The weather is so cold the David Busby Centre’s outreach van is frozen shut, forcing staff to use their own vehicles to provide services to the city’s most vulnerable residents, executive director Sara Peddle said.

“We’re making sure everybody is in from the cold, and our outreach team is making sure everybody has a place to be or at least the supplies to be warm,” she told Simcoe.com on Thursday. “People are still outside, and we’re trying to connect with them.”

While Busby has been at cot capacity for a few days, it will remain open throughout the extreme cold. Busby has taken in more than 70 people per night during the cold snap.

It’s no surprise that the plunging temperatures are forcing more people to walk through the doors at the Alliston Out of the Cold Shelter on Paris Street, but so far the volunteer-run organization is keeping up with the demand.

“We are not at capacity but we’re are getting awfully close, and have managed to stay that way for quite some time now,” said shelter director Jeni Pergentile.

“We are hovering around the seven to nine mark for people staying with us, and our capacity is 12.”

Pergentile said the overnight shelter has been doing everything it can to help people escape the deep freeze, like extending its hours in the morning so users have a place to stay until other facilities in town open their doors.

As Ontario courts grapple with the case against the provincial government on basic income, the Jesuit Forum for Social Faith and Justice is reminding Catholics that Catholic social teaching demands society must provide an economic minimum that supports families and human dignity.

“The universal basic income idea is about giving people that fundamental human right to a just wage, which is totally in line with Catholic social teaching,” Jesuit Forum director Anne-Marie Jackson told The Catholic Register. “Money is like manure — it’s only good if you spread it around.”

That concept was put to the test in an Ontario court Jan. 28 as lawyers argued over the cancellation of Ontario’s Basic Income Pilot. The court has reserved judgment.

In just a few weeks, Ontario’s ambitious basic income pilot project will be over, cancelled by Doug Ford’s Conservative government. The last payments go out March 31.

For the 4,000 people from Hamilton, Thunder Bay and Lindsay who depended on that money to survive, what happens now?