Abbotsford’s Housing Leadership Vacuum
Reading Mayor George Peary’s comments regarding homelessness left me wondering if councillors are issued a simple ‘crib sheet’ or whether they are required to memorize the ‘official city response’ to parrot back on questions about homelessness.
Setting aside why it is that the City of Abbotsford has such a limited amount of city owned land, one is left wondering why councillors keep pleading poverty whenever the issue of homelessness is raised.
I have not heard people clamouring for the city to fund homeless initiatives. This is hardly surprising since people are well aware that it is the provincial and federal governments that must provide funding if we are to begin addressing the complex issues of homelessness, addiction, mental illness, poverty etc. Not based strictly on whose responsibility it is, but because of the reality that the senior levels of government are the ones who have sufficient financial resources to fund solutions.
The city’s lack of funds is not the poverty that is, and has been for years, the major impediment to addressing, rather than avoiding, the issues connected to homelessness solutions.
A poverty of leadership from council, not a lack of funds, is the poverty that most interferes with making progress on these issues. It is this lack of leadership that has failed to rally the wide array of resources available in Abbotsford and the province of BC, preventing effective progress to be made on these issues.
The difference between those communities building affordable housing and striving to address the issues that surround and interconnect with homelessness versus the communities pleading poverty or that it is not their responsibility or whatever the excuse de jour is for wringing their hands then sitting on them – is leadership.
There is a desperate need for affordable, supportive, minimal barrier housing in Abbotsford. The Ebenezer home, a 91 bed supportive care home, sits empty. In a city with civic leadership on these issues … anything is possible.
To relieve tension over council
Homeless and Forsaken
The suicide of Corey O’Brien was tragic, but the true tragedy of Corey’s Story is that nothing has been done about implementing the recommendations in “Lost in Transition” – the report on mental illness on the streets of Vancouver.
The BC Liberals and the health care system have failed to put these recommendations into effect; as a result the mentally ill homeless continue to be left abandoned to the mean streets, continuously adding new names to the list of forsaken victims.
While a tragic suicide such as Corey’s is an infrequent event, having a person in desperate need of immediate mental health treatment refused service and turned away is a weekly occurrence for the outreach nurse who ministers to Abbotsford’s homeless.
Except for those not infrequent weeks where more than one person is turned away, back to being mentally ill and homelessness on the streets of Abbotsford.
The other evening the nurse and another staff person stayed late trying to help the latest victim of the BC government and its mental health system. Struggling to get a young human being in desperate need of immediate mental health treatment, mental health services at the Abbotsford Hospital.
An ambulance was called and took her/him to the hospital … were he/she was discharged to homelessness – unable to care for or help her/himself; the police were then called and they took this individual to the hospital … to simply drop them off rather than staying and ensuring this mentally unwell individual received the care needed.
Dealing with the Abbotsford Hospital is enough to drive anyone to wanting to run away screaming. Someone having a mental health crisis will escape the madness by wandering away.
So, rather than being in hospital getting the care desperately and conspicuously needed, he/she spent the night in the stressful environment of the emergency shelter.
The homeless, by and large, have no support. No parent, sibling, relative, neighbour or friends to provide support or to advocate and fight on their behalf.
They must rely on those charged with providing healing or to serve and protect to discharge their duty with due care. When the healers and protectors cannot be bothered …
Hospital staff said to take her/him to detox.
Yes, he/she is an addict, suffering the burden of drug use. For those suffering from addiction, their treatment by hospital staff can frequently, at the very best, be called less than professional and rather haphazard.
No visit to detox was required. She/he was detoxed as the result of a mental state so bad, so degraded that it was interfering with his/her drug use.
This individual is so mentally ill that their mental illness was and is interfering with their drug use. Yet he/she was returned to the streets in a condition where she/he was mentally unable, unfit to care for him/herself; left to wander Abbotsford’s streets with decreased ability, capacity to function.
Government and society tells homeless individuals they need to seek help, yet when they seek such help they find there is no help to be had. If the homeless are to be told they need to seek help, it follows that when they do, the capacity, services and professional staff must be in place to help.
To get the homeless into recovery and wellness, it is necessary for the system to adjust to their needs as they lack the ability to navigate the current systems. The recommendations of the “Lost in Transition” report needs be implemented as a priority.
Another priority must be an attitude adjustment for hospital staff and police; while the homeless are more often than not frustrating pains in the ass, that does not justify less than professional behaviour on matters of physical and/or mental health.
The test of the soul of a society, its ethicalness and its set of values, is how that society and its government(s) treat the most vulnerable: those in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those in the shadows of life, those in need, the handicapped, the helpless and the ill.
Our failure of this test of character is written in the pain and despair of people like Corey or the young human being who is in such desperate need of healing.
It is time to make the wellness of people more of a priority than a convention centre, Olympic venues, roads, bridges and ideology. Time to recognize that the homeless mentally ill and/or addicted are wounded human beings.