I will leave it for others who have data to comment on the nature of drug use and crime in our city. I am not perennially in downtown Newcastle, although I will say I and my in-laws from England passed a perfectly amiable half hour in Queen Elizabeth Park recently, enjoying the midday shade while various members of our group did banking, checked out a few shops, and so on, coming back and forth to chat and chill in the park. There were some people there who appeared to be down on their luck. One of them was smoking cannabis at one point. As far as I am aware there is currently no law against that, nor against being poor in public. They enjoyed the shade as we did, and were no bother to anyone around them.

 

Neither poverty nor homelessness is pretty. Of course, the Monday morning quarterbacks bring various comments sections alive with opinions about what should be done. People just need to get a job. They should be put somewhere. Why can't we dump these people at the old mill site or somewhere else. Other cities are dumping their problems on us, half these people aren't even from here, all that type of stuff. If you've been paying attention at all, you know it well, I'm sure.

 

Miramichi, for many years, had a lower level of poverty and homelessness, or at least it could seem that way, buried as it was by a booming economy of mills, mines, the port, the military base, and a culture of generosity and charity among Miramichi people that saw few go without, at least visibly. The idea could safely persist that homelessness was something that happened some place else. No longer. When I began working in the social sector in Miramichi almost five years ago, people were already sleeping in cars, bus shelters, bank machine lobbies, laundry rooms. Anywhere that was warm and dry. What kept the pie in the sky notion that homelessness didn't happen here alive, at that point, was that the only option agencies had was to send our homeless to Moncton, Fredericton and elsewhere. For those of us who might feel annoyed about the likelihood of other localities "dumping" - a horrid term to apply a suffering human - their problems here, other localities have experienced plenty of dumping from us, I assure you. All while we continued the pleasant fiction that homelessness doesn't happen here.

 

Those of us who work in this sector have asked provincial governments of all stripes for a homelessness strategy to exhaustion, and such a strategy has not been forthcoming. Health and social care is, after all, a provincial responsibility in Canada. A former New Brunswick minister famously labelled one community's declaration of emergency around homelessness "political posturing." Talk is cheap. In a nutshell, a few exceptions aside, New Brunswick's small municipalities have been left to fend for themselves in relation to homelessness.

 

If you want to talk about who our homeless are, eighty five percent of our homeless have a connection to Miramichi. That is verified by statistics, head counts, and the hands on work of people who connect with our homeless population every single day. If you're a mind that this problem should or could be moved elsewhere, and that law and order needs to be imposed, among those laws is that Canadian citizens have the constitutional right to live and attempt to make a life for themselves anywhere in Canada. Even if our homeless population was not from here, we would still be obligated to help them and provide for them.

 

I detest the conflation of poverty and homelessness with criminality, and the judgement foisted on those attempting to help on this issue in the absence of a wider, concerted strategy for addressing homelessness regionally. That and the misguided notion that our homeless can either recover without assistance, or that that assistance somehow should be gate kept in ways that keep most of us at a comfortable, clinical distance from people in dire need. Income assistance for a single person in New Brunswick is somewhere above six hundred dollars a month, at a time when rents are fourteen hundred and more. Impossible. Even two wage families are struggling to make ends meet. Our homeless are not all criminals, inasmuch as there is crime to some degree in every sector of society. They are elderly people left without a home after a bad turn of luck, someone sleeping in a truck so they can still get to work, someone who left a home of abuse or trauma and can't go back. Many people are a pay check away from joining them. And neither are our homeless especially antisocial. Most are deliberately the opposite, so afraid of social judgement, or of having the cops called because of the way they look, that they deliberately shrink themselves socially, avoiding going into shops or talking to anyone. Much like the people I and my in-laws recently sat with in the park.

 

The notion that somehow we are going to law and order ourselves out of this problem is extremely naive, and a band aid at best.   Newcastle remains the focus because most services are there - social development, Service New Brunswick, the food bank - and because for most of our homeless, these public spaces are both the only place they have left, and the community spaces that, as Miramichiers, they have known their whole lives. Even if that population could be moved elsewhere, they would gravitate, as we all would, back towards what they know. Services that are going to help our homeless respond as we do because we need to meet people where they are. Hence Dining with Dignity and Jeremy's Mission offer meals and support in Newcastle, with some wider outreach, as does Miramichi Housing Solutions and the John Howard Society. And as one who has been involved in that response, I'm content we have done things by the book and followed the process that is open to us. At times, community groups have responded to that with legal action and other options, using the process that is open to them. I didn't enjoy being subject to that process, but I didn't begrudge people the right to take that avenue if they chose.

 

The back and forth on this issue really needs to be a thing of the past. We will thrive together or sink together. If you're one of those folks who's annoyed with the present state of local government, you could replace the whole council tomorrow and we would still be right back where we started in a few months or years, with the same problems. You can collect everyone's community concerns and reflect great consensus and annoyance - again, everyone has a perfect right to do that - but you'd get no further ahead if the only result of that is a more punishing life for the already destitute. I do have sympathy for Miramichiers trying to run businesses in an environment like this, or community members affected by uncertain social changes, but I have yet to see judgement solve a single social problem.

 

We have a real chance in Miramichi to end homelessness. We have around one hundred chronically homeless people in our community.

 

Outreach services are increasing, shelter spaces are increasing, stable out of the cold provision is increasing, all of which will come to fruition in the coming months. Social and affordable housing is increasing too, allowing us to get more and more people off the streets and moving towards healthier living, which is better for everyone.

 

We can end local homelessness if we work together; if not, we'll be having the same conversation in a decade. As one colleague put it recently, homelessness services are the one service locally that can't move their problem along to another agency or department. We recognize that in the absence of concerted action at a higher level, we have no option but to help. We have good helping relationships with our local homeless population, and in change work, the relationship is the most important factor of all.

 

If Downtown Newcastle wants a cooperative partnership to end homelessness, and to give more attention to criminal acts and drug use, I'm all in. If they prefer to conflate crime and addiction with homelessness, and demand sanctions that will disproportionately impact our largely blameless and most vulnerable population, it's not a road I can follow.