Council was told security hired to prevent encampments wouldn’t make arrests. One councillor is questioning why city documents say otherwise.
One of the main concerns people have about the camps is that they are open to the public – but not necessarily to the homeless. Some of the campers are on the street, others have gone to the library, others have gone to a shelter. Others are at the grocery store. They’re all just as easy to find as everyone else.
What I don’t understand is why it’s difficult to make it illegal to sit on the sidewalk in front of a grocery store and try to buy food and other supplies. Even if it’s only a few people, why is it difficult to make it illegal?
In any case, I’m also curious why it’s necessary to put all of the homeless in the same camps, when there’s an obvious homeless shelter a few miles away.
That’s the second time in two days that I’ve seen that happen – this time it was an actual councillor speaking, which usually is some sort of emergency, unless you’re talking about an actual emergency response in the city of Calgary.
At issue is that the city’s homeless services are underfunded, and that the homeless shelters are in crisis, and are not providing the service levels that the city needs.
It is the responsibility of the government to allocate those services, and to make sure that the government funds those services.
You know what? I don’t think it’s the responsibility of the taxpayers to pick which homeless people are in the camps, or which homeless people don’t go to the camps. It’s the responsibility of the government to fund a homeless shelter, when we have homeless people that need a safe place to live, and to make sure that services are available to those homeless people when they need them.
It’s not the responsibility of the taxpayers to determine who is “homeless.” It’s the responsibility of the government to fund programs to make sure there are resources available to those people, to make sure
