It’s a pretty safe bet that most of us have forgotten that Jordan Charlie even existed.
Just over five weeks ago, the 24-year-old Nunavut man was shot and killed by police outside a strip mall in west Winnipeg after stabbing an officer in the neck. His tragic life and even more tragic end were top news in this city for about a week. Then, as our attention shifted to preparations for the holiday season, Charlie was erased from most of our memories.
That is a tragedy on top of a tragedy. It’s not a stretch to say that Charlie, in death, exposed all of society’s greatest failings.
Charlie suffered from a broad spectrum of mental health and addictions challenges, and had been in and out of jail for a variety of violent offences, including assaulting hospital security staff with a knife, the sentence for which he’d completed just days before he was shot and killed.
Between periods of incarceration, he lived on the street with no formal or familial supports.
Despite the better efforts of social-service agencies, the health-care system and even the correctional system, Charlie was an intractable challenge. A review of sentencing, health and parole assessments came to the same awful conclusion: a lot of people wanted to help Jordan Charlie but almost no one knew how to do it.
In a more perfect world, we would mark Charlie’s death by committing to an urgent and robust campaign to providing real help and hope to the homeless, the addicted and the mentally ill. Instead, it seems that just at the time when we need to respond with the full force of our compassion and resources, we are instead signalling our surrender.
It’s not that governments are not responding. Political leaders are constantly making announcements about new expenditures and programs to address homelessness, mental health and addictions. And there are significant sums of money being spent. It’s just that the size of our commitment is almost always woefully inadequate when considering the size of the problem.
In Manitoba, the NDP government has held out hope that the new year will bring the first modest steps forward in its plan to end chronic homelessness. However, Premier Wab Kinew is being very careful to keep a lid on expectations.
The Kinew government has not offered any specifics about how many people it will move out of encampments and into more stable alternatives, or exactly when the movement will begin. In an interview with the Canadian Press, Kinew said his government will go “camp by camp” to move “a few dozen people at a time.”
We should all hope that this is more than political rhetoric. If Kinew and his government can somehow do what they say they want to do, Manitoba might just stand out as a beacon of hope in an otherwise bleak landscape for the homeless.
The awful reality gripping this country is that as the problem of homelessness grows — and make no mistake, it is growing — we are doing less to help people and more to make the problem even worse. What is extraordinary about our response is that robust social programming with a focus on stable housing is not just the most compassionate thing we can do, it is the most cost-effective.
The John Howard Society of Ontario published a report last year that compared the cost of “housing” people in a variety of public institutions that at one time or another serve the homeless.
A month in a hospital costs taxpayers about $13,500. A month in a prison costs about $3,960. A month in a temporary shelter costs about $2,100. But “supportive housing for one household” costs about $600 per month.
With numbers like that, you might assume that a compassionate society would surely launch an aggressive campaign to provide stable, permanent social housing for the homeless.
You might assume that, but you’d be wrong.
Governments in this country remain obsessed with “affordability measures,” cash handouts and tax cuts that provide a disproportionate benefit to people who will never face homelessness. The billions of dollars being spent on these programs have very little impact on affordability, but a huge impact on government’s ability to support programming for homelessness, mental health and addictions.
Consider what’s happening in Ontario right now.
Last fall, Premier Doug Ford decided to send $200 rebate cheques to every adult taxpayer in the province, a gesture that will cost his government about $3 billion.
At the same time, the Association of Municipalities of Ontario is crying out for support to deal with the estimated 1,400 homeless encampments across the province. The AMO has estimated it would cost $3.5 billion annually to reduce chronic homelessness by 50 per cent.
The similarity in the two figures — $3 billion for rebates and $3.5 billion to cut chronic homelessness in half — says everything that needs to be said about the perverse priorities our political leaders are demonstrating at this time of desperate need.
Back in Manitoba, the Kinew government has extricated itself from its own affordability measures by restoring most of the provincial gas tax it stopped charging last year and capping rebates on the education portion of property taxes. Those two measures will bring hundreds of millions of much-needed dollars back to the treasury, money that, in part, should allow Kinew to do what he said he would do: end chronic homelessness.
We should all hope that Kinew is successful. The life of the next Jordan Charlie depends on it.
dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca
Dan Lett
Columnist
Dan Lett is a columnist for the Free Press, providing opinion and commentary on politics in Winnipeg and beyond. Born and raised in Toronto, Dan joined the Free Press in 1986. Read more about Dan.
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