Gateway Continues to Coerce Trafficked Gal

Well this is super upsetting. If you’ve been following along with the various human rights cases being commenced by tenants of Gateway Co-operative Homes Inc. (Gateway) here in Barrie, Ontario, then you’ll know that the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario (HRTO) has recently asked the trafficked gal if she’d be willing to try mediation with Gateway and the County of Simcoe. And she said yes, she’d willing to try mediation.

One thing that I haven’t mentioned yet is that things aren’t going well with her current landlord, who, believe it or not, seems to be worse then Gateway. For example, the tenants who were living at her current address before she was, didn’t pay their utility bills for about two months before they moved out, and now the landlord is expecting her to pay the past tenants’ utility bills. This is just one of several serious issues she's dealing with there. So, in the beginning of April, she told her landlord she’s moving out by June 1st because she just can’t take it anymore.

Since we thought the County and Gateway were open to mediation, I wrote the County of Simcoe’s senior lawyer a one-page letter:

And it did seem like they were open to trying to help for a little while:

Alex is actually really nice!

But then yesterday, we found out the County has decided that the trafficked gal’s application for subsidized housing is ineligible because Gateway says her rent is in arrears, even though we don’t know why, or the amount of arrears, since Gateway’s unlawful eviction order of the trafficked gal in October 2024 didn’t mention anything about owing money (because when she got unlawfully evicted, she didn’t owe any money):

What a nightmare this is. So yesterday, I emailed the County’s senior lawyer again, asking if they'd still try to work on finding her a new place to live while simultaneously working out a repayment plan:

Why does no one in the County’s social services department care about this girl? Especially after the hell she’s already been though.

Can’t She Just Get a Job?

No. Mentally, she’s not capable of it. Let me tell you about a time when I witnessed one of her mental breakdowns.

As some of you know, she was on my food security program for several years. Although she’s on the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) now, back in 2022, her source of income was welfare, and since my program required proof of income, I knew she only received $300/month. So I knew she desperately needed food all the time.

On one of my program’s delivery days, her volunteer delivery driver told me she wasn’t home to receive her food. Because we delivered frozen and refrigerated foods, I made the rule that food cannot be left at recipient’s doors because it could go bad and get wasted, and I worked really hard to raise the money to purchase the food and I didn’t want any of it going to waste. If recipients weren’t home to receive their food, we’d give it to someone else on the delivery list, or the volunteer could give it to someone they knew personally who was in need. Recipients were told that if they missed their delivery three times, they’d be taken off the program (that never happened though).

Anyways, this was the first time the trafficked gal was not home to receive her delivery. She always made sure she was home to receive the food because she desperately needed it. I thought it was really strange that she missed her delivery. I texted her and emailed her but got no response.

Finally, about a week later, she texted me and told me she thought her phone got hacked because for the first time in years, she had a friend come over for a visit. She got paranoid that this friend hacked her phone when she went to the bathroom so she shut off her phone for a whole week. She said that after she got out of the bathroom, there was a little man icon at the bottom right corner of her home screen and she didn’t know why and she couldn’t figure out how to get rid of it. She was so paranoid because her trafficker had hacked her phone. In fact, he mirrored his phone to her phone, so whenever she got her monthly welfare cheques, he’d transfer the money directly into his bank account, and he did this for years, and she was terrified that someone was trying to do this to her again.

So I offered to take her to Telus, to have her phone checked out.

When we got to the Telus store, there was a nice young man who listened to her concerns, and proceeded to go through her phone. After about five minutes, the trafficked gal leaned in close to me and started whispering frantically. She was terrified that the Telus employee was doing something he shouldn’t be doing on her phone. Her eyes started tearing up and she started hyperventilating. I did my best to try to calm her down, but nothing I said seemed to have any effect on her. Thank God, right before she was about to walk out of the store, the Telus guy figured out what the little man icon was. Long story short, she downloaded some sort of app on her phone accidentally. Once the Telus guy figured that out, he deleted it and everything was all good again.

When we got back in my car, I turned to her and said:

“I can’t imagine what life is like for you. I have no idea. However, I do know what its like to think the worst case scenario, and when that happens, I ask myself: what is the statistically probability that the worst case scenario is going to happen? And then I’m able to find some relief in knowing that the statistical probability of the worst case scenario happening is very low”.

Was that helpful advice? I don’t know. Probably not.

But this experience really opened my eyes to just how hard her daily life is. I can’t imagine her holding down a job when she’s this paranoid about something awful happening… again.

Why am I telling you this?

Because she needs help. She can’t just “fix” her problems on her own. She’s about to become homeless again in three weeks if she doesn’t get the help she desperately needs.

Does anyone know of any other housing programs that she could potentially utilize? For some reason, the County doesn't seem to understand... or care ... how badly she needs help.