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 being visibly poor considered a clear sign of a person who 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 going to have to fight for it. 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 who are being held involuntarily under the Mental Health Act so they can be forced to take their psychiatric medication, yet are still left to live homeless.

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

The deserving/undeserving framework extends to 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 that continues to flow across all borders like water 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?