The Recorder & Times (Brockville)
Liberal leader gets earful on homelessness, health
Winning this riding will be a challenge for Ontario's Liberals, but on Thursday they heard about even broader challenges facing the Brockville area.
Liberal Leader Bonnie Crombie, who has been touring ridings across the province, joined some 35 locals at Wall Street United Church for a roundtable discussion encompassing the challenges of homelessness and health care.
And while the new leader disagreed with the former Liberal candidate about the winnability of Leeds-grenville-thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, they both agreed the current cascade of crises requires a change at Queen's Park.
The afternoon event came on the heels of Crombie's stop in Belleville, which was recently in the grip of an overdose crisis requiring the declaration of a state of emergency.
The picture local politicians, public servants and advocates painted of this area was also bleak, with homelessness, addictions and mental health struggles being compounded by a lack of access to health care.
“There are common themes emerging that the system is broken and needs further investment,” said Crombie, the three-term mayor of Mississauga who resigned her post in January to assume the Liberal leadership.
The roundtable, initially slated to discuss homelessness and heath care separately, ended up addressing both topics together, given their interconnectedness. Participants included two local mayors, a prominent local physician and leaders from Lanark Leeds and Grenville Addictions and Mental Health, the Co-operative Care Centre and the Brockville and Area Food Bank.
Front of Yonge Mayor Roger Haley linked the current rise in homelessness to a decision made decades ago, by the Progressive Conservative government of Mike Harris, to move a number of mental patients into the community and shut down the Brockville Psychiatric Hospital, which now continues in reduced form as the Brockville Mental Health Centre.
Not only did the influx of people who should have remained institutionalized contribute to the homelessness crisis, Haley asserted, but the operators of the Co- Operative Care Centre now struggle to run the facility for the homeless on the former BPH grounds.
“It's deteriorated so bad that it's unfit,” he said.
Haley also reiterated another grievance about the east-end overnight shelter, that the province is charging the local organization too much for rent.
Amber York, assistant manager at the Co-operative Care Centre, told the gathering that staff at the 20-bed facility is struggling with the need for more space.
“We have a second and third floor we cannot use. We can't afford it,” she said.
York later said the centre had to turn away 94 people in April. While that's down from the 107 turned away in March, it is still a sharp increase from the 38 they were unable to help in January, or the 54 in February.
The current provincial government has recently discussed plans to use the former BPH lands for housing.
Gananoque Mayor John Beddows also referenced the Harris government, noting the Tories in the late 1990s downloaded a host of services to the municipal level.
Referring to ongoing discussions at the Eastern Ontario Mayors' Caucus, Beddows said the pressing need for affordable housing presents “a base argument for re-uploading.”
In particular, the mayors' group would like to see the province turn the former Rideau Regional Centre, which it wound down in the downloading and deinstitutionalization movement of the Harris years, into a supportive housing facility.
“This is not an individual challenge. This is a scale challenge,” said Beddows.
Amanda Petch, operations manager at the Brockville food bank, said the Buell Street site feels the impact of the homelessness and mental health crises, with limited staff having to de-escalate situations and even deal with homeless people who enter the site hypothermic and in need of emergency medical care.
Similarly, Domenic Ielo, chief executive officer of Lanark, Leeds and Grenville Addictions and Mental Health, stressed that housing people with mental health challenges is not enough.
“We really do need to provide these people support,” said Ielo.
These crises are occurring against the backdrop of continuing health-care access problems. Haley spoke of his municipality's struggle to get a new nurse practitioner clinic in Mallorytown, while Dr. Adam Steacie spoke of physician shortages and long wait times for specialists.
Steacie, who is part of one of the area's family health teams, said team-based primary health care may be expensive, but it must be expanded.
Team-based care allows professionals to work to their “scope of practice,” meaning they do what they are trained to do while other tasks are taken on by other team members, said Steacie.
Technology is providing some relief to overworked physicians, he added.
Steacie cited a new artificial-intelligence-driven app that speeds up the taking of medical notes as one example. On a broader scale, teleconsults with specialists are allowing people quicker access when they would otherwise face long waits for medical problems to be addressed.
Haley, meanwhile, recounted a recent visit to the emergency department with his mother, a visit that tied up six paramedics at the hospital when they could have been available for calls, because there was not enough staff in the ER.
“The system is badly broken,” said Haley, adding rural Ontario suffers in particular.
The wide-ranging discussion was an earful for Crombie, who used the occasion to attack the Progressive Conservative government of Premier Doug Ford over what she considers his skewed budget priorities, with more money needed for health care and affordable housing.
The new leader's fact-finding tour of the province comes as recent polling placed her Liberals far behind the governing Tories, but ahead of the Official Opposition New Democratic Party.
Leeds-grenville-thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes has long been a safe Conservative seat, something Josh Bennett, who placed a far distant second to incumbent Steve Clark as the Liberals' most recent standard-bearer in 2022, acknowledged Thursday.
“We may not win this riding, but we are going to win a majority government,” he told the meeting.
Crombie agreed to disagree on the local constituency, later asserting that every riding is winnable.
“We have positioned ourselves as a clear alternative to the government,” she said.
“I think we are the government in waiting; we are the party of choice.”