What can we learn? Solving the encampment and shelter crises in Canada’s cities

Full Panel
Transcript

Note to readers: This video session was transcribed using auto-transcribing software.  Questions or concerns with the transcription can be directed to events@canurb.org with “transcription” in the subject line.

Mary W. Rowe I’m very pleased to have such a thoughtful, experienced group on this CityTalk topic. So many topics at the moment that are so difficult for us to all be wrestling with in tandem at the same time. We’ve got war breaking out all over the place. It’s very conflicting. It’s causing all sorts of challenges, both in Europe and in the Middle East, where it’s most acute, but also here amongst our neighbors and in our own communities. And I appreciate this is a time of great anxiety and pain for people. So just to acknowledge that in a somber kind of thoughtful way, and to recognize that we need to work together to figure out what our collective life is going to be, and what it needs to be now but it needs to be in the future. And that’s the heart of this topic that we’ve chosen today around the manifestation, what about encampments and, and the sort of, struggles that the shelter systems are experiencing as part of a homeless continuum. What can what can we be collectively working on? What’s working, what’s not, what’s next? Those are the three questions we always ask at CUI. I happened to be in Toronto today, although I’ve been resident in Ottawa for the last several weeks where it’s really cold, just to highlight that if anybody wonders about this, the nation’s capital is very … experiences winter in its own unique way. And I’ve been appreciative to have my time there. But this week I’m back in Toronto, which is the traditional territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat Peoples, home to many First Nations, Inuit and Métis, and in this particular case, treaties that were signed, Treaty 13 and the Williams Treaties. We at CUI have listeners and participants from all across the country and, and across North America, actually. And I think that many of you were signing in. I appreciate you doing that and identifying where you’re signing in from, which are traditional territories of a myriad of First Nations. And we are all collectively,  as we are with this topic, we are collectively trying to determine what reconciliation needs to look like and what the truth is, of the ways in which Indigenous peoples have been affected by urbanism, bad urbanism and the, limitations of urbanism. And here’s a topic that demonstrates that very significantly, because we have an overrepresentation of Indigenous peoples in the homeless population. So, here we are – we’ve had, I think, over 200 CityTalks since about four years ago when we started them, early in the pandemic. They’re on the website, citytalkcanada.ca …  They continue to be downloaded and referenced and they have a remarkable shelf life. There’s about 400 different people that have actually appeared on a CityTalk, and then thousands who have signed in, as you all are. And it’s a really interesting repository of collective problem solving and trying to inform public policy from the ground up. So I encourage you, in your spare moments, if you’re like me Saturday night scrolling, you know, have a look at a CityTalk, have a listen. You’re going to hear some really, really thoughtful, observations and recommendations around what’s working, what’s not, and what’s next. And it’s particularly poignant because it was all initiated during the pandemic. So here we are. This is an important critical topic. It’s kind of a proxy, I think, for urban systems that are not aligned and are not functioning in the way that we need them to. And here we are in a state of crisis across the country and made all the worse by fierce weather and, putting pressure on orders of government, on civil society, on not for profit, on communities, in the support situation, but just putting enormous pressure on people, families, individuals, working people, people who have other support needs. So it’s a really important topic. I’m going to ask my, esteemed group to put their cameras on, and we’re going to hear from coast to coast, pretty much, what people are seeing. And, I, I never want to, you know, the interesting thing about CityTalk that I always say at the end is – if I forget to somebody remind me – I always say “it’s not the end of a conversation, it’s just the beginning”. You know … Urbanism and making great cities is a constant, iterative work in progress. It’s never over. And so the fact that we’ve probably had half a dozen, maybe more, I haven’t counted them, but we’ve certainly had many sessions that have talked about encampments and the phenomenon. And I don’t know, I think  Leilani, you may have been on the first one, I’m trying to remember but … and a number of people at that time thought it was a bit of a temporary thing. Do you remember? We all thought it was just going to … “oh, it’s a stopgap. It’s a response to the pandemic. It’ll settle down”. Well, here we are. And … Four years later and encampments are much longer or have been around much longer than that. But in the same way that food banks, I’m old enough to remember when food banks were first introduced and people thought, again, this was going to be a temporary thing. It was churches, everybody remembers this, and I was in university and we thought it was a temporary thing. And I remember there were naysayers saying, “if you start that, you’ll never, ever … You’ll never be able to eliminate them”. And so here we are at this inflection point where we’ve got significant conflicts about what to do with this predicament that we see ourselves in as city builders, and that thousands of families are experiencing and individuals. So I’m going to ask our folks to give us their unvarnished, as we know, this is supposed to be a safe place as much as we can make it to be, where we have really frank conversations about what’s working, what’s not, and what’s next. And I would encourage people in the chat, as you always do with the chat … It always is alive at CUI. On these CityTalks, it has a whole life of its own. So please don’t hold back. Throw in your comments there. Let’s be respectful. Let’s remember that this is a difficult topic for lots and lots of people, and lots of people have very personal experiences with it. But also resources, questions … Feel free to put them there. We will … If people refer to studies or resources CUI staff will smack them into the chat. And as you know, the chat will get published as the recording also gets published. So, I really appreciate you all being with us. And I’m going to ask Jaimee to go first, if you could, to just give us a bit of a picture. You’ve put Regina as your affiliation. I know that you, you know, work in a bunch of different places, but tell us a little bit about who you are and what your particular perspective is. And then just in brief, you know what’s working, what’s not. And what do you think needs to be next? And we’ll go around the table and then we’ll get together and have a group chat. So over to you, Jaimee. Welcome to City Talk.

Jaimee Guance Thanks, Mary I appreciate it. So my name is Jaimee Guance and I am from the Pasqua First Nation in Treaty Four Territory in Saskatchewan. I’ve worked in housing, supporting those in marginalized communities, experiencing residential school trauma, supporting families and understanding and trying to bring light to barriers that Indigenous people face on a daily basis, inside of their families, inside of their generations, and really help Canadians as a whole understand – how do we make lives better for everyone that lives in this great country? And it’s a really difficult conversation because many Canadians are very divided on how they see Indigenous people and the issues that they face. For me, I think what impacted me the most when it comes to encampments is I was directly on the ground in Pepsi Park in Regina when that encampment began. And I think some of the most profound things that I’ve seen were the community, the supports, the connection that individuals came to, become inside of that encampment. And when that encampment started, it was actually by one individual. It was one person that had nowhere to go. They were scared. They were alone. They had no supports. And so they reached out to a community member. And that community member said, “well, all I can do is maybe buy you a tent and give you a little bit of support and hopefully we can figure something out from there”. And that community grew to, I think we had just under 150 residents inside of that encampment in Regina. It was, you know, for as beautiful as an encampment can be, it was quite incredible. The people that were there that were supportive, the community came out, big corporations like Enbridge, supported by giving warming packs and food. And we had the fire department come out in support and provide fire safety and warmth. And they had church groups and just community members as a, as a whole come out and support these people. But the one thing that we learned out of this was it was just temporary. There were no supports or services or connections to services that provided these people a way out. And I think that’s where we fell short. That’s where we failed. We didn’t provide these individuals, these brothers, these sisters of ours an opportunity at safe, adequate and affordable housing and the wraparound services that they need to become thriving parts of our community. And I think if we look back and we look at the lessons learned, I think that would be the most important takeaway from all of it, is that while we help them stay warm and fed them, we didn’t provide them a way out. We didn’t provide them the supports and we didn’t support them the way they needed to. So we failed them 100%. And I think the most heartbreaking moments I’ve ever seen in my career is when the bulldozers came in and tore that camp apart, like these people were not people. Everything that they received, all of the love from the communities they received, they were told, you have two hours, collect your two garbage bags because that’s all you can take with you to the shelters or the apartments you’re going to. And the rest is garbage. How can you tell a human being that the love they received from another human being is garbage? Because it can’t fit, ironically, in a garbage bag? This is our failure and we need to own it, and we need to learn from it. And we need to do better because these are our brothers and sisters, regardless of our skin color. We need to do better. So I appreciate having, having my voice on this today and I look forward to the conversation. Thanks so much, Mary.

Mary W. Rowe Yeah. Thank you. Jaimee. I mean, there is a flagrancy to the way that these things have been visibly … and the media, of course doesn’t help, but I hear you. It becomes a kind of visceral shock when people watch the way … And we had, ages ago, at the very beginning of … In 2020, I think someone will remember and maybe one of the staff can put up some of the other CityTalks that deal with this. But we had Tracy Cooke on, who was the Deputy City Manager in Toronto, who got involved in that clearance, at Trinity Bellwoods, I think. And again, it was … That’s what shocks people is that it seems to be so callous. But as you’re suggesting, the callousness is actually being demonstrated all along with the absence of supports and our inability to actually catch people and provide the supports, long before they get into an encampment, find themselves in an encampment … Yeah. Okay. Sandra, can we hear from you in, I bet it’s sunny in Calgary. It seems always to be sunny. Is it sunny?

Sandra Clarkson It’s actually quite cloudy today, Mary.

Mary W. Rowe Oh, it’s a miracle … one of our one of our senior colleagues lives in Calgary. He always puts his camera up and goes, “nya nya nya we have sun again”. So talk to us about … Calgary’s got a particular set of experiences and context, and you are right in the thick of it. So tell us, tell us from your side.

Sandra Clarkson Yeah. Thank you. I’m Sandra Clarkson. I’m the CEO of the Calgary Drop-In center, which is a large, homeless shelter, housing-focused emergency shelter, that operates in Calgary. We have capacity for up to a thousand people. Never a good thing to have a thousand people in the same building at one time. But I think, you know, our direct experience with encampments, that I want to share is that we had a significant encampment that built up outside of our facility in 2022. And it became incredibly dangerous. It ultimately was run by organized crime. There was a lot of violent incidents, sexual assaults, human trafficking, drug trafficking, significant amounts of exploitation, threats on staff, threats on others, seeking the services of the Calgary Drop-In Center. And we knew that we couldn’t allow that to continue just for safety purposes alone. But we knew enforcement alone was not the way to go. So, we worked very closely and collaboratively with numerous different departments within the city, including bylaw, fire, police, emergency services, local outreach groups, other service providers, and a very well-coordinated  communication strategy, as well as, operation strategy. And we really went in with social services first, and enforcement last. So, as Jaimee spoke about the connection to services, that is a critical component. And, you know, our actions that day were known as Operation East Side. And we also at the same time, you know, went in with, with social services first led with that. And, in the weeks leading up to it, we had made very concerted efforts to get to know who was actually out there, what are their needs, how can we support them in finding safe and appropriate housing, which we believe was not in a tent, that was really governed by organized crime. And so we set up a resource center. There were some individuals, admittedly, that were living in that encampment that had been, restricted access to services due to safety issues or incidents of violence within the shelter. But we didn’t … that didn’t preclude us from working with them, in a different way. So we set up a resource center that had numerous different community partners on site where we could do taxes, ID clinics, health services, counseling, and mainly housing specialists in order to get people connected to housing. In fact, the day we did that, we did apartment viewings with people that same day, and knowing that housing was the answer and we were able to house 28 people directly from that encampment that day. And so, the services are an absolute key. But we also recognized that, you know, encampments have the potential to be very unsafe, for those living in them, as well as the surrounding community.

Mary W. Rowe You know, before the movie Oppenheimer came out, the most famous Oppenheimer was Oppenheimer Park in Vancouver. And, Donnie Rosa, who used to be the general manager of the park system. I don’t know whether Donnie’s on or if there’s anybody else who’s on from Vancouver to let us know whether you’ve got data about when you rehoused people out of the Oppenheimer encampment, which was a huge encampment. I don’t if you know what, Sandra … it was several hundred during the pandemic, right. I don’t know whether we do … We sadly, we’ve been at this long enough that we probably do have the capacity to get some data to find out when people get rehoused and does it stick? And that was an elaborate process that we heard about in real time. So, Donnie, if you’re on, maybe you can put something in or somebody else who’s familiar with the Vancouver, situation and whether it got resolved and if there’s any data to tell us how that work. Sandra, when you go back to … You know, I think one of the dilemmas that people respond to is who’s to say, who is best equipped to make the decision about whether it’s safe? You know, that’s one of the challenges, right? So there’s a … I think there’s a concern, maybe, that encampments are deemed unsafe by people who are influenced, let’s say, by neighbors or by some other set of values and, and may not appreciate that the person in the …. There are some people in encampments who are choosing that because they feel safer there than they feel in a shelter. Right? So how do you square that? Tim, I’m going to come to you next because you’ve got the big picture and then Estair and then Leilani. Go ahead, Sandra. And how do you square that? And maybe I don’t know whether Jaimee wants to come back in and comment further, but go ahead Sandra.

Sandra Clarkson I mean, it’s a great question and I wish there was an easy answer to it. I think, you know, in our particular case, we had a lot of video evidence to indicate it was unsafe. Staff were being threatened on a daily basis. We knew people were afraid to walk through the encampment because it was right outside of our front doors. Were afraid to walk through the encampment to access the services so that they could end their experience of homelessness. And we knew people.

Mary W. Rowe You mean people who were in the encampment did not feel safe in the encampment. Is that what you’re suggesting?

Sandra Clarkson Some of them were actually held there against their will, and other individuals that would be seeking the services that the drop in center offers in order to end their experience of homelessness were afraid to come in because they kind of literally had to walk the gantlet through the encampment to access the building and so … That’s, I mean, speaking specifically to our direct experience, that was a big part of it. And I ended up going … just ended up going to the, the police, with some of our video footage. And I said, this cannot continue. It was so dangerous.

Mary W. Rowe You know, again, this is part of a larger systemic set of failures we’ve got. We work a lot with business improvement areas all across the country on the states of main streets and downtowns. And those stewards, they’re place stewards. They’re reporting all sorts of criminal activity, unsafe activity and all sorts of, difficulties. And they end up having to involve the cops. And then the cops often will stop responding, and then business owners end up having to get involved. It’s … We’re in this sort of gray space repeatedly about where is help coming from and how do we balance the needs for community safety and also resident choice … That’s making … somethings making the chat blow up. Thank you everybody. Keep going in there. Can I just caution people on the chat I see people putting in various things. You know, the chat is not your own bulletin board to promote your own stuff, particularly … If we could just encourage you to post stuff that’s relevant to this conversation, that would help us. Tim, so your big picture on homelessness. So tell me, when did encampments become part of this continuum, and what is your perspective on where we’re at now in the spring of 2024?

Tim Richter Well, I think, unsheltered homelessness and encampments have been a fact of life in Canada for some time. We haven’t seen them on the scale that we see them now, for … Well, I don’t think we ever have seen them quite on the scale we see them now. You know, I’m kind of approaching this from a place of hope and worry.  I’m approaching it from hope because I, I, you know, I’ve seen, like, in the example Sandra gave, that there’s a, there’s a way to resolve encampments that make sure people can access the right to housing quickly, and respects their self-determination, right? But my worry is the scale of the problem that we see today, and the binary that this conversation, I fear, is falling into. You know, homelessness on the scale we see today is larger than the scale of unhousing from Canada’s largest natural disasters. Right? So again, many of you will have heard me say this before in Calgary in 2013, in our flood, we had 77,000 households were dislocated. Right. None of them are still homeless today. None of them. Except those that were at the drop-in center when the drop in-center was evacuated. And some may still be. But why is it that in Canada we can resolve the homelessness of people who become homeless from natural disaster, but we can’t or won’t for people who are living in encampments or experiencing homelessness due to poverty or policy.

Mary W. Rowe What does that tell us Tim? I mean, is mental illness part of it too, though, or are needing more mental health supports?

Mary W. Rowe Because people are chronically disadvantaged?

Tim Richter I think it’s a choice. I think it’s a policy choice. I think homelessness is a housing problem. It’s not caused by mental illness or addiction. It happens more often to people with mental illness or addiction, more often to people who are Indigenous. Right. But it doesn’t happen because of … Just because of mental illness or addiction. But, you know, I think where I, where I have a worry is that I’m, I’m concerned, especially in the public narrative, that this conversation is going into this kind of false binary between police enforcement, which is cruel and ineffective and violent and just doesn’t work, or allowing encampments to remain. Right? And I think my hope is that we can be focused on rapid resolution of encampments. And you made a really important point when you said some people are choosing encampments, but I want to just talk about choice really quickly, because I think the key to resolving encampments effectively is, is thinking about it in terms of choice. People are choosing encampments because they either have no other alternatives or the other alternatives are worse. Right? So the key to resolving an encampment, I think, is having a conversation with people in those encampments as individuals, one at a time, slowly and methodically. Understanding their needs, understanding what they want, and then providing them with a better option. Right. That’s the key to resolving encampments. And it doesn’t need to wait. Right? Now …

Mary W. Rowe If we have a better option.

Tim Richter But we can create those better options. This is the thing. So Sandra, in in a rental housing market that is sub 1% … 1% or maybe 1.5 … Sandra found housing for 28 people. Right away. Right. You look at Nigenon and Edmonton, it is, you know, an Indigenous organization set up low barrier, effectively shelter for … not shelter, bridge housing, for Indigenous people, using basically workforce housing. Like there are rapidly deployable options that we can create if we choose to do so. But if we get trapped in this binary and it becomes this culture war, street fight, we get nowhere. So what I’m hoping, you know, we do and we’re going to do some work on this is give cities examples and give them tools and give them models and just say, you know, try to do you know what Sandra did at the drop-in center. Try to do what Fort McMurray has recently done. Look to what Houston has done, look at the Nigenon project in Edmonton as a way of creating rapid housing. Look at what the town of Elgin is doing in terms of proactive outreach to people who are becoming street involved so that they don’t form encampments and you can rapidly respond to them.

Mary W. Rowe Yeah, I appreciate the … What you’re suggesting about some … There are some alternative approaches that are proving to be effective. So I think the ones you’ve just cited … it’d be great, Tim, if you’ve got a minute, if you can smack down the names of them in the chat and CUI can see if there’s documentation they could make live on that. Also, when you say choice, I want to just clarify, because I know we’re always careful about this – I always say cities are about choice, maximum choices of all sorts. You’re not talking about, an individual’s choosing particularly what you’re saying is we have an absence of, you actually, I think you’re referring to policy choices, public policy choices …

Tim Richter Well, I’m using it in a few different ways. Okay. There is a structural, systemic policy choice we’re making to either ignore the housing issue, not resolve it, or allow this homelessness to continue. There are … But when you’re talking specifically about encampments, we’re talking about individuals … Rational, individual choices to make their lives better, to stay alive. Right? This is, you know, encampments are really a survival mechanism.

Mary W. Rowe I see interesting comments in the chat from colleagues like Cathy Crow and Carolyn Weitzman. Gals, if you know of specific data sets that exist. So the 150 that we’re in Tent City, Cathy, do we actually … I saw the book you’ve cited, but do we actually have data? That is … I don’t know whether we have any longitudinal data to see that when people are provided the support, do they stay? And I don’t know, it’s interesting for me to know whether we have those. Okay. We still have a couple people to hear from – Estair and then Leilani. Estair, I think you’re going to take a sort of broad view. You study this and look at it in a bunch of different contexts. So give us your sense of what you’re observing in terms of what’s working and what’s not.

Estair Van Wagner So yeah, I have mostly been looking at this at a kind of broader scale. Although, you know, lots of attention to specific. happenings, especially in Toronto. And, you know, I think our starting point really has to be that encampments are a violation of human rights. But we can’t compound that violation with further breaches of human rights. So our approach has to start from what is human rights compliant. And the approaches we see for the most part really are human rights compliant. And they’re not working. So they’re not stopping encampments from forming and they’re violating human rights. And both of those should be nonstarters, right? If we’re not fixing the problem, we need to find a different approach. If we’re violating human rights, we need to find a different approach. So, you know, in particular, I just really think we need to emphasize the end of forced evictions. They do not work. They are violent and they violate a whole set of human rights. This doesn’t mean that anyone thinks encampments are a permanent solution or a solution at all. It just means we’re not going to choose to address the violence of our collective human rights failure around the right to housing with further violence. Right? It means we need to figure out what the alternatives that are human rights compliant are. And I would just touch back on the kind of safety issue around, you know, defining what safety and who is defining that. I mean, safety and risk have been long used to displace people from their territories, from housing of all different kinds, particularly people who are precariously housed. So we need to be really, really careful about what we mean and who’s defining safety. And we need to start with listening to the people who are living in encampments and respecting their expertise. So this is how we’re going to find lasting solutions, and it’s how we’re going to find equitable solutions, particularly solutions that are suitable for specific local contexts. And I really want to applaud the advocates report for using this as a starting point by going to speak to people around the country and hear from their experiences and drawing on those to set some guidelines, and targets for policymakers who are trying to grapple with this admittedly really difficult issue. So the report makes clear that we can recognize encampments aren’t a solution and ensure those living in them are treated with dignity and respect. So we can do those things at the same time, it is possible – and, you know, some of the things that are in there are really not emphasized … or emphasizing, sorry, that shelters are an interim solution and we need to get better at doing them, but they’re not housing. Housing has to include all the elements that are called for in international law around security of tenure, affordability, accessibility, cultural appropriateness, the provision of services. And there are really specific things that municipalities can bring to the table in terms of that. And the starting point for that is really embedding human rights right into the policy frameworks that we’re using to approach these issues and those policy frameworks, in order to be human rights based, have to be co-developed. So not, you know, consultation where we go out and say, hey, this is the approach we’re going to use, and we’ve already determined what that is, but actually taking the time to meaningfully create processes that are about co-development with people with lived experience. And this, I think, really needs to, emphasize Indigenous jurisdiction and Indigenous organizations as leaders in this area. There’s amazing work being done on the ground, but we need to build it into our legal frameworks and our policy frameworks that these solutions are what we’re going to focus on, and we’re going to respect that jurisdiction.

Mary W. Rowe You know, I feel with so many things in urban life we have to hold … We have to work at various scales at the same time. So you’re the, you know, Leilani, I’m speaking  for you in terms of human rights, obviously, because I know that’s your focus, that Estair’s just pointed to … But there’s the … We need these things embedded in policy, those of us that live in that world know how long that takes. So embedding a policy is like, you know, I used to never have any gray hair. Now look at me – like it’s a long, arduous process. And in the meantime, you’ve got really very contentious situations happening in, in, communities of all scales and all sizes. So, Leilani, I know you worked on a … You’re going to tell us what it was called again, there was a working group on encampments, and you were working very directly with municipal practitioners, mayors and people on the ground, to come up with a protocol which I’m assuming is some kind of an interim step to the world that Estair is saying we should have, which is that human rights compliance is fed through the whole system. Right. So give us your perspective. And I know you look at jurisdictions around the world as well as your home in Canada.

Leilani Farha Yeah, thanks. Thanks to all the speakers before me. So many really important and valid points that I agree … I agree with so much of what’s been said, obviously. I guess where I wanted to start, Mary, if this is okay and you’re going to kind of hate it because it’s super zoomed out and not practical, but I’ll get to the practical. But, you know, I think in some ways encampments in Canada are really actually natural and predictable. And I hate to say that, but I think, like when I asked myself, like, what did we think a settler colonial neoliberal state that promotes rent seeking and profiteering on stolen land by white settler colonialists … What did we think that would look like? Well, frankly, I think it looks like encampments, to me. I think our system of governance, our economy is generating homelessness and generating encampments, specifically. And so the problem with that position is … Like, everyone can nod and go, yeah, yeah, yeah, but what, like we have an emergency here. This is a crisis. The federal advocate has said it’s a human rights crisis. Just yesterday she released her report or the day before. So right. So what’s the practical. And I would just have to agree with so much of what was said. Of course Estair and I share that human rights framework in our work, in our everyday work, as do others on this call, I think. Tim referenced it and Jaimee referenced it as well. So, you know, we know what doesn’t work. And, I’m interested in some of these examples that are coming up in the chat because I have been to encampments, many, many encampments. I might be the person in the world who’s been to more encampments than anyone else. I mean, I’ve been up and down California. I’ve been across this country, I’ve seen them internationally and in parts of Europe, etc. and we know what doesn’t work. We … Everyone knows and my, my, my panelists have said, “we don’t want to replicate the colonial state and the colonial system through our response”. That’s the biggest thing for me. So when I look at shelters, well, the shelter system, even the most barrier- free shelter system, if it’s not designed by Indigenous people, led by Indigenous people, for Indigenous people, it’s probably not going to work for them, for those people who are homeless and Indigenous, we know that. So shelter system has to be completely revisited. The idea of sanctioned sites and navigation centers, I think Tim put in, the Texas example, Julietta, my colleague and I have visited a couple of navigation centers, and they are a nightmare. And, the people I met there say, you know, I’ve been navigated here, but I’m not going anywhere. And, you know, they end up replicating shelters, for example, even where they have some good things, like a place to store your stuff and a refrigerator for your medicines. You know, they still are not producing the kind of results we want. We know forced evictions don’t work. And by forced eviction, I mean the involuntary removal of people from encampments. And I just want to say, one of the things that I’ve seen that’s hugely problematic is you have cities evicting people living in homelessness from the encampments, and then sometimes you have those same cities trying to come up with solutions and work with that population and that that is like basically like an abusive relationship. Right. I slap you one day and give you, you know, candy and love the next. And so if we’re I think what works, besides obviously adequate, affordable, sustainable, long-term housing with supports where necessary, which is the Housing First approach from Finland and from other places, what really has to happen is a building of trust and building of trust will require an understanding of self-determination. Tim used that term, Estair used that term, I think, maybe Jaimee did too … Self-determination is a human rights concept. And I have to say, in a colonial state, it is a very difficult thing for governments to really take on board because it means ceding power. It means allowing the people that you have deemed criminal, trespassers, etc. it means deeming them capable of making decisions in their own lives, capable of influencing policy, capable of determining the future, and for governments to cede that … very difficult. I’ve worked with cities across this country. It is one of the big sticking points. What does meaningful engagement mean? That’s a human rights concept, right? Estair talked about that. It means being … allowing people living in homelessness to affect and change decisions that are going to be made about their lives. Very difficult for governments. I think I’ll just pause there. I have tons to say, but I want us to, you know, to do what you want us to do, which is have a big conversation.

Mary W. Rowe So let’s have everybody open up their mics and let’s see if we can chat a bit about this. But I, you know, your concept, your advocacy for self-determination, my version of that is subsidiarity. The way that looks in Europe and in European structures is that you empower local governments to be the accountable entity that’s responsible for … whoever’s receiving the service, the government closest to them is responsible for delivering and co-designing the policy. And I think so much of what we’re struggling with here is jurisdiction because, local governments have this challenge, but housing is traditionally a provincially responsibility. The federal government suddenly got involved. But, Tim, you lived this life. It’s a whole complicated navigational piece here. And actually a couple of broadcasts ago, we talked about … encampments in many ways to me are for some people an expression of self-determination, that they’re saying, no, wait a second. I feel safer here. I’m going to make a choice to live in a tent. But the dilemma we’ve got is how do we enable those kinds of options to manifest? And lots of people are putting in the chat examples of what are … Seem to me fairly modest, smaller scale initiatives. That seems to me to be one tangible tactic is that we try to address this at a hyper-local, more manageable intervention level. Who wants to take that? And Jaimee, can we … actually I wanted to go back to you, Jaimee. Jaimee, somebody asked in the chat, why did they have to go and bulldoze? Why did they have to resort to that?

Jaimee Guance So it goes back to what, Leilani just talked about. And it’s that relationship with the government, with the way that the cities see their policies, how they feel restricted by the policies that are in place, and they don’t have a lot of flexibility or room to make real decisions that impact human beings in a good way. And that is the bottom line. 

Mary W. Rowe You mean they don’t have the resources or they don’t have …

Jaimee Guance They don’t have policies. We have these policies that are written that don’t allow them the latitude to make good decisions for human beings and the right to life. In Regina, they bulldozed it because they had this new funding program come out, and one of the organizations had applied and said, we can do this. If you give us all this money, we can take all these people out of this encampment and we can house them in a hotel. Well, it was the seediest hotel in Regina. It only had 27 rooms. There was more than … more than a quarter of the people were pushed back into the street. But because they vowed to remove the encampments and house these people, all these people were dispersed that didn’t get housing, and the city wasn’t going to leave this eyesore sitting there with all of these people’s homes. These currently are people’s homes, right? So can you imagine if somebody came in and walked in your front door and said, hey, somebody thinks they have a really good idea for you and they’re going to take you and they’re going to displace you and everything that you have worked really hard to gather up until this point is about to go in the garbage.

Mary W. Rowe It sounds pretty familiar, Sounds like a pretty familiar pattern …

Tim Richter I want to jump in on that. And there’s one question in the chat, too, that I want to get to. I think there’s two things. First is like, I’m going to be the rude guest. There’s a lot of folks on this call that work in city governments. This is on you. You need to be making better choices, right? You need to be finding some of these other options. You have influence in these discussions like the Advocates Report is largely focused on the federal government as part of the function of her role and her mandate. But realistically speaking, city’s lead in these responses. The city of Edmonton is getting manhandled by the chief of police and the province of Alberta. Right. That … city’s play an essential role. And so, it’s kind of like …

Mary W. Rowe When you say city, you mean municipal government. I mean, Alex Quinn is on this on this call. She is a constitutional expert. She knows full well. And Carolyn has tried to talk with us too – how do we actually devolve this responsibility? Because one of the dilemmas all of you are facing is when you try to hold anybody accountable, they kind of go this exactly.

Tim Richter You know what? You do it in disaster response. So the response to homelessness is exactly the same as disaster response. The city’s lead, senior government support. There’s agreement between all of them on who does what. And the cities have a system in place to manage it. And it’s … and a disaster response is focused on housing. Rapid response to the crisis. Keep people safe. Coordinate your response. Get people back into housing as fast as possible. Now, somebody mentioned, in the chat a question about, well, what do you do in a disaster for people living in encampments – the same as you do for everybody else. Get them inside, right. Yellowknife was evacuated this summer. Right? And Sandra could probably speak to this. Folks in Yellowknife that had homes were sent to other places inside. They were sent to hotels. They were given money to go stay with relatives. They were helped out of town. People experiencing homelessness were arrested, put on busses or planes, sent to homeless shelters. I ran into it …

Mary W. Rowe But Tim – just that like, get them inside. I mean, they’re … We already start losing that thing about self-determination.

Tim Richter That’s true. It’s like a conversation ….  I’m not I’m not saying force them inside, but you got to create the same options as you do for everybody else, right?

Leilani Farha Also in the pandemic, like if you look at the pandemic response, a lot of mayors have said to me, “man, I loved that pandemic period”. Right? Because it’s what you said, Tim. Right? All the levels of government, we’re working together, we’re going to be we’re in.

Mary W. Rowe A we were in a massive disaster response.

Leilani Farha However, racialized communities did not feel that that worked well. Indigenous communities did not feel that it worked well. Why? Because they weren’t properly consulted. And if you look like, Andrew Boozary did a huge amount of work, Dr. Andrew Boozary, who you know, many of you will know is a social medicine doctor and he works with homeless populations and racialized communities. And during the pandemic, he made sure that those communities were reached properly, were consulted, where, you know, all the, the, concerns around vaccination, etcetera, he was addressing with those communities, building trust with them. So I think like this inter-jurisdictional piece is huge, super important. But what I like to call it is more of like, inter-jurisdictional, multi-stakeholder approach is what we need, where we’re bringing in also Indigenous governments, not just the three typical level, you know, orders of government we talk about, but also bringing in people with lived expertise, people who are, you know, studying this and, and working on this like a, like the Estair’s of the world, etc.. Right. So and you know, of course advocates etc.. So I don’t think just a … Like I think when the federal housing advocate said we need the federal government to do a national plan to address encampments, I think what she meant was, use their spending power and their convening power to come up with a plan that’s actually going to work for the people living in encampments. And, sorry, Jaimee, I see you.

Mary W. Rowe Jump in. Jaimee.

Mary W. Rowe Jaime’s put her hand up. She wins … up you go Jaimee.

Jaimee Guance Thanks everybody. I think one of the things that everyone is missing is that there’s no education piece to this. The discrimination Indigenous people face on a daily basis, on every level we live in our lives has to be addressed. We have to stop being the topic of discussion, and we have to be part of the discussion. And until we educate others about why it’s not “homeless” people and I put that in quotes or “Indigenous” people, we have to stop labeling each other. We are human beings, and there has to be some education that removes that barrier, that discrimination. You know, I just read a story about a young lady who was, in a homeless … In an encampment. She was homeless, and she had an opportunity to go back and go to university. And she went to the library every day. She took her classes, and she managed and navigated through public washrooms, through the supports that she had. And she remained in the streets for one full year. And she committed to her education and she finished it. Why are we not educating the general public? You know, just because you’re homeless doesn’t mean you’re garbage. We have to start opening that conversation up and we have to stop using the word co-development. You’re not co-developing anything with Indigenous people. You’re telling us what you think we need. And until you build an allied-ship approach. We will never have that trust that was discussed. Unless we trust you. Unless we feel that you are with us, supporting us, respecting us. We will never be seen and the discrimination will never be removed. I cannot take my brown skin off. I cannot hide my brown skin. And every store that I walk into, it’s the first thing people see. And it’s the first thing people think about – who I am as a person. They don’t care who I am. They just know I’m brown. And that’s always my first step into the public.

Mary W. Rowe You know this … Sandra I’m interested about what’s Jaimee’s getting at around … and actually, all of you have said in different ways that, you know, trust is the component. And all of our visceral reactions to how this is being coped with is eroding trust. It’s so untrusting. You’re in the shelter business. How are you trying to build trust with the people that are the users of your service? How does … It must be a huge challenge?

Sandra Clarkson It is a huge challenge, particularly when you’re dealing with the high volumes of the numbers that we’re dealing with. And, you know, we’ve been very successful in terms of, like, rapid resolution and getting people rehoused quickly. You know, return to shelter rates less than 4%. So it’s but, you know, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in the numbers, this year, over 26% and new people coming in all the time. And, you know, you’ve got limited resources and, you know, trust comes down to relationship. Right. And being really intentional … those one on one conversations that were mentioned earlier. And we certainly do the best that we can, but do we have the resources that we need to do it appropriately? No, we don’t. And, you know, ultimately it comes down to working more with the people who are ready to engage because you don’t have the, the, the resources to be doing the same thing with everybody all the time, every day. And it’s a terrible situation. It’s … You know, it’s demoralizing for those we serve and for the staff .

Mary W. Rowe And for staff, I’m sure. And we’ve heard it … We’ve heard stories of the trauma on both sides. That’s … All the PTSD that exists within the service workers as well. You know, it’s interesting, Tim, when you’re saying, you know, hey, city people or municipal government people pay attention. The dilemma and it’s being repeated in the chat over here is … you know, this is the level of government or the government that has the least money, and it has the least capacity to raise money. Toronto just passed a big honking budget, 10% property tax. You know, is that the solution really? I mean, I think property taxes obviously should come up. I’ll hear about that. But it’s not a revenue source that grows. And I think this is the dilemma that we’ve got is you’ve got shelter workers working with inadequate supports in the first place, and then you’ve got a housing system that has not been delivering the diversity of housing choice for several decades. And so these are big heavy structural challenges. That people worry about. But it doesn’t actually change the experience of that family, as you just suggested, Jaimee. The person who’s in a tent in the in the square facing City hall in the city of Halifax and gets up every morning and goes to their job and then comes back to their tent. So how do we square that? Tim, I think you want to say something and I’m interested in hearing from Estair as well, because I know you’ve been advocating for these structural, you know, fidelity around the rights. But in the meantime, what do we do? So the one suggestion has been, let’s take a disaster preparedness approach. Go ahead. Tim.

Tim Richter Yeah, I would just, I would just say that cities aren’t powerless and they’re making.

Mary W. Rowe You’re talking about municipal governments.

Tim Richter When you talk about governments. I mean, municipal governments aren’t powerless. They’re making choices to use police and spend millions chasing homeless people around. They’re making choices to go to court to fight lawsuits. Those cost millions of dollars, right? They’re making choices with their resources. They don’t have enough to solve the problem by themselves. But if we get stuck in this mindset, that poor old municipal government, we can’t do anything. You’ll do nothing, and you’ll just resort to what you have, which is enforcement. Like we need municipal …

Mary W. Rowe So Tim, if you were sitting, if you were sitting at a table with senior municipal officials, what kinds of advice and practical problem solving tactics would you be encouraging them to pursue. Within the levers they’ve got?

Tim Richter Look at your municipal disaster response structure, okay. See how you can adapt that. Work with community partners. In in Edmonton, for example, you could work with Homeward Trust in Ontario, the municipal governments also administer provincial homelessness dollars. Right? You do not have everything you need to solve the problem, but you do have enough to get started. You do have enough to address encampments, and you do have the ability to drag the provinces and the federal government into a conversation. But … yes … No, municipal governments can’t do it alone. But I don’t believe for a second they’re powerless.

Leilani Farha I don’t want to … I think, you sort of pointed to Estair, but I just want to say, what Tim is saying, I think is quite right from the point of view of human rights as well. All orders of government have an obligation to use the maximum of their available resources to address violations of human rights and ensure people enjoy their human rights. And I do not believe that cities are doing that right now. And Tim gave the example of them investing in police and using police as if it’s somehow a solution to any of this, and not, looking at their resources, he says, you know, they’re resources related to, what’s the word, disasters or whatever, but … all in resources …

Mary W. Rowe But let’s go back to trust, because the dilemma is, and I heard it this morning with the mayor of Toronto on CBC talking about how she advocated for this big property tax increase. But she’s also giving the police exactly the increase they want. And she got pushed back on that. That’s about trust, too. We have people in communities that feel afraid, and the trust erosion has happened across the whole system.

Mary W. Rowe Right?

Leilani Farha That goes to Jaimee’s point right around education. I don’t have so much sympathy for people who are like afraid generally about homeless people, etc., because, I mean, first of all, they’re being denied. Homeless people are being denied a fundamental human right. The link between housing and life is clear. We see it all the time. Right. Your life expectancy is half if you are unhoused.

Mary W. Rowe So but listen, we’ve now got every dinner table conversation across this country and every public policy table. And I’m sure the federal budget is going to be about housing, housing, housing, housing, housing. So that piece is getting a lot of attention. The piece you guys are talking about, I think is more pertinent.

Leilani Farha I wanted to raise that too, because there is a complete disconnect between that arm of what the government’s doing. Build build, build. You know, let’s do housing, housing, housing and what’s happening at the other end with homelessness. And they are connected. And that’s what I meant at the outset when I said, we have a financial economic system that is creating homelessness, and it is very much related to what’s happening on that build side. And until we start making those connections. Sorry, but we are screwed. I also want to just … I’m going to lob this in … I would like to see the private sector being engaged as co-responsible for some of the social issues that are arising in this country, including homelessness, because they have contributed to it. And, and people know I work on the financialization of housing. There are direct connections between what’s happening at that end as I said, and homelessness. But no one want to have that conversation with the privates, no one.

Mary W. Rowe But I mean, we’re you know, it’s … Here we are. I mean, I’m appreciative that everybody’s talking about the biggest issues possible. And I appreciate that because that’s what this is a manifestation of. But just to see if we can get down to the granular here. Education, said again and again, trust-building right across the board, this notion of repurposing disaster preparedness, that’s a very interesting model to look at. Why can we do it under a disaster circumstance? And we seem to understand that there’s public support for it. But not here … Like a natural disaster, disaster. And then this idea of how do we engage the private sector, how do we build more trust and more public support … for these kinds of creative solutions. Who else wants to get in? Estair – do you want to throw something in?

Estair Van Wagner A  couple of things. So I think there’s a big connection between the role municipalities can end this financialization and private sector piece because municipalities deal with planning, and there are lots of interventions that can be made in the planning sphere to make sure that we’re focusing on affordability, that we’re focusing on the right to housing. And, you know, of course, municipalities do have resource issues, but they also have lots of resources. And they, as we’ve talked about, can choose where to spend them. And they also have expertise in terms of involvement. And we think about involving people in all sorts of planning processes in different ways. So let’s turn some resources and expertise to making sure that those kinds of public involvement structures are human rights compliant, and that they’re engaged in the context of encampment. We can’t let a kind of urgency emergency framework emerge in a nonhuman rights compliant way. That’s my concern about the kind of emergency framework, we see that unrolled in in ways in which human rights are not respected. And we need to be very careful of that in this context, when we’re dealing with folks whose human rights are being violated constantly, every day. So let’s think about what urgency means in a human rights compliancy.

Mary W. Rowe Again, you know, lessons from Covid, you know, there were a whole bunch of things that we should be deriving lessons from. And one of them, I think, you guys are consistently saying is, whatever you do, it has to be human rights compliant. You know, that we had urgent situations. People think you can do all sorts of things. There’s good parts of that when you have to act urgently, but there’s also potentially lots of violations. So that has to be our takeaway here. It’s 2024. We realized we had to completely infiltrate human rights thinking into, preventive policies, funding and resources. Okay. Yes. Go ahead Jaimee.

Jaimee Guance Trying to be polite … We have to look at the basics of this. Saskatchewan is very cold. We have -60 winters. A person is outside in the cold. They’re sleeping on the pavement. They freeze to the pavement. They go into emergency. They get an amputation. They don’t have a home. They don’t have supports. They don’t have wraparound services. They don’t even have the health care to provide them after-care services after a major amputation, but then pushed it out into the street, into a wheelchair with no supports whatsoever. Now they’ve been set back even further, because now they have this new disability that they have to navigate. This is a human being we’re talking about, but we feel that homeless people, or people that are marginalized and are facing these crises situations are less than, not worth it, and they’re a problem. We have to start meeting them where they’re at. Holding their hand, telling them that they matter. Telling them that we care and showing them that we care. Because dumping a person in the streets after a traumatic event like an amputation. It’s cruel. It’s more cruel than anything I’ve ever seen. And when do we get to stop the cruelty on our brothers and sisters? And until we really look at that, there’s no way we’re ever going to fix this. No matter the policy, the money, the regulations or the advocacy. It Has to start with the people.

Mary W. Rowe You know, you each have got 10 seconds to say something, but I dare you to try to improve on what Jaimee just said. But let’s go around … 10 seconds Sandra, each of you, what’s the primary thing that you’re going to be focusing on? Sandra, then Leilani, then Estair, and then Tim. 10 seconds.

Sandra Clarkson It’s hard to follow up on Jaimee. I’m just going to say I love exactly what you just said, and I’m kind of speechless right now.

Mary W. Rowe Yeah, I get it. Leilani …

Leilani Farha I’m going to just echo what Jaimee just said. 100%. What worries me most is our current government and the way it’s engaging other brown people overseas in the Middle East suggests to me we are a far ways away from solving anything in this country.

Mary W. Rowe Estair …

Estair Van Wagner I mean, I can’t improve on what Jaimee has said, but just how do we build out … centering that notion of care and respect and respect for dignity?

Mary W. Rowe Last word. Tim.

Tim Richter What Jaimee said. And politics moves at the speed of public opinion. So do you want to shift that? Then we need to engage. Mary W. Rowe And maybe the way we affect public opinion is we start to build some trust and some awareness and some education, and we start to embed in our policies. You know, I always say that cities are fundamentally an act of collective empathy. We make choices to live close to one another in proximity. And one of the great challenges we have right now is that people aren’t coming downtown. They aren’t coming into their neighborhood streets. They’re not being exposed directly. They’re only getting it through intermediated media. And so maybe that’s part of what we have to try to do is continue to build back our collective trust in one another to confront and challenge, as you said, Jaimee, our brothers and sisters and what we’re all collectively in. Thank you very much for being part of CityTalk. These are always such rich conversations. Thanks to everybody in the chat. Lots of great resources, lots of great candor there. We’ll see you next time. And thank you to Leilani, Estair, Tim, Jaimee and Sandra. Thank you for joining us in the midst of your day. I really appreciate the conversation.