Tuesday, August 01, 2023

QUEEN CITY
Murray Mandryk: Homeless eviction defies our supposed welcoming nature

Opinion by Murray Mandryk • Leader Post

Sending in the police to remove the poor, homeless and drug addicted is not a solution for a city and province that prides itself on being welcoming.

Just beyond the chain-link fencing encircling Regina City Hall with no less than 24 “No Trespassing” signs, you can still visit the courtyard monuments telling us what a welcoming place this is.

Gone are the tents that housed the houseless. And gone are the people who lived in those tents … although some may not have gone very far.

Monday morning, people milled about across the street from city hall near the YWCA on McIntyre Street, just behind the Fresh and Sweet coffee house.

After Regina police tore down the homeless encampment on Friday. half a dozen were sent out of town to hotels in Balgonie for the weekend.

The rest? We don’t know. Perhaps they sought refuge in parts unknown. Out of sight, out of mind?

As explained by city manager Niki Anderson, the issue for these people nobody seems to care much about is public safety.

“Elected officials who claim they should have been consulted about today’s response are, in fact, placing the public at greater risk by inappropriately challenging public safety experts and eroding confidence in my administration’s ability to protect the residents of the City of Regina,” Anderson wrote in a news release.

Of course, we are still a welcoming place … or so the monuments in the city hall courtyard suggest.

You can still go there and peruse those signs. A couple of uniformed private security personnel may give you the once-over, but if you’re a frumpy looking, 60ish white guy, you needn’t worry.

“Dominion of Canada. Tawaw,” reads one monument. Tawaw means “it is open” in Cree. Ironically, the Cree translation also means “it has a hole in it.” That one seems more apropos, given the past few days.

“Open Door Policy. Open Door Society. Open Hearts. Open Minds,” states the Regina City Hall monument from where the homeless were evicted.

“Who dreams shall live,” further states the monument a few feet away from where camp resident Leitsha Bigknife died two weeks ago.

Perhaps we’re no different than anywhere else that similarly prides itself on being welcoming and can’t see when we aren’t.

A few decades back, then-Calgary mayor and later premier Ralph Klein made it known that “Eastern creeps and bums” weren’t welcome. Vancouver, which purports to be the loveliest city in Canada, cleaned out its east end before the 2010 Olympics, so the world could see just how lovely it was.

Toronto? Montreal? Winnipeg? Ottawa? Are they really any different than Saskatchewan, where the solution was to give out-of-province welfare recipients a one-way bus ticket to Vancouver … until we sold the bus company?

With deaths and fires at the Regina City Hall homeless camp, there’s no denying dangers were mounting. City fire and police officials are being vilified, but this is first about keeping the public (including those in the camp) safe.

Finally, issues of mental health and the scourge of serious drug abuse surely must leave those in charge feeling helpless. One might even sympathize with the Saskatchewan Party government, were it not hiding behind the politics.

Asked for simple followup information Monday and an interview with the minister, officials with Gene Makowsky’s Social Services Ministry told the Leader-Post they have “strict rules engaging with the Regina media” because there’s byelections going on.

Beyond this being simply nonsense, this is the same government putting up billboards outside the city slamming teachers. And this same government that won’t meet with municipalities to talk about changes to its Saskatchewan Income Support (SIS) program now clearly adding to the homeless crisis.

Meanwhile, there are 700 vacant Saskatchewan Housing Corp. units. The provincial government is sitting on its second year of a billion-dollar surplus, holding back that money to either cut cheques or cut sales tax sometime before next year’s election.

There again, why the hell should provincial politicians meet with those running the City of Regina when they won’t even talk to each other?

We chose multis e gentibus vires as our provincial motto because we wanted to say we welcomed everyone. Well, we clearly don’t.

Forget the mottos and monuments. If you are in distress, the signs say you need to go elsewhere.

Mandryk is the political columnist for the Regina Leader-Post and the Saskatoon StarPhoenix.

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