I was raised knowing many people in my circle of family and friends who dealt with troubles that they had no control over. Tragedy and trauma seemed be a normal part of life as I grew up in Attawapiskat.
My parents’ generation grew up with limited formal education. What schooling they had was in the residential school system, where they faced abuse, colonization and a sense that they were less than human. They passed this trauma on to their children. Some families survived this communal trauma to varying degrees, but many others were unable to cope – falling into drug addiction, alcoholism and mental illness.
Some went to southern communities to find a way out of poverty through work, education and other opportunities. Instead, they found little help and far more ways to complicate their lives. Those who failed to find a life in the south returned defeated to their community. This was difficult as there was a lack of housing or any kind of dedicated care to deal with addictions and mental health conditions.
According to the Homeless Hub, a Canadian Observatory on Homelessness project at York University, 80% of homeless individuals surveyed in the Cochrane District of northwestern Ontario in 2021 identified as Indigenous.
Over the decades, conservative-leaning governments at every level have had simplistic responses to this problem – by stepping up policing and creating rules to outlaw homelessness. Trying to hide the problem only makes matters worse. The homeless, addicted and those with mental problems were ignored or worse, condemned.
It’s necessary to spend money to assist people suffering from these situations. But when you think about it, society always ends up paying for it by spending huge sums in health care, policing and incarceration. There’s also the violence that goes along with these tragic situations. We need to realize that it is best to deal with all these critical problems now to help people heal.
If we don’t care enough to come up with healing solution, those people who are unwell will go on to harm themselves or others, which leads to more emergency health care. People who are homeless, addicted and mentally unwell fall into criminal behaviour, which then leads to increased public costs of judicial services, courts, incarceration and band-aid social services that don’t really work.
The alternative is to take care of people now before things get worse. When people are not left to fall through the cracks of society, they are less likely to drift into criminal behaviour and less likely to hurt themselves or others. The savings appear because more people are well, fewer use public health care and far fewer end up in the judicial system.
There is a bonus to taking care of people and in helping them to live healthy lives. They go on to take care of others around them and they participate in the community in positive ways.
There is already a precedent for this in Canada. At the end of the Second World War, the country provided a national housing program for low-income families by creating what is now known as the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. The need corresponded with a population boom at the time. If those families had not been helped, they would have naturally fallen through the cracks and the country would have in turn paid for the consequences of a struggling population.
A more modern example is in Finland, where government programs promote a “housing first” initiative to house people. In Finland, a country of 5.5 million people, these programs have reduced homeless from 18,000 in 1987 to 4,000 now with less than 500 actually spending the night outside. They don’t just provide housing, they help people deal with drug abuse, mental-health problems and in finding jobs.
This is in contrast to what Canada has been doing for the past few decades: cutting social-program funding with the results being an increase in the number of homeless people, people living on the verge of homelessness and higher rates of incarceration.