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New Canadian Politics Thread

hockeylover said:
toronto.ctvnews.ca

'Enough is enough': Doug Ford says Ontario could hand encampment drug users $10,000 fines, prison

Ontario Premier Doug Ford says his government is introducing a suite of measures to help municipalities “address and dismantle” homeless encampments around the province, including steep fines for people who use drugs.
toronto.ctvnews.ca toronto.ctvnews.ca

How does this actually help the issue? They can’t pay. They’re homeless and/or addicts. How will fining them help?
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Those who grew up in Rexdale know of a certain drug dealer......
 
hockeylover said:
toronto.ctvnews.ca

'Enough is enough': Doug Ford says Ontario could hand encampment drug users $10,000 fines, prison

Ontario Premier Doug Ford says his government is introducing a suite of measures to help municipalities “address and dismantle” homeless encampments around the province, including steep fines for people who use drugs.
toronto.ctvnews.ca toronto.ctvnews.ca

How does this actually help the issue? They can’t pay. They’re homeless and/or addicts. How will fining them help?
Click to expand...


It’s not a new idea, unfortunately. I have a friend who used to be a homeless drug addict for years. And even over 10 years after getting clean and getting back on his feet, he was still paying back all of the various fines he racked up while he was homeless, since he couldn’t get a driver’s license until all the fines had been paid.

That said, something does have to be done about encampments. Letting all of the green spaces in cities gradually turn into a combination of a shantytown & garbage dump is no kind of solution.
 
Agree, but the encampments are a result of society not willing to pay for the housing, health services, skills development etc to help people get back on their feet (I recognize that some cases might be beyond help.) But now it seems we’ll just put them in jail - maybe private jails owned by Dougie’s developer friends?

Running up fines on someone with no fixed address is ridiculous.
 
lecoqsportif said:
Agree, but the encampments are a result of society not willing to pay for the housing, health services, skills development etc to help people get back on their feet (I recognize that some cases might be beyond help.) But now it seems we’ll just put them in jail - maybe private jails owned by Dougie’s developer friends?

Running up fines on someone with no fixed address is ridiculous.
Click to expand...

There's deeper problems. You need to set up the housing and support options for those people struggling, and you also need to figure out how to actually get them to go. You can have the social housing available, but there's a portion of people with problems that they wouldn't go.

Fining or jailing them doesn't do any good. The closest you could argue with would be to somewhat forcibly remove people to rehab centres if you really wanted to get them off the streets. But even that's frought with potential problems, and should be a last step if offerring those services isn't having the desired impact.
 
I don’t pretend to know what has to be done - I’m just guessing a safe place to live with health service are a part of the approach.

What Dougie is doing however, is calling on our dark side in which we just cast people into jails because it’s expedient and seems to be action oriented. There’s also the hard man/cruelty angle that appeals to his base.
 
The encampments are crazy though. There was one broken up in Hamilton yesterday that had an underground tunnel system with electricity.

Its a problem, and there is no good temporary solution because the municipalities don't have the facilities to deal with the numbers.

Its symptomatic about a much larger issue that has been ignored by the Feds and province to get to this point. Not enough jobs. Not enough housing. Little enforcement of public space regs. And not enough social services to help people that are down and out, so building an undergournd mole city in a park is actually a sensible option.
 
leafman101 said:
The encampments are crazy though. There was one broken up in Hamilton yesterday that had an underground tunnel system with electricity.

Its a problem, and there is no good temporary solution because the municipalities don't have the facilities to deal with the numbers.

Its symptomatic about a much larger issue that has been ignored by the Feds and province to get to this point. Not enough jobs. Not enough housing. Little enforcement of public space regs. And not enough social services to help people that are down and out, so building an undergournd mole city in a park is actually a sensible option.
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Yeah, it’s wild.

If you don’t live in a big city of have them near where you live, maybe all you’re picturing is a cluster of tents in a park.

Instead, it’s tents and shanties haphazardly slapped together with scrap wood, pallets, metal, tarps and garbage, with jerry-rigged electricity running to them and fires being built in and outside the shelters. Then all around the various shelters is just mounds and mounds of garbage and random shit that looks like someone took a hoarder’s house, turned it upside down and dumped out the contents into a park. With a scattering of hard drug paraphernalia & human waste as well.

Doug Ford’s dumbassery isn’t the solution, but the idiotic do-nothing approach of Olivia Chow and other dippers sure as fuck isn’t the way either.
 
UWHabs said:
There's deeper problems. You need to set up the housing and support options for those people struggling, and you also need to figure out how to actually get them to go. You can have the social housing available, but there's a portion of people with problems that they wouldn't go.

Fining or jailing them doesn't do any good. The closest you could argue with would be to somewhat forcibly remove people to rehab centres if you really wanted to get them off the streets. But even that's frought with potential problems, and should be a last step if offerring those services isn't having the desired impact.
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And we all know what happens to privileged white property owners when government proposes that a housing project for at risk people be built in their neighborhood, don't we?

NIMBY!

Please, won't somebody think about the children?
 
well if they're giving away free homes, suddenly a lot of people are going to want one, including many renters who barely get by, living in really shitty apartments or with a bunch of roommates, recently laid off, addicted to drugs, stressed to the brink, etc.

If you start to integrate the homeless into regular apartment buildings or low income housing, it leads to major issues if they are violent or abusing drugs.

Obviously Ford's idea here is idiotic. But we have seen this problem grow out of control in many cities around the world, it's not just an "Olivia Chow" problem. If there was an easy fix, somebody would have done it by now.

I do wonder if there isn't a way to take a piece of land and set up a bunch of 3D printed homes, or even smaller storage shed units, with some sort of plumbing and run by the government. That by itself becomes a kind of "encampment" too, but regulate it and have strict rules about who qualifies. Help them find jobs and slowly wean off the drugs when applicable, and eventually move out of there into a regular place with a subsidy. The problem here is that a lot of people won't qualify for a variety of reasons, which will lead them to go and live in an unregulated encampment instead.

It's extremely difficult to deal with the people who have serious mental illness and/or crippling addictions. Many refuse all help from the start, or can't follow rules and drop out of the system.

Honestly, there may not be a viable solution. Other than vastly expanding the amount of low-income housing available. Which will take years and also probably need to be run or subsidized by the government, as builders don't want to spend their time building places that can't make a profit.
 
axlsalinger said:
well if they're giving away free homes, suddenly a lot of people are going to want one, including many renters who barely get by, living in really shitty apartments or with a bunch of roommates, recently laid off, addicted to drugs, stressed to the brink, etc.

If you start to integrate the homeless into regular apartment buildings or low income housing, it leads to major issues if they are violent or abusing drugs.

Obviously Ford's idea here is idiotic. But we have seen this problem grow out of control in many cities around the world, it's not just an "Olivia Chow" problem. If there was an easy fix, somebody would have done it by now.

I do wonder if there isn't a way to take a piece of land and set up a bunch of 3D printed homes, or even smaller storage shed units, with some sort of plumbing and run by the government. That by itself becomes a kind of "encampment" too, but regulate it and have strict rules about who qualifies. The problem there is that a lot of people won't quality for a variety of reasons, which will lead them to go and live in an unregulated encampment instead.

It's extremely difficult to deal with the people who have serious mental illness and crippling addictions. Many of them refuse all help from the start, or can't follow rules and drop out of the system.

Honestly, there may not be a viable solution. Other than vastly expanding the amount of low-income housing available. Which will take years and also probably need to be run or subsidized by the government, as builders don't want to spend their time building places that can't make a profit.
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Yeah, it would really be nice if the answer was as simple as “give them all homes”. A close relative of mine ran a prominent support organization for the homeless in Toronto, and they were always working to get homeless people into affordable or sometimes even free housing.

But the ones with mental illness and/or active drug addictions would pretty much just continue their same habits from when they were homeless until their new place was trashed and they’d end up back on the streets.
 
axlsalinger said:
well if they're giving away free homes, suddenly a lot of people are going to want one, including many renters who barely get by, living in really shitty apartments or with a bunch of roommates, recently laid off, addicted to drugs, stressed to the brink, etc.

If you start to integrate the homeless into regular apartment buildings or low income housing, it leads to major issues if they are violent or abusing drugs.
Click to expand...

This is a very narrow view of what a "home" has to be when combatting homelessness. Finland is running a program right now with free housing for the unhoused, that provides a small bachelor apartment in a purpose built building. It's not really "free" in the real sense of the word either as the money that already went to dealing with the costs of homelessness just gets shifted to paying rent. These are people who were ineligible for traditional social programs because they had no address, but cost society far more than traditional assistance would cost in increases policing and emergency health care spend.

pulitzercenter.org

A Look Into Finland’s Housing First Initiative

Attention on Finland's approach toward housing and homelessness has grown worldwide. According to Housing First Europe, within the past 16 years, Finland has shifted from traditional management of...
pulitzercenter.org pulitzercenter.org

Finland has cut their homelessness from about 20K to 3400 using this approach over the last few decades. To put it another way, prior to implementing this Finland had a better but similar per capita homeless population as Canada and today has a tiny fraction of our rate. Finnish homelessness has decreases substantially since 2018, while ours has fucking exploded since 2018.
 
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Places that have focused on housing first approach have had good results. Even if you're just helping those with lower metal physical and addiction issues you're freeing up resources to focus on the higher acuity people.

I don't know if we need full institutionalization but definitely need more empowered supports for the most hopeless addicts and psych cases.
 
Aberdeen said:
Places that have focused on housing first approach have had good results. Even if you're just helping those with lower metal physical and addiction issues you're freeing up resources to focus on the higher acuity people.

I don't know if we need full institutionalization but definitely need more empowered supports for the most hopeless addicts and psych cases.
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Yep. The underlying truth is that helping homeless people hit the hard reset button on their lives provides a pretty excellent rate of success on getting them back into being a functioning member of society. For the 10-20% who aren't capable of it, now you've created a glut of resources for managing that much smaller percentage with such deep addiction/mental health problems.
 
I generally don't trust the AI write ups on google, but for reference here it is on the impact of Housing First in Finland:

Homelessness reduction
Between 2008 and 2022, the number of people experiencing long-term homelessness in Finland decreased by 68%.

  • Housing access
    On average, 80% of homeless people have accessed housing through the program.

  • Homelessness rate
    Finland is the only EU country where the number of homeless people has declined since the Housing First policy began.

  • Housing stock
    The government converted homeless shelters into housing units, and created new independent rental apartments for people formerly experiencing homelessness.

  • Public housing distribution
    The government distributed public housing in scattered sites throughout the city to encourage people of lower economic classes to mix with more affluent residents.

  • Political consensus
    All governments, despite different political coalitions, have agreed to continue programs to end homelessness.

  • Savings
    A recent study showed the savings in emergency healthcare, social services, and the justice system totalled as much as €15,000 a year for every homeless person in properly supported housing.

 
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