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.