When former Toronto city councillor and MPP Lorenzo Berardinetti found himself in a homeless shelter last year, it was a circumstance he never imagined he would face.
“What am I doing here?” he remembered thinking on his first night there. “I never thought this would have happened to me, but it happened.”
Berardinetti, whose political career spanned 30 years in Toronto’s east end, has been living out of the Ajax, Ont., shelter since August 2023 following a bout of unemployment and a series of medical issues.
He says he wasn’t the only person there who came from a professional background, and the experience highlighted to him how precarious life in the Toronto area is for so many.
“A lot of people come up to me and say, ‘You’re homeless?'” Berardinetti told CBC Toronto on Friday.
“They’re concerned they may become homeless as well one day. And a lot of people are afraid of that.”
After the Toronto Star first reported last month that Berardinetti had fallen on hard times, Ontario politicians rallied to help.
Justin Van Dette, a former political staffer at Toronto City Hall and Queen’s Park, was the first to jump into action.
First, he contacted the shelter in Ajax to leave a message for Berardinetti, who called back and gave his permission for Van Dette to start an online fundraising campaign to help get him rehoused. Then, he reached out to former colleagues at the city and province.
“Everybody who responded [said], ‘How can we help? We’ve lost track of him,'” Van Dette told CBC Radio’s Metro Morning on Friday.
“Seeing somebody who was very passionate about our city, who stood up for his constituents and residents, and to see that, where he has gone since then, was shocking and very troubling,” Van Dette said.
Berardinetti served 15 years as a Liberal MPP for Scarborough Southwest, before he was defeated in the 2018 provincial election. Before that he served as a Toronto city councillor and, before amalgamation, a Scarborough city councillor.
But since his time at Queen’s Park, he says times have been tough.
Divorce followed by unemployment, medical trouble
A former practising lawyer, Berardinetti says he took some time off after his 2018 loss to think about what he wanted to do after politics.
Ontario MPPs don’t receive a pension, and Berardinetti said he used the pension he received from City Hall to pay down a mortgage on his house. That meant he began to rely on his savings.
When he started looking for work, approaching 60, he said it was harder to find opportunities.
A divorce in 2019 set him back, he said, and he began to eat further into his retirement savings. In 2021, he had a brain seizure that forced him to stop looking for work.
“I ended up in the hospital, and I was in a coma for about a month. And then I eventually went home at the end of August 2021, and the doctors told me to rest, you know, the brain takes time to heal,” he said.
But a year later, he attempted a return to politics, running in the 2022 Toronto municipal election.
“I found that the energy wasn’t there. It was hard to mobilize, and so I didn’t win. And I applied for different jobs, but it’s hard at my age,” he said.
Unemployed at a time when homelessness is on the rise in Toronto and the cost of living is forcing more people to turn to food banks, regardless of employment. Berardinetti said he had to sell his car to make ends meet.
He eventually ran out of money, he said, and had to move out of the house he was renting after his divorce. After a short stint living with his brother in Ajax, Berardinetti said he moved into a shelter in town in November of 2023.
Politicians of different backgrounds pitch in
Things have turned around for Berardinetti in recent weeks, physically and financially.
Berardinetti said his doctor has cleared him to go back to work and he goes to the library every day, working to renew his law licence, set up his own legal practice and write a book.
And after over a year on Ontario’s housing list, he’s taken himself off and will be able to look for new accommodations with the help of the $25,000 raised through Van Dette’s GoFundMe.
The campaign has raised over $35,000, with donations coming from politicians from across the ideological spectrum. But Van Dette says the extra money will be given to the Association of Former Parliamentarians to set up a trust to help other politicians struggling after retirement.
Politicians from all backgrounds contributed to the campaign, including former mayor John Tory, former premiers Kathleen Wynne and Dalton McGuinty, Conservative MPP Lisa McLeod and Toronto councillors like Brad Bradford and Parthi Kandavel.
“It’s very humbling,” Berardinetti said. “The guy that I defeated was a Conservative [Dan Newman]. He donated. And the woman who defeated me, who was NDP [Doly Begum], she donated as well. So, compassion is not owned by one party.”
Berardinetti said he plans to meet with a real estate agent this month.
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