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Our dear mayor and council have decided to fight seniors, students, single parents, wage workers, people dealing with mental health and addiction, and people in poverty in general as their pet project.
They have proposed cutting critical bus service, scrapping free garbage tags, changing the pricing of recreational activities, and clamping down on homeless encampments, all the while not addressing the fact that Orillia has no detox centre, an overloaded mental health ward, dangerously inadequate housing, and a rising homeless population that includes myself. All the conversations that have been had here in the local media have fallen on deaf ears. So, fine; let’s dance.
Go ahead, mayor and council. Tear down the encampments. Put more cops on the street. Set up those SCRAM cameras (hell, even the acronym insinuates you aren’t welcome in the city and will be driven out), force people into sex work, take advantage of those vulnerable women and offer sex in lieu of rent, chase away proposals for detox centres, declare that the Lighthouse should be enough, flip your extra house into four Airbnb units instead of housing someone in need.
Go ahead, bureaucratize the community gardens to the point that they are unusable for people in crisis, complain about those lazy people who don’t want to work three jobs where they get yelled at or treated awfully so they can make rent, sob about how sad it is that someone would opt for medical assistance in dying, increase the price of recreation, and while you’re at it, why not also reduce the bus schedule at the prime time that low-income people are taking their kids to school and getting to work and then take away free garbage tags?
You guys must know only the crappy neighbourhoods will get trashier.
What do we choose: Garbage tags or bus fare for a bus that will get us to work an hour early or an hour late? Then go ahead and send staff to hand out tickets to those people who have six garbage bags in their front yard because they chose bus fare. Now it’s $50 on a ticket or groceries.
I tell ya, if I had a house, I’d let someone camp in my backyard, and maybe I’d wait on my porch with a camera and dare the city to make them leave.
Maybe us homeless people should all occupy a part of our glorious Couchiching Beach Park out in the open where you can see all of us. Maybe people on the edge of homelessness themselves would care enough to come stand watch with their cameras.
It’s crazy to think I’d risk jail just to know someone could have a place to rest their head, even if they were high, even if they were unlovable, even if they were trash; but considering the precedent established by Justice Michael Valente a few weeks ago in Kitchener and the formal review by the federal housing advocate into the human rights of people living in encampments announced recently, I’d say the risk is minimal.
We are in dire need of radical compassion from the mayor and council, and quick, because if they can’t, then it will be radical occupation. What do we care? We have nothing left to lose anyways.
Aaron Switzer
Orillia
