COLUMN: The world is watching - let's take real action on homelessness

When I consider the phrase “shit hit the fan,” nothing seems more relevant than the acts of the City of Abbotsford in June 2013. Amid growing tensions with a homeless camp in the city, workers dumped chicken manure at the site and told people to move along.

The disgusting — morally and otherwise — act did nothing to help the situation but instead incurred a lawsuit.

When Matthew Baran pointed to the Abbotsford example and the damage that incident did to its reputation, I initially shrugged it off as an extreme example.

But as a community, we need to acknowledge that we have damned at least 52 people who could have had a room by the end of December to life on the streets for a few more months.

And those months happen to be the coldest time of year.

Though I may not have immediately paid much mind to Baran’s comments about Abbotsford, we have managed to garner some outside attention.

In an editorial in the Burnaby Now last Friday, editor Chris Campbell took aim at the demonization of homeless in this province, from Maple Ridge to Richmond to Penticton.

“In Penticton, the cowards on that town’s council caved in to a group of scared people who had ludicrous views about people who are homeless,” Campbell wrote.

As a town that thrives on and takes pride in its tourism industry, surely we could be leaving a better impression on potential visitors on the coast.

Campbell’s views fly in the face of a statement from Coun. Helena Konanz, who called council’s decision — to say they want the housing, but not there — “courageous.”

As was pointed out to me by Baran, there’s little courage in voting largely in lockstep with council and those who came to lecture them. Where Baran sees courage is the lone dissenting vote from Coun. Judy Sentes.

But we have seen courage from this council. In November 2016, council heard the old lines (good project, bad location) again and again for three hours in a packed convention hall, where hundreds turned out to oppose a 119-unit rental apartment development on Kinney Avenue.

Despite hearing only a few solitary voices of approval for the project, only Mayor Andrew Jakubeit voted against the project.

“I’ve lost many of my peers in this community due to affordable housing not being available. Families need places to live in this community,” Coun. Max Picton, the strongest voice supporting the project at the time.

That same councillor became the strongest opposition to the Green Avenue proposal.

In a phone call, Picton suggested a single mother who works 16-hour days to support her family might give up when she sees housing provided to the homeless. But that ignores that, in doing so, a single mother with two children would drop from a minimum $202 day before tax to a $38 day.

And where sympathy rightly exists for the working poor and vacancy-starved, the homeless are too often blamed for the state of their lives, ignoring that nearly all of them are coming from trauma and systemic failures.

But Picton’s 2016 logic doesn’t apply the same here — we won’t see the homeless pack up and leave town because of a lack of housing like those who struggle to find rentals in town.

Instead, we’ll see them on the streets, where the city’s most vulnerable find themselves in far more danger than the Green Avenue proposal would have posed for the nearby students.

After the Highland Motel closed, at least one 64-year-old man was assaulted with a golf club while he slept on the beach. Another man recently woke up in his tent in Esplanade Park to intruders shooting him several times, including in the eye, with a BB gun.

A day after council condemned 52 people to the streets through the harshest season, bylaw cleared out several homeless camps in Esplanade Park. They came armed with the explanation that there was a large mess in the park, meanwhile acknowledging that much of that mess comes from non-campers dumping or leaving garbage in the area. And yes, city staff did offer sympathy to the campers.

Yes, we’ve yet to spray manure on anyone’s campsite. But when we play political games with their housing and sweep them out of one of few consistent locations that they can sleep, one must question the integrity of the first half of the phrase “We want the housing, but not here.”

As a community that’s filled to the brim with innovative small businesses, surely there’s some ingenuity that can be scrounged up to help pull our most vulnerable people out of dangerous situations on the streets.

We’ve learned from the Burnaby newspaper’s editorial that the world is watching. So let’s show them what compassion looks like — and while we’re at it showcase our community’s ingenuity.

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Dustin Godfrey | Reporter

@dustinrgodfrey

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