It’s been nearly three weeks since the Health and Housing Symposium hosted by the City of Guelph and Wellington County closed, but I’m hard pressed to tell you what exactly came of it, and whether or not it will make any difference to the shared crises of housing, homelessness, and addictions and mental health.
Unlike the January sessions, media were allowed to attend and report on the speeches and panels that took place in the morning, but when the participants broke up into working tables we were not allowed to sit and write about what has being discussed. That’s fine, that was the deal we all made to be there, but what I continue to be stumped by is how little has been said coming out of the symposium. Where are the solutions?
Perhaps it was naïve to think that easy solutions would be coming out of the symposium, but there was also a lot of hype around this event as the boiler from which big solutions would be generated. Back in November, City of Guelph staff recommended to pause any new funding for daytime shelter services until the matter could be discussed at the symposium. Well, funding ran out for Royal City Mission this week, what were the results of that discussion?
In fact, what were the results of any discussion? As I’m writing this, the agenda for next week’s Joint Social Services and Land Ambulance Committee meeting has not yet been released, but I suppose that there will be an update of some kind. I can’t imagine that it will be complete though, or that it will be the last word. And if it’s not going to be the last word, why do we have to wait so long to hear the first word?
Let me say that I appreciate that these issues are complicated, solutions are not easy to come by with issues this big, and they often involve a jurisdictional mess of funding and regulation.
Having said that, I think the Health and Housing Symposium was a failure, at least on the messaging piece. It’s obviously too soon to tell if it’s a failure on the substance, but in terms of offering some assurance that there are solutions coming, it’s been a failure. And in terms of making sure that the community is part of those solutions and feels engaged, that’s also been a failure.
When it was announced that there would be a third day and that it would be open to the media, I expected there to be follow-up details, but just 48 hours before the start of the session on Wednesday, April 17, I still hadn’t received any notification. If you’re going to hold an invite-only event, you’ve got to send out invites.
There was also a promise that the morning speakers and panels would be live-streamed. They were recorded on video, but those videos – to my knowledge – have not been posted yet. The most obvious place would be Wellington County’s YouTube channel, but on Wednesday night they still weren’t there. In any event, posting a video after the fact is not a “live-stream”.
But understanding where other municipalities have enjoyed success is only a part of the picture. What’s important is knowing where we’re going and that’s where the communications part of this really falls short. The Royal City Mission has pulled back service, temporary housing at area hotels is done, tiny homes seem stalled as they wait for land to materialize, all the sturm and drang over an encampment bylaw has been cancelled, and the provincial and federal budgets seemed to offer nothing of substance.
So what do we do now?
Regardless of what you felt about the encampment bylaw or the use of Strong Mayor Powers, this year started with the feeling of some propulsive movement on these issues. There was a real, kind of “We’re rolling our sleeves to get this done, and it may not be perfect, but we can’t wait around for the perfect plan with the perfect budget anymore.”
Then, this week in Ottawa, there was a tizzy because the leader of the opposition called the prime minister a “wacko” for supporting decriminalization efforts around the drug crisis. Barely a year into a pilot project, the government of British Columbia has asked Health Canada to re-criminalize the use of drugs in public spaces and this has been taken as a repudiation of the entire policy despite some highly specious testimony from the B.C. United Party.
I’ve noticed a similar tone on local social media channels lately, an idea that compassion and tolerance for people who use substances has created an unwieldy disgusting hellscape in our downtown core where people fear to venture. I won’t deny that there are issues downtown, and I won’t tell people how they should feel about it, but even the police will tell you that the drug crisis won’t be solved through the criminal justice system. We would have seen those results long before now.
And yet, I think what we’re seeing on the socials, and in B.C., and in Ottawa, is an expression of fatigue. Despite everything we’ve tried, and all the attention these issues have garnered, we’re seeing no progress. That’s why the silence following the symposium has been deafening.
While I appreciate that there was a lot of information shared, and a lot of details to breakdown and rectify, there’s been a void created by that silence and it’s being filled with that frustration, and the default position of a frustrated population is to go back to what worked in the past, even if it never worked in the first place.
The massiveness of these issues, and the fact that they’re not unique to Guelph, is a consideration when looking at how hard it is to find answers, but as long as our leaders aren’t talking, the default position is that they’re probably not doing anything at all. That may be unfair, but it is how the human mind works, especially in this time where nobody trusts the government on reflex, and unfortunately, it’s all quiet on the Wellington front.
