Ah, yes, these Toronto Star Saturday debates do provide the inspiration to get my typing fingers tapping. This time it is the argument over whether homeless encampments in the public parks should be cleared. The URL to it is here, in case you have trouble understanding what I am talking about. https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/the-saturday-debate/2021/07/03/the-saturday-debate-should-toronto-clear-encampments.html
In this case I do not get a sense of both sides being out to lunch. I am totally on side with the “do not clear encampments” cause. Yet as with most debates, this one is totally futile. It will not change any minds.
The screwheads in charge will keep clearing encampments, in the parks or just about anywhere the happy campers try to set up. The latter will continue to try to create shelter for themselves. This will continue until the great miracle occurs; some people in charge who can deal with the actual problem.
The only problem I have with the “no” side of this discussion is that it does not go far enough. It cannot; if they really laid out the problem it would not be published. But the two writers do a pretty good job of pointing people in the right direction.
The pro clearance side of the debate is a senior official of the city. He runs pretty much the same line which the city has run for about as long as I have been in the city; that shelters are available if people would just go to them.
The anti-clearance side are two social work types who work with homeless people. They make the same counter argument we have heard often enough. They show that there often is not enough space in these shelters. They are often not where people need them and can get to them.
No one should be sleeping in tents in parks. That is obvious. Part of the solution is for the city to spend the money to run proper shelters. There is no reason why they have to be particularly dangerous, or dirty or bug infested.
But the most important point about the city’s shelters is that they are so incompetently run as to be almost impossible to live in. The homeless are camping where they can because that is the best option available to them.
I know what I am tapping about. I have had the misfortune to be in Toronto shelters for a few brief days. Further, in my periods of travelling on the cheap, I have observed at close hand the ways in which several jurisdictions run their homeless or ‘transient’ shelters.
Toronto is the absolute worst I have seen. Acquaintances who have also ‘greyhounded’ generally confirm my observations.
Alas, the problem here is not just an unwillingness to spend money. A major problem with anything social in Ontario is the “move them on” mentality. You see it in some parts of social housing. You see it in the welfare system.
That is, the idea that all public services should be as wretched as possible in order to discourage use of them. It seems like this idea has spread in Ontario since the Harris era. It even informs the transit system and the public school system. They want people to use private systems; an evolution from the ‘less eligibility’ mentality of Victorian England.
In the case of homeless shelters, the aim is to encourage the transient or ‘dropped through the cracks’ elements of the population to get out of town. Unfortunately, there is nowhere else for most of these people to get to and they have no means to get there anyway. If you are going to be homeless, it is better to be so in a large city.
So there is the solution to all the stinky people stinking up our pretty parks. Change the attitude of the people in control of these services in Toronto. Alas, these attitudes seem fairly dug in and it will take some doing to alter them, and that is a topic outside the scope of this essay.
Meanwhile, the ‘run ‘em out of here’ mentality always includes the city police. Every time there has been a rise of a ‘tent city’ or ‘favela’ in Toronto we have seen the same patterns of police harassment. The aim is to do everything to make the community in it fail so as to discredit it and help to justify the final attack.
Every tent city I have been acquainted with has had some weirdo hanging around it who does not actually live there, who attacks the unattached females there, and who tries to burn something down, often successfully. Always, strong evidence about him is presented to the police, whose response ranges from doing absolutely nothing about him to doing the least they plausibly can. This strongly suggests the subject is a police stooge.
Police will try to encourage drug dealers and crazies to relocate to the camp, leaving them unobstructed there. Calls for police assistance from within the camps are ignored. Cops show up only to further mess things up for the residents.
Here is the real cause of the problems created in the locality of these encampments; the lack of police and other assistance. The places are treated as outside the law and so there are no rules and no way of maintaining peace, order and good government. The people in them have as much right as anyone else to police protection and things like garbage pickup.
To conclude; until shelters can be made inhabitable and sufficient in number, homeless encampments must be regularized. Services must be provided so as to prevent problems. As for those who whine about access to ‘their’ parks being restricted, they should shut up and go back to their warm and cozy abodes.
Of course, none of this is going to happen in present circumstances, so look forward to intensifying conflicts in relation to homeless people, homeless shelters, human rights and bad government.
One final point, regarding the travails of “Cheryl.” It seems to be a rule that every city service accessed by homeless women requires its own sexual predator on staff.