GuelphToday received the following Letter to the Editor from resident, Liz Hales, who expresses concerns with homelessness in the community:
I am compelled to write my first letter to the Editor as I’m deeply disturbed by our community’s apparent complacency to help the homelessness.
Last week, my teenaged daughter met me at my downtown place of work just after at 5 p.m. when most employees and clients had left for the day. As I let her into my locked place of work, someone who was tucked into the sheltered doorway in his sleeping bag, looked up at me. I felt a deep sense of shame and helplessness. The man was trying to survive outside through another night of -17C.
How can we allow this type of situation to persist? How do we explain this to our children?
I work with underhoused and homeless people in Guelph. The people that I know who are sleeping on the street, including those who are in tents in St. Georges Square as well as many other “invisible” locations, would sleep indoors if beds were made available.
The City of Guelph has developed a list of warming facilities to address daytime and overnight stays for people experiencing homelessness. The Community Cold Weather Response lists close to a dozen warming options. The list is misleading. What seems sufficient upon an initial glance reveals that only one emergency shelter is open overnight. The overnight facility on Gordon Street is open every night; winter and summer. During the winter, it is usually at full capacity. Many of the people I work with stand in line for hours to secure one of the 30 some beds available only to be turned away as the facility fills up.
This is an inadequate emergency shelter response because additional spaces or beds are not made available during extreme cold weather events as part of the City’s Community Cold Weather Response.
There are so many reasons why a prosperous City such as Guelph should have overnight shelter for all community members at all times, never mind during the winter. In addition to signalling that we are a caring community, it would at a minimum acknowledge that exposure to below zero temperatures results in hypothermia, frostbite with loss of digits and potentially limbs, pain, frostnip, trench foot with blisters, ulcers, feelings of despair and neglect. And these issues in turn lead to the need for more emergency and urgent services including many preventable sequelae (cardiovascular insufficiency, sepsis, premature death).
As a health care provider, I can assure you that the costs of treating the effects of cold exposure that I see among my clients including the preventable sequelae, costs taxpayers a lot more in health care dollars than staffing a warming centre provided by a municipality.
There are many current examples of cities acting to help the homeless this winter. Gatineau is installing heated tents in front of a city arena, cities in Nova Scotia are partnering with the Provincial government to get small homes up for homeless folk, the City of Toronto opens their warming centres 24/7; Ottawa opens additional community centres.
I am calling on the Mayor and City Council to act now to address the inadequate cold weather response for our homeless and create an overnight shelter on city property.
We should all be appalled and ashamed that there is even ONE person sleeping on the street; warm weather or cold, tent or not. As a compassionate man once said ‘the true measure of any society can be found in how it treats it’s most vulnerable’. The suffering is real.
Let’s not be complacent and let’s also not blame other levels of government. The time to act is now.
Liz Hales,
Guelph
