The federal government has agreed to allow the city to use the Moss Park Armoury as a temporary respite site until Jan. 29, by which point another site at a provincially-owned building on George Street is expected to be operational.

The feds had initially said that the city could use the armoury for a period of two-weeks but on Wednesday Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan confirmed that the armoury will in fact remain available to the homeless until Jan. 29, which would be more than three weeks after it first opened.

The news comes one day after the province announced that it would allow the city to use a former youth detention centre at 354 George Street as a temporary respite site but would need until the week of Jan. 29 to complete needed renovations to the vacant building.

Speaking with reporters at city hall, Sajjan confirmed that the armoury will remain open until Jan. 29 to allow for an orderly transition to the new facility. He also said that the federal government will not be charging the city for use of the armoury.

“We want to work together to make sure that Canadians in their time of need get the support that is required,” Sajjan said, following a meeting with Mayor John Tory. “We won’t be conducting any cost recovery. This is about making sure we serve Canadians.”

A number of city officials have previously suggested that cost was a factor in not requesting the use of the armouries sooner.

In December after council voted down a motion to ask the federal government for use of both the Moss Park and Fort York armouries, Ward 21 Coun. Joe Mihevc said that the armouries “won’t be offered for free tomorrow” and added that there was a “big cost to it” the last time they were made available in 2004.

For his part, Tory told reporters on Wednesday that the “subject of money never came up” in discussions with the federal government. He said that his aversion to using the armoury as an emergency respite site was based on “operational” concerns, mostly around the difficulty of using an operational military building as a temporary shelter site.

“The matter of money and finances never entered into this because it was never raised and never discussed until this minute when you heard the minister say that it wasn’t going to be an issue,” Tory said.

George Street building will be available until April

The province has said that the respite site at 354 George Street will be available to the city on “as-needed basis” until April 15.

“There is a number of common areas in there and we want to use those common areas as spaces to put in cots and facilities,” Minister of Housing Peter Milczyn told CP24 on Wednesday. “We are going through the building now. Some things like steel doors we want to remove in order to make it as welcoming and open as possible. Our focus, though, is to make sure that it is safe, that the heat is on and working and that the plumbing and all those crucial things are working.”

Milczyn said that the province it is “expediting” renovations that must be completed before the building can be used as a respite site.

He said that the building, which has been vacant since 2009, could potentially be made available to the city for the “next couple of winters” as the province mulls over its future.

“The building is vacant and it is going to continue to be vacant. Because we are putting some effort and money into fixing it up as a respite centre it will obviously be available to the city for at least the next couple of winters,” he said.