Canadians have a reputation of being bland and cautious, but you can be sure that we look for reasons to counter with smugness. Unfortunately, on the lookout to recast our traits into holier than thou rebukes of others, it seems that opportunities to do so have been particularly threadbare in the face of COVID-19’s affronts.
Here’s a challenge to our Canadian self-esteem from the United Kingdom, where local councils have been admonished to try harder to house the homeless as the coronavirus runs it course. Read more in The Guardian: England’s councils told to ‘redouble efforts’ on housing rough sleepers
Accordingly, Canadians can be expected to look homeward for that feel-good smugness, if not to cheer some visionary national mobilization of resources, then at least an opportunity to mutter “slow and steady wins the race,” excusing some thinly-veiled foot-dragging.
This time around however, Canadians can only be humiliated at the official responses to our own homelessness problems. Yes, Canadian homeless were initially swept from the streets as were those in many other nations. But any Canuck self-congratulation quickly faded as tent cities began to pop up everywhere. Rules are a contributing factor. It seems that those homeless at the start of the epidemic qualified for shelter, but not, for some unfathomable reason, many of those who have subsequently become homeless during and/or because of the pandemic.
If this characterization of Canada’s feet of clay is not enough, we need only to turn to a provincial example — Ontario for one — where the government is hard at work actually manufacturing homelessness.
Our pesky provincial eviction ban expired in five months ago. The results are monthly eviction “hearings” numbering in the thousands. Such is the demand upon the province’s Landlord and Tenant Board, it has caused the death of the quaint old concept of a “hearing” as an event at which a tenant might attend and be heard. Instead, internet efficiency triumphs in “virtual” hearings, robotically bumping hundreds of tenants onto the streets every day. Read more at CTV: ‘People are being shown no mercy’: Online evictions raise alarm in Ontario
As this post was being written, the Ontario eviction sausage machine was retooled on January 13, 2021. It continues churn out eviction orders. BUT, the product won’t leave the factory, so to speak — sheriffs will not go around booting people out of their houses. It’s not so much an eviction ban as an eviction delay. One half-hearted cheer for this unimpressive example of Ontario looking out for its citizens overwhelmed by a pandemic.
