This week, Canada’s largest public transit system, the Toronto Transit Commission, announced it would be stationing crisis worker teams directly on subway platforms to improve public safety.
Last week, Canada’s largest library, the Toronto Public Library, announced it would be increasing the number of branches that offer crisis and social support services. This builds on a 2023 pilot project between the library and Toronto’s Gerstein Crisis Centre to service people experiencing mental health, substance abuse and other issues.
The move “only made sense,” Amanda French, the manager of social development at Toronto Public Library, told CBC.
Does it, though?
Over the past decade, public institutions — our libraries, parks, transit systems, hospitals and city centres — have steadily increased the resources they devote to servicing the homeless, mentally ill and drug addicted. In many cases, this has come at the expense of serving the groups these spaces were intended to serve.
For some communities, it is all becoming too much.
Recently, some cities have taken the extraordinary step of calling states of emergency over the public disorder in their communities. This September, both Barrie, Ont. and Smithers, B.C. did so, citing the public disorder caused by open drug use, encampments, theft and violence.
In June, Williams Lake, B.C., did the same. It was planning to “bring in an 11 p.m. curfew and was exploring involuntary detention when the province directed an expert task force to enter the city,” The Globe and Mail reported last week.
These cries for help — which Canadian Affairs has also reported on in Toronto, Ottawa and Nanaimo — must be taken seriously. The solution cannot simply be more of the same — to further expand public institutions’ crisis services while neglecting their core purposes and clientele.
Canada must make public order a priority again.
Without public order, Canadians will increasingly cease to patronize the public institutions that make communities welcoming and vibrant. Businesses will increasingly close up shop in city centres. This will accelerate community decline, creating a vicious downward spiral.
We do not pretend to have the answers for how best to restore public order while also addressing the very real needs of individuals struggling with homelessness, mental illness and addiction.
But we can offer a few observations.
First, Canadians must be willing to critically examine our policies.
Harm-reduction policies — which correlate with the rise of public disorder — should be at the top of the list.
The aim of these policies is to reduce the harms associated with drug use, such as overdose or infection. They were intended to be introduced alongside investments in other social supports, such as recovery.
But unlike Portugal, which prioritized treatment alongside harm reduction, Canada failed to make these investments. For this and other reasons, many experts now say our harm-reduction policies are not working.
“Many of my addiction medicine colleagues have stopped prescribing ‘safe supply’ hydromorphone to their patients because of the high rates of diversion … and lack of efficacy in stabilizing the substance use disorder (sometimes worsening it),” Dr. Launette Rieb, a clinical associate professor at the University of British Columbia and addiction medicine specialist recently told Canadian Affairs.
Yet, despite such damning claims, some Canadians remain closed to the possibility that these policies may need to change. Worse, some foster a climate that penalizes dissent.
“Many doctors who initially supported ‘safe supply’ no longer provide it but do not wish to talk about it publicly for fear of reprisals,” Rieb said.
Second, Canadians must look abroad — well beyond the United States — for policy alternatives.
As The Globe and Mail reported in August, Canada and the U.S. have been far harder hit by the drug crisis than European countries.
The article points to a host of potential factors, spanning everything from doctors’ prescribing practices to drug trade flows to drug laws and enforcement.
For example, unlike Canada, most of Europe has not legalized cannabis, the article says. European countries also enforce their drug laws more rigorously.
“According to the UN, Europe arrests, prosecutes and convicts people for drug-related offences at a much higher rate than that of the Americas,” it says.
Addiction treatment rates also vary.
“According to the latest data from the UN, 28 per cent of people with drug use disorders in Europe received treatment. In contrast, only 9 per cent of those with drug use disorders in the Americas received treatment.”
And then there is harm reduction. No other country went “whole hog” on harm reduction the way Canada did, one professor told The Globe.
If we want public order, we should look to the countries that are orderly and identify what makes them different — in a good way.
There is no shame in copying good policies. There should be shame in sticking with failed ones due to ideology.
If you and the rest of the selfish NIMBYs want public order, how about taking steps to prevent homelessness in the first place? It’s funny that media outlets like yours always blame the victims, but none of you are willing to talk about how people ended up on the streets doing drugs. Or, the real reasons why homelessness has skyrocketed in the last 20 years.
Like provincial and federal governments shutting the vulnerable out of entry level jobs by bribing employers to exploit foreign slave labour instead of hiring Canadians. Or artificially raising the prices of basics like groceries. Or enacting policies that cause rents to skyrocket, and financially rewarding landlords for evicting the vulnerable. Or keeping low income people’s benefits so low that they have to choose between food and rent, while imports receive lavish handouts. Or taxing seniors out of their homes. Or refusing to help people who try to get back into the workforce. Or enacting DEI policies to shut Canadians out of affordable and supportive housing. Ontario has a DEI housing policy, which caused tens of thousands of Canadians to be quietly removed from housing wait lists a few years ago. No wonder they end up in tents.
Seniors, disabled people, the jobless and youth are being deliberately rendered destitute, then when they end up homeless through no fault of their own they’re dehumanized, criminalized and blamed for their situation by media like yours, so that the public will support their murders. They’re only given three ways out of this hell: death by overdose, death by untreated illness, or MAID.
State mandated poverty aka human disposal is a blatant form of eugenic genocide, but I don’t see any “news” outlets like yours writing editorials about that! Instead you rage farm with blame and hatred of the victims, talk about them as if they’re vermin to be exterminated, and shamefully whine for “public order”. How about public fairness?
Well said! There is much talk about housing being a human right but very little action in making this a reality. I agree there is as you say state mandated
poverty for seniors, disabled, jobless youth, homeless and people on the margins of society with low benefits that are not pegged to the cost of
Icing in Canada. Canada is a very rich country with all its natural resources but the money is not being used to address the poverty for people existing on the margins of society. Canadians are also having to wait many hours up to 12 hours and more in emergency. I myself have waited 9 hours only to be seen by a doctor for 4 minutes. My father waited for 12 hours in emergency and was kept overnight in emergency and he says no one came and even asked him if he was hungry or wanted a glass of water or a blanket! I also am one of the many Canadians without a family doctor. Something has gone very wrong here.
There is no edit button for one to make a correction of a typographical error.
So, I make the correction here:
I agree there is as you say state mandated poverty for seniors, disabled, jobless youth, homeless and people on the margins of society with low benefits that are not pegged to the COST of LIVING in Canada.
With all due respect, when Canada stands on the world stage and proclaims Canada is the number ONE country in the world, this shows a total lack of humility – and in order to learn from the best policies in other countries that maintain public order, Canada first needs to address this lack of humility in order to develop humility first. When Canada believes it is the top country in the world, it does not position itself to learn from how other countries develop social policies to successfully maintain public order by addressing drug addiction, mental health, and homelessness – because being top in the world Canada believes it knows everything and has nothing to learn from anyone.
Canadians first must be told that every country including Canada has good points and areas for improvement, including Canada and that we must work much harder to successfully address drug addiction, mental health and homelessness crises in Canadian towns cities right across the land. This lack of humility in the national attitude of Canada is concerning because it presents a big obstacle to addressing drug addiction, mental health and homeless crises afflicting Canadian society. I am sire that my pointing this lack of humility out will be met with denial and anger. I have lived in many countries around the world and sorry to say but I have never seen such lack of humility anywhere like I do here in Canada.
Post script: I think Canadians look at the mountains and rivers and lakes and the big trees and are so impressed with the beauty of our country that they think all is well in the land and hence in their minds Canada is the number ONE country in the world – and believing this they neglect to really see and understand the nature of the very serious social crises like drug addiction, mental health, and homelessness crises that lead to public disorder in Canadian society.