Plante’s Homeless Solution Isn’t A Solution

If you look down, there’s a very good chance you will see a pair of shoes on your feet.

You give this almost no thought and take for granted that you will always have a pair of shoes.

Homeless people do not. Shoes are their most valuable possession.

Because homeless people walk. They walk to meet their friends. They walk to get their meals. They walk to get to shelters. They walk to health care.

In fact, some homeless people won’t go to shelters because they’re afraid their shoes will be stolen.

Imagine not having shoes. Imagine not having shoes when you don’t have a car or can’t afford public transit. Add to that fact that many homeless people have horrible health problems that limit their mobility.

Imagine being too hungry to walk.

So Rideau-Vanier Councillor Stephanie Plante has a solution for the homeless problem … spread out the services across the city so that other parts of Ottawa can get some of the help that is available from the shelters and health services in her downtown ward.

She calls it: “spread the love.” Perhaps a better word for it would be NIMBY. And spreading the love does the exact opposite of what that phrase appears to mean.

For example, put a health centre geared to the needs of the homeless in Barrhaven. That means that the homeless must take a two-hour ride from the ByWard Market to the outer suburbs. Here’s what happens. The homeless don’t do it for all the reasons previously mentioned. So they don’t get their badly needed health care.

The homeless gather where they can get the things they need like food and health care. Those services in the market area can’t be duplicated in Kanata and shouldn’t be because that’s not where the homeless live. They gather in the market and that’s where their services should be located.

We understand Plante’s problems with the homeless. Their problems are not nice. She would like to see them elsewhere.

But here’s the rub. A number of years ago I did a two-week series of stories for the Citizen on the homeless who lived under the Laurier Street bridge across the Rideau Canal. Shelter workers called them the Dirty Dozen. They were the worst-off of the homeless publication. The horrors they faced every day are shocking.

A year later, I went back to see how the dozen were doing. Eight of them had died in 12 months.

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We’ve Got A Form For That … : CULLEN

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So that’s how serious the problem facing homeless people is. Life or death. They are killed by addiction, disease, hunger and exposure. Sometimes one cause or maybe a number. Kanata, Hintonburg, Orleans, Carlington, Overbrook, Vars  and Barrhaven don’t have the services available to deal with the problem. In fact the market, with those services, is coping with a problem too big to handle.

Accordingly, the suburbs and inner suburbs couldn’t remotely deal with the problem.

Homelessness is a life-and-death situation. Bad ‘solutions’ make a terrible social problem worse.

And that’s what Stephanie Plante’s so-called solution causes.

Ken Gray

For You:

We’ve Got A Form For That … : CULLEN

Ottawa Staff Think You Are Stupid: PATTON

Let’s Make A Deal City Hall: PATTON

The City Work-At-Home Compromise: LO

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