Given the impending evictions worldwide, the number of people experiencing homelessness may well get far worse before it gets better. Looking on the bright side (a bit of a stretch) there’s always the great outdoors, where studies suggest that COVID-19 is tens, hundreds, as much as a thousand times less transmittable.
Hardly surprising then that, along with growing numbers of homeless encampments, there is an increasing reluctance — even belligerence — towards those who would simply sweep the homeless aside as if the problem is somehow going to go away, rather than just go somewhere else.
This ongoing situation is beginning to have overtones of the famous scene in The Naked Gun film, where the voice of officialdom stands before a perfectly obvious exploding hellscape while shooing away passers-by: “Nothing To See Here. Move Along.”
In Toronto a few days ago Global News had little interest in moving along, and neither did the encampment residents. The City of Toronto tried to apply a fire extinguisher to this burning problem with a mob-hand of policemen.
Violence followed, and the police eventually beat a tactical retreat, the job half done.
Which brings this city to Groundhog Day movie overtones, where we wake up over and over to the dawn of a new homeless encampment, the same as the last, which must be cleared away by the same set of blinkered bureaucrats using the same shopworn tools.
BTW what’s all this about love? Scottie Bailey Kelly, who didn’t want to leave the encampment and was interviewed for the article, has a perspective on that.
Read and watch the video at Global News: Clearing of homeless encampment in Toronto halted after standoff with community
