As long as we allow homeless people to sleep on our streets, then homeless people will sleep on our streets.
It has nothing to do with the resources City Hall assigns to combat homelessness.
Even during cold spells like the ones we’ve been experiencing recently, Toronto’s multimillion-dollar, 3,800-bed shelter system runs 3%-4% below capacity.
And in a cold weather emergency, more beds can be added if the city thinks they’re necessary.
That’s why last week’s call by Coun. Adam Vaughan, backed by the perennial rabble-rousers from the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, for yet another emergency debate on homelessness, was pointless.
Predictably, city councillors, far too many of whom are influenced by whoever happens to be screaming at them that day, voted 24-20 in favour of Vaughan’s motion.
But that fell short of the two-thirds majority needed to bring the homeless issue to council immediately, instead of in April when it’s scheduled to address it.
This caused the OCRAP contingent to erupt into one of its predictable festivals of indignation, screaming insults and promising they would be back March 7 to turn Metro Hall into an emergency shelter. So what else is new?
Back in the real world, the real issue when it comes to dealing with Toronto’s homeless is this.
As long as our governments — at all levels — consider it a civil right for people to live on our streets, regardless of their capacity to make rational decisions on their own behalf and no matter how many times we ask them to come in from the cold, nothing will change.
In that context, demands that we throw ever-increasing amounts of tax money at the problem, from all the usual suspects who hang around City Hall looking for never-ending handouts, are absurd.
That won’t solve anything, for the simple reason that if people are bound and determined to live on the streets — and we refuse to compel them to come inside — then that’s exactly what they will do.
In politics, as in life, decisions have consequences.
The consequence of refusing to compel people to come in from the cold on our streets is that some of them will die in the cold.
We disagree with that.
We believe it’s unacceptable to leave people out on the street who have lost the capacity to care for themselves, often due to mental illness or substance abuse.
We believe it’s unconscionable to treat these people worse than we would a suffering animal, which is not to compare the homeless to animals, but to condemn our lack of action for the cruelty it is.
But it’s not a problem we’ll solve by throwing more tax money at the homeless file, that taxpayers can’t afford to pay.
And it’s time we stopped pretending otherwise.
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