DISMANTLING REGINA’S TENT ENCAMPMENT

 

 

 

Last Friday, July 28, the order was given by the Fire Department in Regina to dismantle the encampment that had developed around the city hall. There had been three fires in the past week and the encampment was declared unsafe.

 

This one has no easy answers. Struggle with the incompleteness and the confusion of homelessness in our society. The honesty is in the struggle; not in the results. There are no easy solutions. But this situation puts our society to the test. How do we treat the  weakest and most vunerable in our society?

 

Everyone said, ‘where are these people to go?’ We order them to pack up their tents but they will just move somewhere else in the city. Some of these displaced people were placed in hotels but this was often away from the area in which they were able to function. We clean up one problem in front of city hall, only to dump it somewhere else? Does this make any sense?

 

How does one become homeless?

 

Each homeless person has a unique story. There is no one recipe to become a homeless person. There are many who suffer from mental illness and are not able to hold down a job. There are serious addiction problems. Drugs are used to numb the pain within their lives.

 

We must ask: where are their families? So often, their families are not able to cope with the terrible behavior of the individual who becomes  homeless. They are powerless to give any directions to the addictive behavior. The bridges between the family and the addicted person have collapsed. They cannot go home or even ask for any type of assistance.

 

We must recognize that homeless is also the direct result of prosperity. When the rents and housing prices increase at the top end, so does the cost of rents go up at the bottom end. People who could afford to pay the monthly rent in the past find themselves squeezed out of the market as the rent increases at the bottom end of the economic circle. Where do you go when you do not have enough money to pay your monthly rent?

 

When you get knocked down in life you can slid into depression that things will never get better and you give up trying to fight your way back up. One failure leads to another failure. You can only try to survive day by day. Each of these persons on the streets is a survivor.

 

The strength of our Canadian society is not in walking away from the reality of homelessness in our cities. Canadian social strength will be in our struggle to try to find solutions. It will be in admitting our limitations in trying to help the situations.  We will be humble and do what we can do to help individuals. We just will not push homelessness to the edge of our city and ignore it.

 

 

 

At the end of the day, we might only come up with very partial solutions but as a society we try to lift people up from the streets. We are not dumping these people into  society’s waste bin. We honestly struggle with them and with all sincere Canadians, even when the odds seem hopeless at the moment.