Those working with addicts, homeless deserve pay bump

Consumption- and treatment-site staff should be included in the list of eligible employment categories for the pandemic pay bump. I work in such a site and I am endlessly amazed to see how far my colleagues and I can stretch to meet their needs of our clients and our community in these very trying times.

I work with people who are, for the most part, homeless or precariously housed; people who relied on the essential supports offered by food banks, drop-in centres and public libraries that are now closed to them.

My service has not closed for a single day since quarantine began and we have built relationships with community partners, including the city, to fill as many of the gaps left by these other agencies as we can.

We are handing out meals, thousands of them, to people. We are staffing a municipal recreation centre, so that our neighbours who have nowhere else to go can access a shower. We are bottling hand sanitizer to distribute to our clients and soliciting home made masks from volunteer groups so that our community can keep themselves and each other safe.

We are trying so hard, in the midst of our own fears and sorrows, to help people be safe.

It hasn’t been enough. Eight people who accessed our service, who I knew, have died since the COVID response began in mid-March. None of them knew of COVID-19, as it happens; the people I work with have been trying to survive the opioid crisis and the housing crisis for years before anyone got sick with coronavirus and we have lost many people along the way.

Many of my colleagues have children and families, some are on social assistance themselves, or are stepping up from casual roles to full-time to help us meet the needs of a community that is at grave risk.

This extra pay would make a big difference to many of them and provide some extra financial cushion for when our society begins to open up again and we have the breathing room to process these experiences.

Arwen McKechnie, Ottawa