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| A couple of the fabulous moms out there holding onto their kids - Lisa and Correne |
Why hasn't there been a single report out of City of Victoria detailing the results of these 32 months of extra-rough enforcement since the Property in Custody bylaw took effect? How much of the "up to 10 tonnes" of people's personal property that the city takes away every week goes to the dump? How much gets reclaimed? What's the chain of custody process? Is there any appeal process? (Spoiler alert: No.)
Are they really trashing that brand-new tent - and if they're not, then what are they doing with it? How much is the city spending taking away everything – multiple times a day - from the region’s most vulnerable, most impoverished people?
The Community Safety and Well-Being plan that this enforcement is part of has this to say about the root causes of homelessness: “Underlying the continuing effects of fragmented, inadequate social services is society’s incapacity to resolve poverty and its impact as a driver of systemic social inequality. Unresolved systemic social inequity – combined with inadequate “upstream” interventions to interrupt and prevent the need for responsive services – continues to hamper social service delivery.”
So tell me, please, anyone, especially the people who are going to be running for election in the City of Victoria in two months: How can a city make that statement in its guiding document while at the same time legalizing daily state-sanctioned theft from the poorest of the poor?
In its own way, it’s every bit as horrible as all the other horrible things done by the powers that be in decades past - with public support - that many of us cringe to even imagine these days.
Leaving unwanted children to be raped by priests. Kidnapping Indigenous children from their families. Locking people up and lobotomizing them for “mental illnesses” that were nothing of the kind. Hiding away all the populations of people who looked or acted different than the rest of us, even shaping law to legitimize what was being done.
How could we ever have done such things? Yet here we are, at it again. Like before, we put a label on it so that we can pretend it isn’t really people we’re doing this to.
In days gone by, the labels were things like “the retarded,” “the insane,” “the savages,” “junkies.”
With this particular manifestation of hatred and discrimination, we’ve gone one step further to erase even the smallest sense of people from the label, choosing to call what we’re doing “addressing street disorder.”
Sometimes people will ask me, OK, lady, what would you do, then? I have a lot to say on that, but it always starts here: Not this. There is not one thing that is being made better by these aggressive street sweeps, and so much is being made worse.
Please follow the page and learn about the reality from the point of view of the people enduring these profoundly cruel experiences every single damn day, none of which is fixing one damn thing.
Are they really trashing that brand-new tent - and if they're not, then what are they doing with it? How much is the city spending taking away everything – multiple times a day - from the region’s most vulnerable, most impoverished people?
The Community Safety and Well-Being plan that this enforcement is part of has this to say about the root causes of homelessness: “Underlying the continuing effects of fragmented, inadequate social services is society’s incapacity to resolve poverty and its impact as a driver of systemic social inequality. Unresolved systemic social inequity – combined with inadequate “upstream” interventions to interrupt and prevent the need for responsive services – continues to hamper social service delivery.”
So tell me, please, anyone, especially the people who are going to be running for election in the City of Victoria in two months: How can a city make that statement in its guiding document while at the same time legalizing daily state-sanctioned theft from the poorest of the poor?
In its own way, it’s every bit as horrible as all the other horrible things done by the powers that be in decades past - with public support - that many of us cringe to even imagine these days.
Leaving unwanted children to be raped by priests. Kidnapping Indigenous children from their families. Locking people up and lobotomizing them for “mental illnesses” that were nothing of the kind. Hiding away all the populations of people who looked or acted different than the rest of us, even shaping law to legitimize what was being done.
How could we ever have done such things? Yet here we are, at it again. Like before, we put a label on it so that we can pretend it isn’t really people we’re doing this to.
In days gone by, the labels were things like “the retarded,” “the insane,” “the savages,” “junkies.”
With this particular manifestation of hatred and discrimination, we’ve gone one step further to erase even the smallest sense of people from the label, choosing to call what we’re doing “addressing street disorder.”
Sometimes people will ask me, OK, lady, what would you do, then? I have a lot to say on that, but it always starts here: Not this. There is not one thing that is being made better by these aggressive street sweeps, and so much is being made worse.
Please follow the page and learn about the reality from the point of view of the people enduring these profoundly cruel experiences every single damn day, none of which is fixing one damn thing.
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