They Don’t Care About Us

You know what’s way more important than addressing homelessness and the opioid epidemic?

Ask our Honourable Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. According to him, it’s way more urgent to give 1 billion dollars to provinces for COVID vaccine passports. Indeed, provinces need all that money to produce QR codes pertaining to restrictions that are purely coercive in marginalising dissenters and do nothing to make us safer; in fact, this kind of rhetoric has historically made us far less safe. But hey, there’s the word COVID in it.

Of course he also needed to spend 612 million dollars on an anticipated election nobody wanted, in the middle of a pandemic (after promising he wouldn’t), and which merely reasserted the status quo.

And to say I’m walking around town every night with a naloxone kit, ready to resuscitate drug users who overdose pending admission into drug rehab. What an assclown.

Of course it’s not just a matter of how much is spent, but how; governments prefer splurging it on sand and even oppressing us using the police, the courts, and prisons. They’re giving us naloxone when we need quicker access to detox. They’re putting us in shelters when we need protection from renovictions, higher welfare cheques, and a moratorium on evicting poor people.

None of this should come as a shock. They don’t give a shit about us. To them, we’re supplicants. We’re suckups. We’re vermin. Why would they treat us otherwise? We don’t vote, we don’t donate to political parties, we don’t bribe them, we don’t flatter them. Governance always comes down to clientelism, after all.

Well, all we have to do is stop being so meek and make them respect us after all. The hard way. Because there is no other way. We can persuade them that it would be more economical for them to give us what we need, but only if we exacerbate the problem to ludicrous levels, let’s say, by having them put us all in prison, such that politicians will have to choose between building more affordable housing and building more prisons.

Now it’s just a matter of making enough noise to reach Justin Trudeau’s ears.