So – It Does Happen
People living on the street in London is a problem, one about which I have written more than once on this blog. Reading the news, it appears to be a problem in many places. However, there has always been a belief about this problem floating around in my city, one that has been voiced to me by a variety of people of various stations in life. The idea is that the problem is worse in London than in other cities in Ontario because London is generally known to have the most available no-questions-asked services for the homeless. And, the idea goes on, this leads officials and health-care workers in other places to send homeless people in those places to London by some means or other.
Having heard this claim more than once, I have always been skeptical. It sounded to me like the sort of urban myth one often hears when people are upset about something. They want to blame it on ‘outside forces’. Indeed, it sounded to me like a conspiracy-theory-adjacent kind of belief.
My skepticism regarding this phenomenon has dropped recently, with the appearance of a story on the CBC-London website dated January 26, with the headline:
This homeless man was put in a taxi to London. Here’s who paid the $241 fare
The ‘who’ in the headline is revealed in the story’s first sentence:
A Huron County man who often uses shelters to avoid sleeping outside says the Huron Perth Health Care Alliance paid his $241.42 taxi fare to London, Ont., to free up space in a shelter where he’d been staying in Clinton.
Clinton is a town about 80km north of London, and much smaller than London. Now, according to this guy, one Stephen Webster, he was told there would be shelter space in London for him, which turned out not to be true once he got here.
Webster said he was being treated in the Clinton hospital for trench foot, after which they moved him to a shelter in Clinton. After seven nights there they said he had to make room for others, and a cab ride to London was all they could offer. Webster is quoted:
“They told me that they send a lot of people to London because London has the shelters.”
CBC did some more digging, to their credit. From the story:
CBC News has confirmed with a local taxi company that the transfer happened and that the $241.42 fare was paid by Huron Perth Healthcare Alliance, which operates four hospitals in the area.
So, Huron Perth Healthcare Alliance is much like LHSC here in London. It operates the hospitals in the area, which means that Ontario taxpayers paid Webster’s cab fare to London. Isn’t universal health care great?
Also from the story:
When contacted for comment by CBC News, the Huron Perth Healthcare Alliance would not confirm they paid for the cab trip, citing privacy reasons. However in a statement they said their outpatient mental health teams do not relocate people out of their community “unless it is their choice.”
The statement goes on to say they make an effort to provide care for people locally whenever possible.
Whenever possible. Sure. And ‘privacy reasons’. Um….whose privacy is being protected here, exactly? I suppose we should be impressed they did not cite ‘safety concerns’.
The story also details Webster’s itinerary of shelter stays once he got to London, which, by the way, seems to contradict the claim that there was no space available when he reached London. What appears to be true is that there was no space at the first place he tried, run by the Salvation Army. Here is where he did find space over the next several days:
City of London shelter at the Boyle Memorial Community Centre
Ark Aid Street Mission on Dundas Street, London
After hitching-hiking to Stratford on Thursday and finding no available shelter space there, he managed to find a shelter space in Cambridge, Ontario.
Now, I said there had been rumours about this happening for some time, but the CBC story also contains a link to a story they posted in August of 2023, headlined
Stop sending your homeless people to London, deputy mayor says to others
The story quotes deputy mayor Shawn Lewis as follows:
“It has been conjecture and speculation and rumour over the years, but now we are starting to get some hard data,” he said.
Lewis wrote a letter to the London City Council laying out that data, and saying that he was going to ask the Council to condemn “the relocation of homeless individuals under false pretences and against their will.”
As to that ‘hard data’, this is also from the earlier story:
According to Lewis’s letter, in the first six months of this year London helped connect 319 people back to “where they have a natural support network” after they came to London seeking service.
Of those 319 people, more than a quarter were sent to London “against their will or under false pretences by various individuals and organizations from outside London,” Lewis said.
I have not been able to determine whether Council passed Lewis’s suggested condemnatory motion, but I would put my money on ‘no’. Nor do I believe anything important would be changed by the passing of any such motion. Lewis’s letter is no longer available on the CBC website.
When I wrote about London’s approach to homelessness back when, I said that there would be no number of shelters or granny flats or sheds that would be enough. Mr. Webster’s odyssey shows one – but only one – reason this is true.
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Caption: Mayor Josh Morgan walks through the modular shelter site under construction on Cheese Factory Road in London on Friday, Jan. 23, 2026. The first tenants are expected to move next week. (Mike Hensen/The London Free Press)
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Webster made his way from a shelter in Clinton to Victoria Hospital in London by the good graces of the Huron Perth Health Alliance. Once in London, however, he somehow got from Vic hospital, where the taxi dropped him off, to the Salvation Army shelter, to the Boyle Memorial Community Center, to Ark Aid Mission on Dundas. All without a car. Then he hitch-hiked to Stratford (that’s 60km) and, finding no space there, somehow made it to another shelter in Cambridge, Ontario, a further jaunt of 60 km. What enterprise, what diligence – what effort. No one at the CBC appears to have asked Mr. Webster why he was homeless. He is quoted as saying ‘I bounce around a lot’ and is said to have a number of health problems.
‘If you build it, they will come’, as the movie line puts it. Or, in a less Hollywood vein – give away something of value for free, and the demand for it will be unending.