Editor, The News:
Re: Standing up to staged tent squatters (B.C. Views).
I am one of the “thugs” in the alleged “bus load” (we were in cars) who went to Victoria last summer when the housing ministers converged there.
We didn’t meet with Amarjeet Sohi, as Tom Fletcher inaccurately claims, but with Jean-Yves Duclos, the federal Minister of Housing who actually attended and spoke at our rally.
We didn’t invade Victoria’s tent city. After the rally, we went there to show them our solidarity and bring some food.
We did argue that we need 77,000 units of social housing per year in Canada in order to end homelessness, with about 10,000 per year in B.C.
Several studies show that homeless people have half the life expectancy as other people and that it’s actually cheaper for taxpayers to end homelessness than to maintain it.
I wasn’t there when Ivan Drury grabbed possessions stolen from homeless people by bylaw officers off a truck
and gave them back to the homeless owners. But I heard about it and I think it took a lot of courage to do that.
People who are homeless are not an “endless stream of transients looking for a free ride.” They are human beings who deserve their international human right to adequate housing and are trying to make do in the best way they can.
With welfare and disability rates providing only $375 a month for shelter, it is virtually impossible for someone without work to be able to rent a place. So, of course we have homelessness.
I wrote a book called Poor bashing, the politics of exclusion that is used in some university courses. I thought, in researching this book, that I pretty much knew about hatred against the poor in all its various forms.
But this outpouring of hate against homeless people in Maple Ridge is truly abhorrent.
If I ever do another edition of the book, Maple Ridge will figure prominently as the hate capital of Canada.
Jean Swanson,
Order of Canada recipient
Vancouver