By Xavier Kataquapit
Windspeaker.com
I was raised knowing many people in my circle of family and friends who have had to deal with troubles and problems that they had no control over. As I grew up in my home community of Attawapiskat on the James Bay coast, tragedy and trauma just seemed be a normal part of life for everyone.
My parents’ generation grew up with limited education and what schooling they had occurred in the Residential School system where they faced abuse, colonization and a sense that they were less than human. As a result, they passed on this trauma to their children.
Some families survived to a degree through this communal trauma but many others were unable to cope. This colonization and oppression resulted in countless people who have had to deal with drug addiction, alcoholism and mental illness.
Many people tried to find a way out of this colonial trap by heading to southern communities in search of opportunities, work, education and efforts to find a way out of poverty. Instead, they found little help on the outside and far more ways to complicate their lives.
Once people failed in the attempt to find a life in the south they faced having to return defeated to their remote community and this was difficult as there was a lack of housing and any kind of dedicated care for dealing with addictions and mental health conditions.
According to the Homeless Hub, a project of the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness at York University’s Faculty of Education, in 2021 from a total number of surveyed individuals who were experiencing homelessness in the Cochrane District, 80% of those people identified as Indigenous.
Over the decades, most conservative-minded governments at every level have had simplistic ways of viewing this problem by stepping up policing, enforcement and creating rules and regulations to outlaw homelessness. Trying to hide or push the problem aside doesn’t deal with anything and it only makes matters worse. The homeless, addicted and those with mental problems were ignored or worse condemned.
We have to come to the realization that it is necessary to spend the money and make the efforts to assist all of these people suffering from these situations. When you think about it, society will always pay for the problems of homelessness, addictions and mental health by investing huge sums of money into dealing with health problems, policing and incarcerating people and all of the violence that goes along with these tragic situations.
We need to realize that it is best to deal with all of these critical problems now in every manner possible to assist people and help them heal and recover otherwise things will never be resolved.
If we don’t care enough to come up with healing solutions then society will have to spend the money on more policing and more security as crime rates inevitably rise. Those people who are unwell will also go on to harm themselves or others, which leads to more emergency health care from all kinds of violence and tragedy.
People who are homeless, addicted and mentally unwell fall into criminal behaviour, which then leads to increased public costs of judicial services, courts, incarceration and band-aid social services that don’t really work.
The alternative is to choose to pay for taking care of people now before things get any worse. When people are taken care of and not allowed to fall through the cracks of society, they are less likely to drift into criminal behaviour and they are less likely to hurt themselves or others.
The savings appear in the form of lower rates of crime because more people are well, less people using public health care and far less people ending up in the judicial system.
There is a bonus to taking care of people and in helping them to live healthy lives. They go on to take care of others around them and they heal and participate in the community in positive ways.
There is already a precedent for this in Canada. At the end of the Second World War, the country provided a fully funded national housing program for low-income families through the creation of what was then known as the Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation.
Today this is known as the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. The need corresponded with a population boom at the time. If those families had not been helped, they would have naturally fallen through the cracks and the country would have in turn paid for the consequences of a struggling population.
A more modern example of helping people is what is being done in Finland where government programs promote a ‘housing first’ initiative to help house people. These national programs have meant that in Finland, a country of 5.5 million people, they have been able to reduce homeless from 18,000 in 1987 to 4,000, with less than 500 actually spending the night outside.
The Finnish programs don’t just provide housing, they complement these services by helping people deal with drug abuse, mental health problems and assist them in finding jobs.
This is in contrast to what Canada has been doing for the past few decades in cutting program funding with the results being an increase in the number of homeless people and people living on the verge of homelessness as well as increased numbers of those being incarcerated.