A place to discuss all the news and events taking place in the province of Ontario, Canada.
Rules
Quick, let's give more money to megacorps and business our way out of it! That'll fix it!
Not surprised. I've never seen so much homeless people in Montreal in Québec either. This is a serious problem. The governments are just waiting for it to go away on its own. It's completely inhumane.
I hate to say this, but at least you aren't criminalizing it, against your own constitution, the way we are doing down here in the US. Waiting for it to go away is marginally better than creating slaves out of the most marginalized portion of society.
They live in worse conditions than concentration camps.
Eeehhhh... Maybe not. But their conditions are bad, yes
As an American, whose country literally invented concentration camps, no, they don't. They live in appalling conditions, inhumane conditions even. They aren't anything like what we did to the Native Americans, or the Japanese Americans.
Source: been homeless in the US, and been in jail in the US. I'd rather be homeless than a slave. I've also lived in 49/50 states. Hawaii isn't possible to drive to.
We can't just keep throwing money at help groups in hopes that will magically solve homelessness, we need to address the economic factors pushing people there, the high and ever increasing costs of living. From a ponzi scheme housing market to ever increasing groccery costs, people are being priced out of their apartments and homes.
We need to invest in affordable housing and transit, we need to break up the groccery cartels that keep getting away with price fixing, we need to slow immigration to ease the pressure on rental units, we need to rework the temporary foreign worker programs to be less exploitative which would open up more low skill jobs available to homeless populations.
But our governments don't want to do any of that because it hurts their sweet sweet profits and the oligarch shareholders. Best they can offer is some cash for local outreach groups that often don't have the resources to make meaningful change (at least compared to the reaources available to governments).
My U.S. relatives: "But Canada is a Socialist country, right?"
Sure, sure it is.
It is unless you need medical care, housing, or food.
Lets spend $$$ on “the most ambitious study of homelessness conducted across Ontario” to show folks how much homeless people we have instead of how can we solve that problem without blaming the government for it...
How wonder how quickly we'd solve homelessness if billionaires weren't allowed to be a thing.
Wealth hoarding, above all else, is the reason why we have poverty.