Before the Hallmark era, where Christmas is mostly about how a highly-stressed career woman from the city finding true love with some laid-back townie who's good with his hands, Christmas movies were about economic equality.
In How the Grinch Stole Christmas, the Grinch learns that the holiday is about more than the acquisition of stuff. In A Christmas Carol, Scrooge learns that life it better when you share your wealth. In It’s a Wonderful Life, George Bailey learns that “no man is a failure so long as he has friends.” In Die Hard we learn that stealing is bad.
I digress.
Strange, then, that next week’s council meeting, just days before the Santa Claus parade downtown and the official launch of the holiday season, Mayor Cam Guthrie would play Scrooge, Potter and Hans Gruber by proposing a motion to ban homeless encampments from downtown.
The proverbial ink is barely dry from the minutes of a meeting last month where council agreed that homelessness should be treated as human rights issue. I’m not sure how that jibes with a bylaw that “prohibits erecting temporary or permanent structures or shelters without permission on lands owned or occupied by the City of Guelph.”
Now to Guthrie’s credit, he did announce on Wednesday a new multi-part motion that was more scalpel than sledgehammer, and that actually uses the words, “Human rights approach.” Still, I wonder if the damage has already been done. Has Guelph’s Housing Mayor reached the end of his compassion, or has he just run out of ideas?
It’s hard to know if there’s a difference. The end result of several lengthy meetings about housing this year has been the conclusion that we need to have more meetings and that we desperately need the funding and attention of the federal and provincial governments, where all the money and the power lies.
Still, the economic update from the federal government this week was focused on how to help people buy a house, and how to help people buy cheaper groceries. Both of those directions presume that you can buy a house and that you can buy groceries, and while this might prevent further destitution, it does nothing for the already destitute.
As for the provincial government, Minister of Finance Peter Bethlenfalvy posted a statement criticizing the federal government for, among other things, not meeting “its obligation to support Ontario municipalities that are struggling to cope with the record number of asylum claimants that have come to Ontario over the past year.”
He said this without a hint of irony, which, granted, is hard to project in a written statement, but for this government to demand of others what it doesn’t demand of itself is either highly partisan or highly tone def. Also, the provincial government’s capacity to blame immigration and the carbon tax as the sole drivers of unaffordability never ceases to amaze me.
Of course the affordability crisis is not new, it’s just risen to the level of being too big to ignore. For many of us, the possibility of owning a house was as untenable 20 years ago as it is today. Plus, Guelph’s vacancy rate has been historically close to zero, and the only thing that’s changed is that the delicate balance between supply and demand is now supremely out of wack.
Blame COVID, blame international students, blame A Place to Grow, but we now have more people than places to live. We’ve got an out of control seller’s marker and loose rules about how rents can be raised resulting in things like “renovictions”, and let’s be honest, nothing done on housing in the last few years has created fewer predatory landlords.
Even on the basics like wages, which are under provincial jurisdiction, we’ve done nothing. ODSP and Ontario Works rates are the same now as they were in the 1990s, and the living wage in Guelph is now nearly $21 per hour even though the minimum wage is not even $17. Despite the crisis, the minimum wage hasn’t even gone up three whole dollars in a decade.
This is a tangled web of a mess and impossible to cure in one grand act. At issue is that our city council is feeling the pressure the hardest. So many of the people we need to take decisive and transformative action are outside our immediate sphere of influence, but you can go to a town hall and yell at the mayor and city council all the live long day.
What they can’t do though is snap their fingers and make everyone housed or get them mental health and addictions services. Guthrie’s motion is, in part, an expression of that frustration, but it looks like a move to just get the problem out of sight, and out of mind. Like with COVID before, we’re sick of the ongoing crisis and we just want it over.
It’s made us forget that no one in their life wants to be homeless, living in a tent in front of city hall just to have some semblance of safety. It’s made us forget that no one wants to buy poison from a stranger just to feel less pain. No one wants to look at the ones in greatest need and think, “What if that’s me?”
There’s a Herman Melville quote that I like, and I’ve quoted it here before, "Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed."
Yes, I don’t agree with much of the commentary in support of Guthrie’s motion, but I do understand the frustration. I do understand the feeling that there’s been more talk and no action because frankly there has been more talk than action.
Having said that, I would keep in mind some words from President John F. Kennedy from a speech he made at American University in 1963: “Our problems are man-made — therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man's reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable — and we believe they can do it again."
He was talking about world peace, another problem that has no easy solution, but the sentiment is the same. Solving homelessness doesn’t just happen, and not seeing a problem is not the same as solving it.
I hope everyone understands that, but my suspicion is that our city’s most vulnerable will be a getting a lump of coal for Christmas, and they won’t even be able to burn it for warmth.
