OrilliaMatters welcomes letters to the editor at [email protected]. Please include your daytime phone number and address (for verification of authorship, not publication). The following letter is in response to an article regarding potential enforcement options at homeless encampments, published Jan. 31.
It is disheartening to read that council is looking into enforcement measures to clear homeless encampments, citing neighbours who have to “deal” with them.
Perhaps what is really needed here is an attitude shift. How tasteless to suggest this in the dead of winter, after one of our own is so disillusioned by ongoing homelessness and how that impacts his mental health that he is publicly seeking medical assistance in dying.
While there are obvious issues that arise in encampments, each and every one of our homes also has issues. Issues that we would be ashamed to display publicly. But we have the privilege of walls and neighbours who turn a blind eye. Perhaps instead of displacing those who literally have no home to go to and rely on each other for some sense of community and security, we should turn our attention to our own homes and getting right within.
Displacing people who already have no homes because privileged white folk don’t want to “deal” with them is just another way of people deflecting attention away from our own issues that we don’t wish to face. Perhaps if we all focused on getting right within, we wouldn’t have a problem. We’d be offering support and kindness instead of displacement and ostracizing the most vulnerable. Perhaps if we got comfortable with our own vulnerabilities we’d stop trying to stomp out others.
Sorry, Tim. I respect you, but your approach to this is mind boggling. Enforcement? How about compassion and, um, an actual goal to permanently house every single homeless person in Orillia?
Instead we let developers displace people who currently have affordable housing, and not even require them to house those same people. Profit over people always.
I’ve lost count how many friends and family have lost their homes and found nowhere safe to go in the past couple of years. It’s hard to exist in this world. Since the pandemic we have community gardens denying people food (and then denying their denial) and now we are looking at enforcing displacing homeless people further. Seriously.
Let’s spend more time getting right within and less time trying to dictate to others how to survive from the comforts of our heated homes and offices.
Valerie Kitchen
Orillia
