Shucking Oysters: No Fixed Address

By Alex Allen

Fun facts. Over 235,000 “known” individuals experience homelessness on any given night in Canada. Last year, there were over two million visits to food banks – the highest number in history. Meanwhile, the social consequences of our public policies have “metastasized.” Changes to health care, social assistance, as well as housing policy have all contributed to the rise in the number of people experiencing homelessness. Our new world order: poverty is not a priority. Profit is. 

Two Canadian political scientists, Alison Smith and Anna Kopec, argue that homelessness is fundamentally political, and the causes and solutions are all wrapped up tightly in our political system. While chronic, long-term homelessness is indeed a new problem of public policy, poverty, colonialism, and social exclusion have meant that people have lived in different forms of housing insecurity or inadequate housing for decades. 

Fifty years ago, Canada had a relatively robust social safety net. Governments at all levels provided supports in many areas, including housing, health care, education, and social assistance. However, that safety net began to erode significantly as governments gingerly assigned more responsibility to us individuals for our economic and social well-being. Why feed or house the poor when food banks and nonprofits will do it for them?

The idealist has given way to the pragmatist, Lawrence Scalan wrote. Much of that energy and activism that once went into political and economic reform has been diverted to nonprofit agencies. While the nonprofits and homeless shelters do their best to meet the needs of a growing and diversifying population of people without housing, some have suggested that the whole homeless system is broken. Former CEO of the Old Brewery Mission emergency shelter in Montreal, Matthew Pearce, wrote “Shelters allowed homelessness to become more than a difficult period in one’s life –  they allowed it to become normalized.” 

The response to this growing crisis has been largely uniform across Canadian cities: eviction through “sweeps” and raids. Last year, police dismantled an encampment in Vancouver, one in Toronto, and another in Edmonton. Similar evictions have occurred in Barrie, Halifax, Calgary, and Victoria. These evictions generally involve a heavy police presence, including riot police, which does not bode well for the sensitive or marginalized. Like the current welfare system, it is all so punitive.

Politicians ordering the eviction of encampments often describe the process as “restoring safety to parks and public spaces.” Marie-Josée Houle, Canada’s first Federal Housing Advocate, calls these actions a “violation of human rights.” Harini Sivalingam, Director of the Equality Program at the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, characterizes it as “criminalizing unhoused people living in encampments.”

“Eviction of encampments is not the solution,” Houle says. “Encampments exist because people have nowhere else to go. Evictions, especially forced evictions, create more insecurity. Even the threat of eviction has a massive impact on people, further worsening their mental health and living conditions.”

According to Sivalingam, this approach poses significant risks to civil liberties. “It is inhumane, unconstitutional, and a violation of people’s rights,” she says. “They are using the law to penalise people for not having a home, for simply trying to survive.”

Addressing homelessness requires more than funding – it demands political will, which is currently lacking across Canada’s political spectrum. But as policymakers ignore expert recommendations – far from the neighbourhoods where politicians order encampment sweeps, people on the streets will continually face a bitter reality.

Ron Rice, executive director of the Victoria Native Friendship Centre said, “It’s like trying to put out a forest fire and only paying attention to the tops of the trees. Telling someone, ‘You can’t be homeless here, go be homeless over there,’ is not a solution.”

We have all seen the sheer dystopia of downtown East Side Vancouver. Locally, Victoria’s Pandora Avenue has also become the poster child of chronic homelessness. And Nanaimo is not that far behind. Closer to home, Campbell River has tightened up the rules around encampments in the city; those experiencing homelessness must be on the move constantly during the day. Like most emergency shelters, if they are not packed up and out by 8 am (some places 7 am) they risk losing their belongings, which they have to haul around all day. Hence the proverbial shopping carts, which represent the last efforts of homeless people to have the ability to keep what little belongings they have. People pushing buggies and carts are doing so because, without them, they have nothing. 

Why is tackling poverty not a health priority? SFU psychology professor, Dr. Julian Somers, wrote, “There are no apparent winners in BC’s bleak, yet astonishingly costly, approach to addiction, homelessness, and community safety.” We need the courage to accept that our efforts to address these issues, have not been successful, and in some cases, may have been misguided. 

As a species we are truly stuck and as someone once said, there is really no escape from the institutional cages we’ve made for ourselves. Or as Somers wrote: “We can transform the challenges of Pandora Avenue with a combination of intelligence, humility, and the one thing that remained behind in Pandora’s Box – hope.”