What’s the Plan for the Unsheltered in Victoria?

Tomorrow morning, Mayor Marianne Alto will inaugurate the city of Victoria’s first homeless shelter, just in time for the cold season.

You think I’m joking? Just look at the above picture. At the cost of over seven hundred thousand dollars, the facility is designed to accommodate about two dozen toddlers, opens during daylight hours, and features very comfortable PVC slides and wooden benches. Bring your own outreach staff and security detail.

Of course neighbours are profoundly grateful and shaking with excitement:

Okay, on a more serious note, I can assure you this is all the unsheltered will get from the city this winter. You want to know what the city’s plan is? Read on.

I happened to overhear deliberations during an in camera meeting at City Hall on September 28th (staff just let me walk in, and the curtain wall is sooo thin). Council was scrambling for a plan, which basically entailed begging BC Housing and the Alliance to End Homelessness in the Capital Region for help. One councillor even expressed serious scepticism that a solution could be put together by the November 1st deadline.

One month later, nothing’s been done. At the latest Committee of the Whole, the Alliance’s Executive Director Sylvia Ceacero gave a presentation pertaining to its activities, in the aftermath of which she announced it is withdrawing from Emergency Weather Response shelter coordination and has no intention of helping run seasonal shelters anymore, instead focusing on advocacy for year-long shelters; a formal announcement is to be made in the coming days.

The usual kabuki theatre unfolded. Councillor Krista Loughton stepped in, asking “what’s the plan?” in a tacit admission that she has none, and blaming the Alliance for discussing the matter only in September, as always, when it should have been done in March. Never mind the fact that she herself delayed having the talk until mid-September, as she stated in a commentary published in the Times Colonist:

Should the province not have appropriate housing options available by mid-September, I am prepared to move that staff be asked to set up an interim sheltering site by Nov. 1, so the four parks can permanently prohibit overnight sheltering.

City of Victoria Councillor Krista Loughton, on July 28th, 2023

So what’s the actual plan? Judging from what I saw at Stadacona Park today around noon, the plan was to sweep the park clean of any signs of sheltering that might contaminate the Mayor’s photo shoot. So if you attend the event tomorrow, you won’t see any of these:

I don’t usually publish pictures of vulnerable people at their worst and frown at people who do. I’m doing it today because the city’s plan is to sweep these people under the proverbial rug. The city’s plan is wilful blindness and selective amnesia. It is to displace these people until they die like road kills out of sight, and pretend they never existed. It is to splurge on amenities at exorbitant price tags while closing shelters like Tiny Town, closing parks for sheltering, and closing public washrooms at night so the unsheltered are reduced to defecating in doorways. In short, this is the master plan:

Nobody in town wants a winter like the previous one, and yet this is all the City of Victoria has to offer. I expect it to blame every other level of government for its own callous incompetence, while in fact it is the one to blame since it wasted more than enough of its own budget to shelter everyone on the streets 24/7 all year long, while failing to spend BC Housing’s budget for EWR shelters last winter.

I shall no longer waste my breath asking the council to ensure basic services, and instead call for its immediate resignation. It is not part of the solution, but the problem. I also call upon legal advocates to help us mount a legal challenge against the City of Victoria’s continued human rights violations, which are plainly meant to encroach upon previous judgements such as BC/Yukon Association of Drug War Survivors (DWS) v City of Abbotsford by constructively denying the unhoused shelter. That’s my plan, and every exasperated resident of this city is welcome to join in.