An unblinking look at the faces of poverty
Here’s what happened during the tent-city saga: T he least sympathetic face of poverty became the dominant one. Violence, theft, drug use, squalor — to much of the public, the encampment on Victoria’s courthouse lawn became synonymous with entrenched anti-social behaviour. It alienated people.
And now those who help the city’s poor are paying for it.
Which means the poor are paying for it — all of them, not just the incorrigibles Victorians think of when deciding to keep their wallets closed.
Our Place has seen donations drop $250,000 this year. “A big part of it, really, comes from almost a fatigue over tent city,” says Grant McKenzie, the centre’s communications director.
As the weeks dragged into months, Victoria was left with the wearying impression of unending, incurable dysfunction. “That painted a bad picture for all of us,” McKenzie says. “Those stories of hope that we push out there got kind of lost.”
Donors wrote and phoned Our Place to say they were fed up, disillusioned.
True, the highly visible downtown drama might have helped spur the provincial government into providing shelter for the hard-to-house, but that created its own problem, says the Mustard Seed’s Allan Lingwood. “I think people were very frustrated, thinking: ‘Our tax dollars have gone to housing and homelessness. We don’t have to donate this year.’ ” The drawn-out affair fostered resentment, hammered a wedge between Us and Them, undoing years of efforts to make Victoria a place where people in need are seen as neighbours to be helped, not a nuisance to be eradicated. The thing is, the image that was left reflects only one face of poverty (or of tent city, for that matter). It makes it easy to forget the single mother whose whole life is anchored to the care of a child in a wheelchair, or the lonely senior who simply can’t afford to eat, or the woman struggling with mental illness or the man recovering from a brain injury.
Think of the Mustard Seed, which feeds 5,000 people a month. “The majority are working people,” Lingwood says. Many have fallen on tough times, lost their jobs, burned through their EI, don’t have moneyed friends or family as a safety net, so find themselves at the food bank.
As tempting as stereotypes might be when those of us who are relatively healthy and wealthy think of poverty (and piously/grumpily do our Christmas giving), real life is more complex.
“I’m really struck by the different roads that lead people to be on the street,” McKenzie says.
He talks of a fellow who went off the rails in his 50s when his wife died and he didn’t know how to handle it. A couple who lost their house after a medical issue drained them of their finances ended up sleeping on mats in First Metropolitan United. Another man was living behind the dumpster at his workplace because he could afford nothing else.
There are success stories — like the 30-year addict now sober — but those tales can get lost amid the negative ones. “I think sometimes people think we’re warehousing the poor,” McKenzie says. He notes that 45 people have transitioned out of Choices (the old juvie jail in View Royal) and into supportive and market housing.
This is the time of year when the likes of the Times Colonist Christmas Fund approach Islanders asking them to give. Last year, generous readers’ donations resulted in $10,000 going to Our Place. Close to $300,000 was funnelled to struggling members of our community through the Mustard Seed and the Salvation Army.
The fear this year is that if our well of compassion hasn’t actually run dry, it’s at least down a few litres, and people who are hurting will suffer in consequence. (And it’s also worth noting that other factors are at play; Lingwood worries about the loss of donations from businesses whose ability to give is tied to the health of the oil and gas industry).
I always go back to a frozen-in-memory scene from the Mustard Seed’s Christmas dinner a dozen years ago: Two little girls in pink party dresses, ribbons in their hair, quivering with excitement as they walked into the jam-packed Bay Street Armoury.
The event was terrific, staffed by great volunteers, but it was hard to shake the truth that for these two little girls, a paper-plate meal shared with several hundred strangers in a cavernous army drill hall was as good as it gets. If they thought this was magic, what did the rest of life look like?
The real face of poverty isn’t always the one we imagine.