UPDATED: See No Evil

 

The evil would be the visibility of homeless people. The 'solution' that had been sought by Barrie City Council was an odious bylaw that would have outlawed individuals giving food, drink and other succour to those living on the streets. Essentially, it was a "don't feed the wildlife" approach, apparently in the hope that if you didn't encourage them, the unhoused would simply make themselves scarce.

As originally envisaged,  legislative fiat would 

include prohibiting the use or distribution of tents or tarps in public parks or lands without a permit, banning food and grocery distribution in public spaces without permission and reducing timelines for park camping and the storage of goods in public spaces. 

As well, bylaws were 

to be changed to prohibit payments to panhandlers on city streets, intersections and highway ramps. 

For now, likely as a result of unpleasant publicity, the city has backed off from the plan.

Councillors referred the controversial bylaws back to staff at a meeting Wednesday night.

Council’s plan was to have the legislation be enforced, under the Provincial Offences Act, by bylaw officers or members of the Barrie Police Service, with individual fines set to range from $500 to $100,000, [my emphasis] depending on the circumstance.

Before the council meeting, dozens of residents gathered outside city hall, many holding signs and speaking out in opposition to the proposed rules.

“Charitable acts of kindness are central to our community,” Coun. Jim Harris said. “We do not want to punish that; that’s not the intent. I look forward to having a better bylaw that reflect what people really want.”

 Marie-Josée Houle, a federal housing advocate whose non-partisan office works under the umbrella of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, had also urged council to backtrack.

“These measures would severely restrict access to basic shelter and food for people living in local homeless encampments and, as such, are in direct contravention of international human rights standards,” she wrote in a letter to members of council, Ontario Premier Doug Ford and Municipal Affairs and Housing Minister Steve Clark.

“I am concerned that the proposed approach of the city to deny basic shelter to people living without access to housing or other safe and adequate formal shelter options will lead to a worsening of the crisis that your residents are experiencing,” she wrote.

I have seen all manner of human debasement in my lifetime. Criminalizing compassion and charity is but another egregious example.

It is clearly the true evil here.

UPDATE: In my view, the following represents a pusillanimous 'walk-back' from Barrie's mayor regarding the bylaw proposal. Apparently, it is all a 'miscommunication' due to sloppy wording and not a war on compassion after all:

Canadians' eyes are on you and your council, Mr. Mayor.

 

It's Not Going Away

In my post about homelessness the other day, I wrote, In Toronto, a motion that would have kept warming centres open from November to April was defeated, despite shelter space being at a premium. 

Homelessness is not going away, and many citizens are acutely aware of that fact and the immorality of Toronto's decision.

A shameful shelter vote, Feb. 10

I am sad and appalled by Council’s heartless and immoral vote against 24/7 warming centres this winter. There can be no justification for voting against providing warmth for people seeking shelter from the cold.

People need warm, safe places to be instead of stairwells, bridges, parks, ttc buses and subways, libraries, etc. The approximately $400,000 per month warming centres would cost, is a drop in the bucket compared to other city expenses that are not vital to prevent suffering and save lives.

The basic purpose of government is to provide essential services for the safety and security of its citizens. As Edward Keenan opines, when there’s money for police and the World Cup, how can 100 people a day be turned away from shelter?

I am angry that the Mayor and Council have failed their core responsibility.

 Dawn Michael, Toronto

The heartless decision of the mayor and some councillors not to see keeping warming centres as their first priority shames all Torontonians.

Brydon Gombay, Toronto

One need only walk a few city blocks or ride the TTC to be confronted with the human suffering and despair of individuals who are unhoused.

It is heartbreaking to witness people bedded down on our sidewalks and to know that our elected representatives believe that the citizens of this city are OK with this callous disregard for human life.

The complex issues that lead to homelessness are certainly not resolved by warming shelters, but leaving people exposed to the cruel elements of our Toronto winters is just wrong.

Barbara McMorrow, Toronto

The refusal of Toronto city council to ensure there are warming places 27/7 in the winter is a new low, done while the police budget is goosed upwards.

But maybe we can lower the bar to something the slim majority of council might support: opening up the city hall parking garage as a shelter.

I’m sure it isn’t all that well used, especially on the lower levels, and at least it’s warmer than outside. It’s already owned by the city, and there’s a lot of security around already. Yes, if it were completely repurposed, it might present a problem for some of the drivers at city hall, but Line 1 subway is minutes away. and there’s the Bay Street bus and the Queen streetcar.

Hamish Wilson, Toronto

There are clearly no simple answers to the growing dimensions of homelessness, but at least the above, and I am certain many thousands more, are unwilling to accept a patently untenable status quo. 

It is incumbent upon all of us to speak for those who have no voice.

 

 

 

The Face of Homelessness

I have been thinking a lot about the homeless for quite awhile now. It is a problem difficult to ignore given the proliferation of people 'living rough,' attested to by the increasingly common tent encampments that are frequently rather gleefully taken down with alacrity by city officials. Are there alternatives? In Toronto, a motion that would have kept warming centres open from November to April was defeated, despite shelter space being at a premium. 

Unquestionably, it is to our collective shame that people are living without a semblance of dignity, dignity they could achieve if we made it a real political issue. 

The poor have no political voice, largely because they don't vote and have no power. Leverage only occurs further up the social scale. But it it would seem far past time that people realize, if not for altruistic reasons, then at least for selfish ones, that the problem of homelessness is everyone's problem. 

Consider the recent, seemingly unprovoked, attacks on people in the street, on the streetcar and in the subway, often in broad daylight. Obviously, those perpetrating the attacks are largely mentally ill, a condition frequently exacerbated, if not caused, by homelessness. 

You can do it for yourself, or you can do it for the collective good. And yes, that would require a reallocation of government resources and/or tax increases for the the well-to-do, something that has become the third rail in politics.

The homeless have a face. Thanks to ESN Parkdale for the following:

Richard was evicted from Lakeshore and Jameson yesterday. His tent and belongings were trashed in front of him, by a large mechanical claw and a group of

@cityoftoronto

workers. They didn’t offer any shelter, because there’s none available (per the City’s own stats).

America's Answer To The Homeless Problem

Call it thinking outside the box, but a U.S. candidate for the Senate has a novel idea about the homeless problem: arm them with shotguns.

Here is Libertarian Brian Ellison's plan, borne, no doubt, out of deep compassion:

... homeless people are “constantly victims of violent crime” and providing them with firearms would provide a deterrent.

[He] said he had settled on pump-action shotguns for practicality purposes.

“Frankly I think the ideal weapon would be a pistol,” he told the Guardian, “but due to the licensing requirements in the state we’re going to have a hard enough time getting homeless people shotguns as it is.

“Getting them pistols is probably next to impossible. The pistols need to be registered, people have to have addresses.”

Carrying a concealed pistol is illegal without a permit, Ellison said, “whereas open-carrying a long gun is completely legal”.

I can't help but wonder if it also occurs to Ellison that he may also have hit upon a cost effective plan to reduce the number of homeless people in America's midst.

Kind of a reversion to Hobbes' state of nature, eh?

Where Is Help To Be Found?

Over the past several weeks I have been reading a number of letters to the editor from 'concerned' citizens about the arrival of Syrian refugees in Canada. Some offer a racist perspective thinly disguised as concern for our fellow Canadians (Instead of helping those people, shouldn't we be dealing with our own homeless?) while others are genuine and heartfelt, happy that we are helping those who have suffered so much thanks to a civil war not of their own making, but also wondering why we can't be doing the same for our fellow Canadians who toil away in desperate situations, often despite their best efforts to get off the street, get jobs and housing, etc. And that is a good question indeed.

Contrary to what some would like to think, it is not simply the poorly educated who are often in fairly desperate straits. As I have written more than once on this blog, the precariat is growing in number, a fact that I was once again reminded of this morning in an article about Toronto's library workers:

Jobs have been slashed by 17 per cent since 1998, according to the city’s library worker union, despite a 30 per cent increase in circulation. And while the number of public library managers on the Sunshine List has skyrocketed, around 50 per cent of non-management library jobs are part time — leaving many strapped with irregular hours and limited access to benefits and pensions.

With good job creation a staple of the City of Toronto’s proposed poverty reduction strategy, library workers say the city needs to start by looking at its own standards.

While there will always be those who insist on disdaining unions, more out of envy than anything else, the above amply illustrates that having a unionized job offers only limited protection against privation and the vagaries of the workplace. So where does a possible answer lie?

The notion of a guaranteed annual income is once more gaining traction.

At a Montreal convention in 2014 when the Liberal party was a lowly third power in Parliament, its members passed Policy Resolution 100, pledging to create a “Basic Annual Income” to solve problems in the social safety net, from pension risk to seasonal worker benefits.

That promise, to guarantee a minimum income, has a new urgency entering 2016, as the new Liberal majority government brings that platform to life in a country clamouring for new ways to manage welfare and benefits.

While some see it as simply a program that would discourage people from working, the fact is that it has a myriad of benefits that makes it attractive to those on both ends of the political spectrum:

Evelyn Forget, one of the few researchers to have actually studied the policy in the wild, described guaranteed basic income as an idea whose time has come, and “definitely doable.”

One popular version of the idea works like a refundable tax credit. “If an individual has no income from any source at all, they receive a basic entitlement,” Forget wrote in an op-ed this year. “As earned income increases, the benefit declines, but less than proportionately. As a result, low-income earners receive partial benefits so that they aren’t worse off than they would have been if they had quit their jobs and relied solely on income assistance. This means that there is always an incentive to work, and people who work are always better off than they would be if they didn’t work.”

And there have been some surprising enthusiasts of the concept:

It has had proponents such as Milton Friedman, the iconic free marketeer who liked it as a simplification of welfare, and leading Canadian Tories from Robert Stanfield to Hugh Segal. No less a neo-con pair than Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney once oversaw a mincome pilot project for the Nixon White House, aimed at measuring labour market reactions.

Lest we forget, there was an experiment conducted in the 1970's in Dauphin, Manitoba which some very encouraging results. Evelyn Forget was

the University of Manitoba economist who analyzed data from a pilot program during the 1970s, where everyone in Dauphin, Man., was guaranteed a “mincome” as a test case. The program ended without an official final analysis, but Forget did her own and found minor decreases in work effort but larger benefits on various social indicators, from hospitalizations to educational attainment.

The results suggested to her that a national mincome could improve health and social outcomes at the community level.

Is a guaranteed annual income a means of addressing the growing income gap in Canada, a way of starting to rebalance the disproportionate transfer of wealth to the few at the expense of the many? Perhaps, although the one quibble I have with it is the possibility that it could ultimately work against the development of fairer minimum wages and labour laws to protect workers more than they are today. Indeed, would it become essentially a subsidy to business, who could justify ongoing low wages by pointing out the safety net provided by a guaranteed annual income?

I don't have the answers, but surely something other than the current sad status quo is needed.

Russell Brand On Homelessness

Oh, how the right wing must hate him. Read this and watch the accompanying video to find out why.



I especially like this from Brand:

“There’s a prevailing idea,” he continued, “that there’s something ethically wrong with being poor, and that America’s run according to Christian values. But when people are practicing genuine Christian values, they themselves are directly prosecuted.”

“Clearly,” Brand said, “what Jesus was really into was having guns, and not having abortions, and not being gay. Those are his main priorities. But after he made sure that everyone had a gun, no one had an abortion, and nobody was gay, he had a little think about the poor people and whether they needed anything.”

“Sharing is one of the most important Christian values. Looking after each other is a Christian value.” But, he added, American businessmen use “Christianity and morality of all kind to protect their own corporate interests.”

'Nuff said.

We really Are Limited Only by Our Imagination

I think this story and the accompanying video amply demonstrate this:

Pick On Someone Your Own Size, Premier McGuinty

Much rhetoric has been uttered of late about the need for everyone to 'share the pain' as Ontario's McGuinty government attacks the provincial deficit in a manner that many think is counterproductive, stripping away teachers collective bargaining rights being but one example.

However one may feel about such moves, those in the public service are at least positioned fairly well to weather this strategy. The same cannot be said for many others. Not all targets are created equal.

One such target of McGuinty's fervour are the poor. As Carol Goar reports in today's Star, a program called the community start-up and maintenance benefit (CSUMB) will be cut off at the end of 2012.

Goar writes:

For 20 years, this program has served as a lifeline for people at risk of homelessness. It’s an emergency allowance, available every two years, worth a maximum of $799. It enables the homeless to move into an apartment. It helps low-income tenants who can’t pay their utility bill keep the lights on; job applicants buy suitable clothes; families fumigate bedbug-infested apartments; and people facing eviction pay their rent arrears.

According to Naomi Berlyne of Houselink, it keeps a roof over hundreds of heads every year. “Without it, we’re going to have a disaster on our hands.”

I don't care how venal or self-centred people might be, I expect that most will be as outraged as I am over this development; I know I will be writing my MPP a letter protesting it.

Shame on the Premier for targeting the most vulnerable amongst us.

It is something that I will neither forgive nor forget at the next election.