Just over a year ago in mid-October, I saw a friend post on social media that a tent city was being set up in Pepsi Park in Regina and looking for donations.
We had an extra tent so I took it down and briefly spoke to some of the organizers (including my friend by phone as she wasn’t on site but at Canadian Tire picking up supplies.)
I took a pic of the burgeoning tent city just before driving away then had tears in my eyes the whole way home thinking how this was how a bunch of people would be spending their Thanksgiving as I was going home to a full turkey meal with my family.
A couple days later days, the story hit the media.
I didn’t do much after that – donated to Carmichael Outreach and followed developments closely in traditional and social media – but also felt somewhat hopeless and maybe even stunned too.
Tent cities existed in places like Toronto and Vancouver (I had even read a book about the Toronto encampment) but had no memory of something like this ever happening in Regina in all the years I’ve lived here.
A month later, it was announced that some housing had been found and the tent city would be shut down. People who spent their Thanksgiving in tents would not be spending their Christmas there as well (except that the housing didn’t have enough space for everyone – a recurring theme in the fight against homelessness – so there were still people without a home at Xmas and throughout the winter.)
Fast forward to fall 2022 and through my work at Regina Public Library, I’ve been asked to organize a community talk. I thought about how it’s the one year anniversary of Camp Hope and how that would be a fitting topic, especially given that homelessness is once again the news in our city.
I asked Carmichael Outreach Board Chair and Camp Hope co-founder, Alysia Johnson (the same person I spoke to while she was in Canadian Tire a year ago) and creator of the Regina Survival Guide/anti-homelessness advocate, Dr. Marc Spooner to speak at a “Lunch and Learn” event yesterday.
About 30 people showed up including some media outlets for a wide-ranging discussion. Marc suggested I livestream the event on FB Live from the event page and, as I type this, another 60+ people have watched the livestream.
There is huge interest in this topic. Surveys repeatedly show that community safety and wellbeing is one of the top priorities for citizens. But still…there’s also this strange unwillingness to act by decision makers. To pass the buck. To fail to do the right thing. To treat homeless people as, well, as people.
I think about it a lot and one idea that came to me.
Regina’s often called “Saskatchewan’s biggest small town” and it’s not unusual to interact with or run into decision-makers regularly. You might play on a softball team with a guy who becomes a city councillor or see chat with another city councillor at your favourite brew pub. You may see a former Premier at a concert or a current Premier in a lineup for a vaccine. You may interact with a current city councillor when she visits your place of work as a patron and another when she visits in an official capacity.
What I’m saying is Regina’s small enough that it feels like we’re all neighbours in a way.
But one thing that makes someone a neighbour is having a home. And maybe it’s overly simplistic but perhaps that’s part of what makes the homeless people so easy to ignore for so many who go home to a warm house every night?
Maybe if some of our decision makers were closer to the ground (literally?) and knew someone who was homeless as a person with a story and a life and a history, with family who loved them and friends who supported them, maybe it’d be easier to see the homeless as our neighbours and as deserving as homes as anyone. That housing is a basic human right and not a luxury?
Maybe…
