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| Jeff Lehman |
Here’s what I see.
The solution to homelessness is community. Not just housing — but housing first. It’s housing, with the mental health, addictions and employment supports needed to help people with the reasons they are homeless. It may surprise you, but I also think enforcement has a role. Like with many issues, the polarization of opinion, driven by algorithms that feed on division, has meant it’s hard to express both those views and not be criticized.
We live in a society that has to have rules. Open drug use cannot be okay. Drug dealers need to be jailed. Assaults and theft are not acceptable. Where order breaks down, people (often the most vulnerable) are victimized. Encampments cannot be the answer.
Believing this is not incompatible with also believing that we are our brother’s keeper. As a society, we are judged by how we treat our most vulnerable — and that we must have a compassionate response to homelessness. That those who need help should be helped, and our system should do far more to address root causes and not just band-aids.
These views are not contrary. In fact, I see them as core Canadian. We believe in peace, order and good government; we also believe in a just society. Just as the broader population has within it those who victimize others or act unacceptably, so does the homeless population. But people are not homeless by choice. We need to ask why so, so many more in Barrie are now unhoused.
For those who want to read more, start with the homeless enumeration done by the county. The reports are here (scroll down to Homeless Enumeration).
These tell us not just how many, but how long, why, where people are homeless — and what has transpired over the past few years. It lists what the reasons are and what the barriers are. People aren’t statistics and each person has a story. But there are answers in these reports to many of the questions people are asking.
The big picture is that the housing market in Canada has increasingly failed more Canadians. Young people have lost hope of owning a first home. Affordable rental apartments are hard to find. Public housing has been under-invested in for decades. The inevitable result: fewer and fewer have the housing they need, and more and more are forced to the street. This has been happening for years.
And then, the really good question is what is being done to change it.
The work of building the supportive housing and services we need is hard, slow, sometimes frustrating work. Ask those in Barrie who have been doing it, like at Redwood Park Communities. It needs capital, it needs less red tape, it needs champions of both more non-market housing and more market supply.
And as much as we need roofs and beds, we need people, because it’s talented people who are our support system. We need mental health and addictions workers, and more funding for support programs. Most of all, we need the community.
We need the volunteers — the tradespeople swinging a hammer for Habitat for Humanity, the high school kids packing toys for families at Christmas Cheer. The seniors who make lunch at their church hall. The donors and businesspeople of Rotary and Barrie Cares. We need to do the very opposite of criminalizing this noble work — we need to join it and get behind it, 100 per cent.
Let’s pause for a second in these really divisive times and realize that these organizations, regardless of differences about what services are delivered and how, are all joined by the goal of a safer community for all, and they are working — actually working — to help.
I had the great honour of being mayor of Barrie for many years, and today I have the honour of working for Muskoka as we fight many of the same housing issues. There’s a lot to learn from what’s happened in Barrie. What’s true in every town and city is there are many, many good people seeking solutions. It should never have gotten this bad — but there is still the opportunity to change the future. It requires pragmatism, it requires understanding every human has their own story, and knowing that you can be hard on crime and hard on poverty at the same time. I think that’s core Canadian.
Jeff Lehman is the chair of council of the District Municipality of Muskoka, having been elected in December 2022. He was previously the 46th mayor of the City of Barrie. In 2019, the prestigious U.S. business magazine Fast Company named Lehman number 26 in its top 100 Most Creative People in Business for his innovative solutions in government. He holds a BA from Queen’s and a master’s degree with first-class honours from the London School of Economics.
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