordable housing stock. 

But by June 2020, a staff report made it clear the plan had already failed.

Titled “Improving Housing Outcomes - Advocacy in a Time of Pandemic”, the report provided shocking statistics that illustrate how woefully inadequate the response to Peel’s decades-long housing crisis has been.

“Current ownership and rental housing prices are out of reach for 80 per cent of Peel households,” it revealed.“The 10-year Peel Housing and Homelessness Plan (2018-2028) identified that more than one in 10 new homes that are built must be affordable to low-income households to keep up with forecasted growth – since 2018, less than one in 2,600 new ownership homes built have met that threshold.” 

A June 2025 staff report appears to come to terms with this failure. Currently, the Region of Peel has a new housing master plan meant to guide the region over the next decade. 

“The increase in homelessness and encampments is a direct result of multiple systems failure, including a decades-long gap in producing new community housing and dedicated supportive housing, an insufficient amount of new rental housing to keep pace with demand, inadequate income assistance programs, and an absence of support from the federal and provincial governments for long-term financial commitments to municipalities which, in Ontario, fund the majority of the costs of the affordable housing system through their property tax base,” the regional report explains. 

In the short term, funding from the federal government will help create additional shelter spaces with the cold months approaching. Through the Community Encampment Response Plan (CERP), the Region of Peel received $6.6 million between September 2024 and March of this year to create 100 overflow spaces to support those looking to relocate from an encampment. The Region is approved for an additional $6.6 million starting in April of this year and ending in March 2026 to maintain these additional 100 beds. 

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