Future generations will (rightly) shame us for this moment

 

Berthold Bronisz, Pixabay

What’s underway in Canada and the United States right now is the manufacturing of new classes of people who can be discriminated against legally. Both our countries have been here before, but I’d always thought I was in the generation that would end all of that awful business, not lay the groundwork for more.

The latest target for discrimination and harassment in the US are people with first- and second-generation immigrant backgrounds from the ever-changing list that the government keeps of countries that it doesn’t like. In Canada, the target is people living homeless.

I’m not going to suggest that anyone’s wearing balaclavas and shooting people dead yet on Victoria streets. But that’s not to say there aren’t some striking – and disturbing - comparisons between ICE raids in the US and what’s happening for people living on our streets.

The principles are certainly the same: Identify a group of “undesirables” whose vanquishing can be politicized, and make life hell for them until they die or leave the area. It seems to be working to plan in the downtown, where at least 15 people have died since December.

BC’s brief and flawed experiment with decriminalizing small amounts of drugs ends today. Significantly increased search and seizure on Pandora Avenue this past week is an ominous sign of what’s coming, as the 180 people who use the overdose prevention site daily could be charged with possession anytime they walk up to the door carrying their drugs (yet are also not able to buy them inside).

Canadians don’t have to look far back in our past to find earlier examples of targeted discrimination. Indigenous people, Chinese and Japanese people, women, people with disabilities, people with certain health conditions – all have felt the wrath of state-sanctioned hate. Historically speaking, we are veteran haters.

But that was then, right? It’s 2026, and we’re so much more aware. We’re so sorry about the bad way we treated people in those days before we understood human rights and equality. We have so many nice laws now, and a library’s worth of court rulings upholding people’s rights.

So the question, then: How can we be doing this again?

I’m spending a lot of time on Victoria streets for a story-telling project. What I see is so many people needing more help than what our systems and service providers want to provide. I don’t know if it’s possible to pin down the moment when it became politically and publicly acceptable to blame and vilify this group of people rather than acknowledge the many factors and policy failures that got us here, but we’re certainly into that stage with gusto at this point.

Overlay that mean mindset with a brutal housing crisis for people in poverty, at a time when land is so valuable and neighbours are so NIMBY that there’s no welcome mat in sight for the poorest of the poor in any corner of our communities.

Add 10+ years of political paralysis as the toxic drug crisis exploded. Stir in some crazy thinking around mental health services that has resulted in the spectacle of seriously ill people being forced to take their medication yet at the same time abandoned to live homeless. Top it with not just gaps in the safety net, but no net at all.

Layer it all with a political climate so conservative that even the left leans right, and are only too happy to lure more voters by simplifying complex social failures into narratives of bad people making bad choices.

Decades into doing nothing right around addressing homelessness effectively, a growing number of people on our streets have essentially been deemed too difficult to bother with. I heard from someone who works in supportive housing that there are hundreds of such people in Victoria. They end up banned from everywhere, even “low barrier” places that they totally rely on for meals, bathrooms and a shower. They’re more or less stranded on the street; wary housing providers don’t want them as tenants, because the providers know they don’t get enough support hours to meet these people’s high levels of need.

Those needs can only increase as this group is singled out for enforcement and discrimination. They end up living in a permanently criminalized state – tents constantly searched, possessions seized, money taken without recourse if police decide that it must be from selling drugs. They sleep in stretches of two hours or less before a security guard or police rouse them and tell them to move along – to anywhere, to nowhere, just not here. Fight back and you’re a target for more harassment. The lucky ones might get a mat on a floor somewhere inside a shelter for a night, but they’ll have to be gone by 6 a.m. and line up for two hours or more that night to try for one.

Our modern society deems that this group can be spoken to roughly – in fact, MUST be, because to do otherwise is just “encouraging them.”  They can be treated disrespectfully. Called terrible names on social media platforms. Barred from fast-food restaurants just because of how they look. Denied use of restrooms. Filmed in the worst moments of their life with no consent. Discriminated against in the hospital emergency room.

Imagine for a minute if this was the situation for, say, Italians. Gay men. People with a limp. Israelis. Fill in the group of your choice, and consider how up in arms we’d all be to think of this identifiable group being singled out in our just, rights-based society for such hatred and discrimination. Intolerable.

But if a person is homeless, it’s open season.

Now maybe you’re reading this and thinking to yourself, hang on just a minute, most of these people are criminals because they’re using illegal drugs, and our society is certainly within its rights to make life difficult for people who are breaking the law. This is the same argument that ICE uses – “we’re only chasing down the sketchy immigrants who might be up to something, not the law-abiding ones.”

In this world view, it’s perfectly defensible to punish and harass people clinging to the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy, because they’re using illegal drugs. If they don’t want to be treated like sub-humans, then they can give up drugs, the logic goes. (Of course, they would still be homeless, but let’s keep the focus on the drugs, shall we?)

So many of us use drugs, though, legal and illegal. There’s absolutely no logic to why some drugs are legal and some aren’t in Canada, and certainly no logic to how someone can sit with Beer No. 4 in their hand going on about “drug addicts.”

Personally, I think we just want to be able to discriminate against people living impoverished on our streets. The fact of the drug use is a handy cover for selling that approach to a public who might otherwise be more reluctant to openly hate people just for being poor, sick and sad.

Lots of us hate that poor people exist. Some turn that hatred toward doing something about it. Others turn it toward sending the uniforms out to crank up the pressure and see if we can’t just make people magically disappear, or at least sicken them with sheer neglect and let their deaths pass without mention.

It’s sad as hell to see which way our government has chosen.  

Sometimes using drugs makes sense

Gerd Altmann, Pixabay

One of my long-time friends has Dissociative Identity Disorder – what they once called multiple personality. Getting to know her and her people over many years has helped me to see that it’s not a mental illness at all, it’s a coping mechanism.

I see so many parallels with this thing we call addiction.

For my friend, dissociating was a sane response to an insane situation, which in her case was a long childhood of non-stop physical, sexual and emotional abuse. When her little-girl self couldn’t handle what was happening to her, she found a way to check out. Some other “person” that her amazing brain had created would emerge to take the pain and heartbreak, and then retreat deep inside with the memory to protect my friend from having to know it ever happened.

Being able to dissociate so completely as a child was a brilliant strategy for her at the time. She thinks it probably saved her life, allowing her to take repeated abuse that any fully present child could never bear. The coping mechanism she’d unconsciously developed helped her manage through unmanageable times.

But in adulthood, this tool that she’d relied on since she was a toddler started to become a problem. She was no longer living a life of abuse, but she still reacted to high-stress situations by falling back on that old coping mechanism. And things often went badly as a result.

Her “switching” wasn’t a conscious act, so sometimes the full-grown woman with years of work experience was gone and a helpless child was in her place, with not a clue how to do the job. Or an angry, drunk customer would throw hot coffee at her, and the hothead personality who existed to punch first and ask questions later would emerge and deck the customer.

Over time, this beautiful coping mechanism that had seen her through terrible years began to interfere with her ability to work. It affected her friendships and relationships. She self-isolated out of fear that anyone who learned the truth about her would reject her. Her dissociating left her highly vulnerable to all kinds of dangers; more than once, she woke up in strange places far from home, with no clue as to how she got there.

She owed her life to her ability to “switch.” But in a changed situation, it had become the thing that was causing her the most harm.

Consider substance use disorder through a similar lens. 

Technically, it’s also a mental illness, presuming that someone’s substance use meets at least three of the 11 criteria laid out in the DSM-V psychiatric manual. In fact, people whose primary “mental illness” is a substance use disorder now account for a quarter of the 30,000 cases a year in BC of people detained and treated against their will under the Mental Health Act.

But is it a mental illness? I’ve been spending a lot of time these past few months talking with people living homeless in our region, and the drug use I’ve seen looks very much like a coping mechanism to me. A sane response to an insane situation.

Who among us could live the dystopian life of a modern homeless person in an affluent society for more than a few days without turning to drugs as a way to check out of the misery? Not to mention all the misery suffered in the runup to homeless. Painful childhoods, histories of abuse, intergenerational trauma, brain injury, disability - off you go into a life of being constantly hated on, and these days hunted multiple times a day by bylaw officers intent on taking all your possessions away. 

If all that and more are going on in your life, drugs that take it all away for a bit make total sense.

Like my friend’s unconscious dissociating, however, what starts out as a useful tool to soothe a savaged soul can end up being your most obvious problem.

Using street drugs at a level that lets you check out of your life is definitely not compatible with jumping through the hoops that await anyone trying to get off the streets, for instance. It also makes the neighbours very unhappy, to the point that they’re soon supporting political initiatives to round everybody up and force them into substance treatment. 

The toxic chemical soup that's now the illicit drug supply adds a whole other layer of misery, bringing death, nerve damage and chronic infection. Soon enough, the only thing anyone is talking about is the need to force people to stop their drug use, like that's the only problem.

That’s how it was for my friend, too. She was poked, prodded and counseled by so many psychiatrists, all of them focused on eliminating her coping mechanism, as if all would instantly be well if she just quit using that tool she needed so badly. 

Nobody asked to help her explore why she needed that coping mechanism in the first place, or how she was supposed to manage in some future new life if she couldn’t fall back on it at times of high stress. Nobody said hey, girl, hurray to you for discovering a coping mechanism that kept you going through some really heavy stuff, but now let’s go find some new tools that won’t get in your way quite so much.

She had to do all that work on her own. (And she did.) It took many years, and many retreats back to the old ways before she was fully ready for a different way of doing things. 

These days, she’s still got a few of her people on hand if needed, but she’s got a whole range of new coping skills, too. She can still dissociate, but it’s no longer the only coping mechanism she has.

In theory, there’s a lot more services and systems to manage harmful substance use than there was for my friend and her Dissociative Identity Disorder, and a lot more people who do understand substance use as a coping mechanism. 

But there’s also a big chunk of the public – the ones with the biggest influence on government thinking, it appears – who believe that if people just didn’t use illicit drugs, there would be no crisis on our streets. They are easily swayed by political rhetoric that maintains that falsity, and messaging that blames, shames and criminalizes substance users for “choosing” to use unregulated substances.

Between the general lack of understanding and the deliberate political posturing, we’re in quite a state.

We’re stressing out about the drugs, but not about the underlying reasons for using them. We’re fixating and fighting over substances as if all the answers lie there, even while the crisis on our streets intensifies and the harmful shaming of people just trying to get through a hard day rages on. 

People living homeless have a lot of stuff to cope with. They use substances to cope. Whatever “treatment” there will be for that, it starts with the stuff underneath.

Half a millenium is long enough to know that what you're doing isn't working

I went looking for the origins of that phrase "the deserving poor" today. It turns out to be a 426-year-old term dating back to the Elizabethan Poor Laws, which aimed to reduce the devastating impact of a famine by providing alms to the deserving poor and a hard stint in the workhouse for the undeserving.

Modern anti-poverty policies would never word things like that, of course. But strip away the dressed-up language and that’s still what we’ve got. We’ve even lost the plot on “the deserving poor” at this point, with people now stranded out on our streets who actually would have been eligible for alms back in Elizabethan times.

Back in 1601, the Poor Laws divided impoverished people into three categories for the purpose of deciding how much help they qualified for.

“The vagrant” was undeserving and destined for the workhouse, where he would be punished daily doing work that was deliberately designed to be more unpleasant than even the worst of jobs outside the workhouse. The “involuntary unemployed” and “the helpless” qualified as deserving poor and could get some aid, albeit with a ton of strings attached.

Sound familiar? Almost half a millennium later, that basically describes our current anti-poverty approach. And as anyone with eyes may have noticed at this point, it’s not working so well.

We have many more fancily named bins to divide people into these days, and many streams of funding that make it look like lots of innovative new approaches are going on. But getting virtually any social support still largely comes down to whether the gatekeeper decides that the person at the gate is deserving.

You can imagine how well this system works for, say, a poor person who is actively using drugs. They’re the ultimate “undeserving,” what with drug use while visibly poor being a seemingly widely accepted signal that a person isn’t trying hard enough.

But in these modern times of scarcity, even “the helpless” can’t depend on qualifying for much support, and certainly the “involuntary unemployed” are having to fight for it nowadays. I’ve been out there a lot in the last couple of months for an Instagram project I’m doing, and it’s stunning to see just how many categories of people are being abandoned under the 2025 version of English Poor Laws.

Not so long ago, you’d never see people with intellectual disabilities - or freshly amputated limbs, or people released post-surgery from hospital an hour ago, or jail  – living homeless. You wouldn’t expect to find people in acute mental distress, being held involuntarily under the Mental Health Act in order to force them to take their psychiatric medication, yet still left to live homeless.

But none of those populations are even rarities out there anymore.

The deserving/undeserving framework encompasses the surprisingly common view that the only reason people live homeless is because they’re just too lazy to get jobs and a proper place to live. (Seriously, take a slow and observant walk down 900-block Pandora and then tell me if that’s still your opinion.)

This flawed belief fuels the modern city’s primary weapon for battling homelessness: a set of bylaws dictating where, when and how impoverished citizens will be prohibited from "loitering," "congregating," or all those other words for gathering that are applied only to people who look visibly poor, and that permit the state-sanctioned theft and disposal of homeless people's possessions.

Cities then use those bylaws, and millions in enforcement dollars, to chase people around town like pigeons being shooed away to a new roost somewhere out of sight. Alas, there is never anywhere to go but to some other street. Yet consecutive versions of city councils keep trying, as if there’s a magical pit that the "undeserving poor" will eventually fall into if chased for long enough.

Everyone has their opinions on how we’ve gotten to this point, with almost 1,800 people living homeless just in Greater Victoria, and 60,000 across Canada. 

But enough with the opinions. We are here now. There is a growing problem on our streets that serves nobody. It’s overlayered with a street-drug crisis of the likes we have never seen, fed by an ever-changing and toxic chemical soup that now makes up the street supply - and that continues to flow no matter how many weird ways politicians come up with to fight the unwinnable "war on drugs."

Meanwhile, business owners in the hot zones grapple with weird new challenges with no easy answers. I was in Wildfire Bakery the other day when a man clearly in some kind of altered state raged into the bakery, snatched food off the counter, and was gone. Or Allied Glass in Rock Bay, targeted repeatedly for vandalism by someone whose own altered state is telling him the business means harm.

I honestly wonder if we can even get back from this.

And yet here we are, still sticking with a shame-based approach put in place by British royalty facing a famine 500 years ago. How’s that working for us?

Rising intimate partner violence rates are just one of the many canaries in our coal mine

Today is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. We are a long way from done. 

The line on the graph looks like a dip in the road – downhill for a few years after 2009, then slowly climbing back up over a decade starting in 2014.

It tracks the number of police reports in Canada related to intimate partner violence. For a while, things were improving. But that’s over now, with violence rates (54 per 1,000 for Canadian women) now back to the levels of 15 years ago. Similar trends are evident in the US, where aggravated domestic assaults have risen to heights not seen in more than 20 years.

What were we doing right for those good years? What did we start doing wrong? When the issue is something as deeply in the shadows as intimate partner violence, a clear answer is hard to come by. With 80 per cent of people experiencing IPV not even reporting the crime to police, any trend line is only ever scraping the surface.

But the rising stress of daily life on Planet Earth can’t be ignored. Trend lines tied to family well-being on so many fronts are headed in the wrong direction. Yet our country lacks even the most basic of plans for dealing with the multitude of issues feeding into our growing social crisis.

It isn’t just intimate partner violence that’s increasing. Police-reported violence against children and youth in Canada has hit historic highs, having risen 32 per cent since 2018.

Financial worries are increasing: 42 per cent of Canadians in a recent FP Canada survey say money is their top source of stress. The housing crisis rages on, with two-thirds of Canadians reporting they’re unable to comfortably afford a monthly mortgage payment of more than $1,700 a month even while the mortgage payment for an average-priced Vancouver condo is almost three times that much.

Business insolvencies are on the rise after their own brief dip in the road came to an end in 2020. The unemployment rate is the highest it has been in a decade. Poverty rates are rising, as are stress levels; almost a third of Canadians ages 35-49 report feeling very stressed every day.

Families with children are under even greater stress, as are their children. More than a quarter of the cohort of young Canadians followed in a national study tracking mental health perceptions reported in 2023 that their mental health wasn’t good, which was twice as many as four years earlier during the first wave of the study.

School absentee rates are up, with some Canadian school districts reporting as many as two-thirds of elementary-age students absent at least 10 per cent of the time.

All of those trends are known to have an impact on the incidence of family violence. Stressors like household finances, job insecurity and poor mental health are known risk factors for increased violence within families.

Life pressures are mounting in all directions. A rise in family violence is too often the result.

Family violence causes harm long after the act is done and gone, both to the person experiencing the abuse and to any children in the home who see it happen.

The direct victims of an act of violence are at major risk of brain injury if the abuse involved impacts to the head, shaking, or strangulation. At least 65 per cent of victims of intimate partner violence end up with a brain injury.

A child who witnessed the violence may have their own health and economic opportunities negatively affected long into adulthood, or end up with a brain injury themselves if they’re also targeted for abuse. So many people living with a brain injury from abuse won’t even know they have one, even as it complicates their health, relationships, parenting, and ability to function at work.

We have talked for decades in Canada about the urgency of ending intimate partner violence. But reducing family violence can’t be achieved in isolation from work that strengthens Canada’s social safety net and supports a strong, equitable economy.

On that front, the trend lines are equally alarming. The gap between Canada’s richest and poorest citizens hit a historic high earlier this year. The top 20 per cent of wealthiest Canadians now accounts for two-thirds of our country’s total net worth, while the bottom 40 per cent accounts for just 3.3 per cent.

The rise in intimate partner violence is a red flag across multiple indicators of social health. We are not doing well. Worse, we have no actionable plan for doing better.

We have been winging it for far too long. With so many social indicators going in the wrong direction, the question that hangs over all of us is how much worse we’re prepared to let it get.

The cruel, pointless belief that we can address a social crisis with enforcement

Scrambling to pack up as bylaw gets ready to close in

In days gone by, I'd be out talking to people living homeless and hearing mostly about police. These days, it's all about City of Victoria bylaw enforcement.

The city's bylaw department and many new bylaw hires have been given expansive new powers to seize people's stuff. The Streets and Traffic Bylaw lays out all the places where impoverished people aren't allowed to sit, stand or lie down, but it's the 2023 Property in Custody Bylaw that really gives the muscle.

I'd like to share some sections from these bylaws, in hopes that someone who understands civic law might have ideas on how to push back against them. It's hard to believe that they could possibly be legal given the grand misery they are causing to people, none of whom have the capacity or the knowledge to stand up against them. As noted by one young fellow out there I spoke with, Michael, "maybe one per cent of the people out here know their rights. That doesn't leave people with enough courage to stand up to police or bylaw."

The Streets and Traffic Bylaw lays the groundwork with a number of sections prohibiting people from being on sidewalks, medians and boulevards in the downtown area between the hours of 8 a.m. and 9 p.m. (Of course, people with money sipping a latte or having a hearty meal at a sidewalk cafe are exempted.)

Section 102 (1):

- A person must not place, or cause or permit to be placed or left, any of the following items so as to occupy, obstruct, or cause a nuisance on any part of a street, sidewalk or other public place: 

(i) any property or thing, or

(ii) a sign, as defined in the Sign Bylaw.

- A person must not place or cause or permit to be placed on, above or in a street, sidewalk, or other public place waste matter of any description, including without limitation, litter, rubbish, garbage, offal, filth, or any noxious, offensive or unwholesome substance or matter;

102 (3)

The Director of Engineering, a person authorized by the Director of Engineering, a bylaw officer, or a police officer, may remove, seize, and impound or cause the removal, seizure or impoundment of any property or thing that unlawfully occupies, or has been unlawfully placed or left in, a street, sidewalk or public place, and such item will be dealt with in accordance with the Property in Custody Bylaw

103 (1)

Without limiting the generality of section 101, a person must not obstruct a sidewalk by squatting, kneeling, sitting, or lying down on it between the hours of 8:00 a.m. and 9:00 p.m. of the same day if the sidewalk is located at any of the following locations: (a) (b) (2) in the area that is bounded by Cook, Pembroke, Store, Wharf, Government, Superior and Southgate Streets; abutting or adjacent to those parts of Cook, Pembroke, Store, Wharf, Government, Superior and Southgate Streets that form the boundary of the area referred to in paragraph (a).

103A 

(2) A person must not place, construct, erect or cause or permit to be placed, constructed or erected any structure, tent, object or thing that encroaches on, obstructs, or otherwise occupies a boulevard or median without first obtaining written permission from the Director of Engineering.

(4) The Director of Engineering, a person authorized by the Director of Engineering, a Bylaw Officer, or a member of a police force, on behalf of the City may cause the removal, detention or impounding of any structure, tent, object or thing found on a boulevard or median in contravention of this section, and the portable sign will be dealt with in accordance with the Property in Custody Bylaw.

(5) Between sunset of one day and sunrise on the next day, a person must not: (a)  (b) occupy a median by squatting, kneeling, sitting, or lying down on it;  stand or walk on a median except while lawfully crossing a street.

So that's the bylaw that provides the foundation for enforcement. In 2023, the City brought in the Property in Custody Bylaw, which is the one that gives power to bylaw officers to seize people's goods if they're found anywhere in the no-go zones and hours defined by the Streets and Traffic bylaw.

In theory, seized goods that aren't deemed "rubbish" are to be held for 14 days (it used to be 30 days) in a mysterious location that the City won't disclose. Word on the street is that between the difficulty of the process to get something back, the lack of a proper chain of custody, and the distance that a person without a car is expected to travel to get their goods back from wherever they're held essentially means nobody gets anything back. 

Here's what is required to get something back. Please take a walk down 900-block Pandora and try to imagine who among the sad, sick people stranded out there could make this happen:

Claiming and Disposal of Retained Property

5 (1) (2) (3) (4) Within 14 days of the date of removal, seizure or impounding, owners of retained property may attend at the property return facility to claim and request the return of the retained property, after which the City will endeavor to return the retained property within 48 hours.

Any retained property that is not claimed pursuant to subsection (1) may be immediately and permanently disposed of without notice or compensation to any person. Permanent disposal of unclaimed retained property may be made to a landfill, recycling facility, or other waste disposal facility or, with the permission of the Director, to a registered charity. Notwithstanding subsection (1), the Director may provide any retained property to the police if they believe that such property may be stolen, may have been used in commission of a crime, or may be misplaced or lost.

6    (1) (2) (3) (4) For each removal, seizure or impounding of any property or thing under a City bylaw, the owner of that property or thing must pay the fee prescribed in Schedule A to the City.  Retained property which has been seized shall not be released without payment of the applicable fee. 

(The fee is waived for a first seizure in any given year, $50 for a second, $100 for a third.)

Notwithstanding subsections (1) and (2), no fee is payable for return of retained property to a person experiencing homelessness where in the opinion of the Director (of bylaw services, or authorized delegate) such item is a life-supporting item such as a tent, sleeping bag, medication, medical device, cell phone, personal identification, or waterproof or winter apparel.  

6 (5) 6 Persons claiming retained property must, as a condition of claiming such property, execute a compliance agreement in a form prescribed by the Director stating that the claiming party will not repeat the unlawful behaviour.

7 - Nothing in this Bylaw shall be construed to impose a private law duty of care on any City employee, agent of the City, or police officer with regard to the removal, seizure, impounding, return, disposal or donation of any property or thing pursuant to this Bylaw or any related statutory authority. No Liability 8 No City employee, agent of the City, or police officer shall be liable to any person or entity for the application of this Bylaw.

Perhaps more importantly than any of that, the definition of rubbish under the bylaw is so broad that it's likely most of the 10 tonnes (!) of stuff being seized every week by the city is immediately garbaged. Whether the person who actually owns it thinks that it's rubbish - well, that makes no difference. It's totally the bylaw officer's decision. 

4) Any property or thing that is removed, seized, or impounded may be immediately and permanently disposed of without notice or compensation to any person if it is rubbish, hazardous material, or a bulky item.

Definition of rubbish:

includes any item that, in the opinion of a City employee: appears to be of no resale value, or negligible resale value, is damaged or soiled to the extent that it appears it cannot reasonably be used for its intended purpose, was manufactured for single use, appears to contain an unidentifiable, noxious, or hazardous substance,  is perishable,  was manufactured for the purpose of packaging a product or thing, including food or beverage, or was part of a cart, bicycle, machine, or other similar item, including wiring and other small parts;

Definition of bulky item: 

includes large, heavy, unwieldy or irregularly shaped items, such as furniture, sheet plywood, lumber, heaters, fencing, structures, and includes a shelter, unless such shelter is lawfully temporarily placed, secured, erected, used or maintained by a person experiencing homelessness in accordance with Parks Regulation Bylaw;

Now let's say you're not one of those people who cares much for human rights for people living homeless, and you just want your damn streets to not look like such a mess. I do get that, because the truth of the current situation is that it's a lose-lose for all of us. 

But here's the rub: Enforcement only works if there's someplace for people to go. If you want to force people from building messy structures and keeping all their worldly possessions with them on the sidewalks of our downtown, then there needs to be some other place where they can relocate. 

I'm definitely seeing people relocating to try to escape the seizures, which are killing them (sometimes literally - I heard tell of a fellow who died of an asthma attack after he couldn't get into his taped-off tent to get his inhaler). But they're just relocating to other people's neighbourhoods. It's not like there's some magical housing where they can all disappear into if we just keep chasing them hard enough. 

So yeah, the seizures are cruel, almost certainly illegal if tested in a court of law, and completely pointless to boot. If the baton-carrying bylaw teams in their anti-stab vests are ever successful in clearing out the downtown core, that just means that pockets of visible homelessness are building up elsewhere. How is that a win for anyone?

What to do about it? It's absolutely essential to identify someplace where it's OK to be homeless. That doesn't mean accepting homelessness; a wealthy country like ours should never do that. But there is just nothing to be gained by this cruel and pointless pursuit of people who are barely surviving and now having to endure the added misery of running from bylaw twice a day, and the government-sanctioned theft of their possessions.

Some of the people living on our streets have been outside for years. It's going to take a lot more services, support and housing than we currently have to address the complexities of their highly individual situations. 

But there is no question that there is nowhere near enough low-income housing for the people who need it. If we don't want homelessness in the downtown core, OK, that can be arranged. But not without designating some other area where people without housing can exist in peace.

Shoving a few of them into "supportive housing" for a few weeks under prison-style rules won't do it. Nor will this insubstantial pipe dream of involuntary treatment, which not only lacks any kind of evidence base but has no plan that I'm aware of for housing people post-treatment, or the massive expansion in social supports that would be needed to ensure all the disabilities and traumas underneath people's substance use are addressed as part of their treatment. (And if we were actually committed to creating such a system, why wouldn't we just make it voluntary?)

Surely no one still believes that homelessness is a problem of wilful people determined to live "free and easy" on the street so they don't have to work for a living. If anyone still thinks that, I'd invite them to come walking with me one day and meet some of the people who are stuck out there. They break my heart with their stories of trying so hard, in many cases since they were children.

Or maybe just wait until a day not far down the line when bylaw chases people into your neighbourhood. Then you can ask them yourself.