Shelter debate should heat up in cold

Ottawa’s well-run shelters are crucial when winter savages the entire city

One night this week, there was a homeless person sleeping in the lobby of my apartment building.

I sure didn’t report him to anyone — and I hope none of my neighbours were callous enough to do so, either.

In the kind of cold we’ve been enduring, shelter’s all that matters.

Luckily, Ottawa didn’t seem to have struggled too much with finding places for homeless people to sleep.

At the Ottawa Mission, about 20 extra mats have been set up in the chapel each night.

This week, there were around 250 people each night, says executive director Peter Tilley, up from a normal 225 or so.

Ottawa, he says, is a “compassionate” place, with leadership on homelessness from the mayor’s office on down.

That’s important: In a wealthy, sprawling, suburban city, it’s easy to imagine rank indifference towards homelessness among politicians and voters.

Ottawa, though, has been having a serious discussion about it, with genuine arguments about good social policy making up a large portion of the recent debate over building a new Salvation Army shelter in Vanier.

It’s not just rank NIMBYism.

It feels like this city has got a decent grip on the problem, or, if not quite that (after all, around 7,000 people used shelters in 2016) then at least we’re grappling seriously with the policy.

Meanwhile, Toronto’s political class found itself entangled in an argument about opening up a federal armoury as a temporary shelter, and the city ombudsman announced an inquiry into the misperception that shelter beds were all full when they were not.

How Canada’s largest city was caught off guard — or didn’t care — is a proper scandal.

After all, it gets cold every year.

There are homeless people perennially.

For some reason, these simple facts haven’t necessarily led to decent public policy or a compassionate response in Toronto.

It is weird at best and strangely callous and dangerous at worst.

This is a mess with consequences: People die from exposure to the cold in Canadian cities.

While I’m no huge fan of the new Salvation Army mega-shelter, because I don’t think the shelter model itself is a very effective method of coping with homelessness, the cold snap makes clear the usefulness of having shelter for those who cannot or will not live in social or regular housing. It’s imperfect, to be sure. Some people won’t travel all the way to where the shelter is — a real problem with moving the Salvation Army from Lowertown to Vanier.

Tensions can run high in a shelter, it can get crowded, some people have mental health issues that make them less likely to come to such places.

But in weather this cold, Tilley says, Mother Nature seems to push more folks indoors.

“Even people who suffer from anxiety and depression and other issues that keep them away ... we still encourage them to come inside,” he says.

“The weather as it is will drive people inside.”

Beyond the actual shelter spaces and common areas, outreach teams head out to find people and make sure they’re staying warm.

After all, says Tilley, many homeless people still would rather be out on the streets, instead of cooped up indoors all day.

“They’re very acclimated ... to the cold weather,” he says.

Happily, The Ottawa Hospital had no hospitalizations from the last cold snap; the Queensway Carleton said it couldn’t say for sure that any ER visits were from the cold. (The Ottawa Police Service referred inquiries about helping people in the cold to the paramedics, who were unable to provide any information about how many people they helped.)

One of the major benefits of the plan for the new Salvation Army facility is that Ottawa’s had — is having — a fairly robust debate about how we, as a city, ought to respond to homelessness.

Hopefully, in the future, Ottawa will be able to find better places to sleep than apartment building lobbies.

Until then, the shelter system is hard at work to keep people warm.

Tyler Dawson is deputy editorial pages editor of the Ottawa Citizen. tdawson@postmedia.com twitter.com/tylerrdawson