Conservative Flyer
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1. Consider John Ralston Saul's comments on homelessness in his 2006 Couchingching conference talk:
Homelessness. Thirty years. Food banks. Thirty years now. Put in place for a six-month crisis. We now have three-storey brick homeless shelters in Calgary, you know. In other words, institutionalize the problem. For that money they could have built housing for half the homeless in Calgary. Very easy, small budget stuff to, on the one hand, build the housing for these people in a way which does not marginalize, or does not seem like charity. It's not a big deal! It's a very easy one. It's the sort of thing, you know, some people could actually put together over a weekend, like it's already put together. And instead of that we walked away from the housing. We know over half the people on the streets in Canada are the same people or the descendants of the people who were taken out of the health wards, mental health wards. We know we made a mistake. Not that we should put them back in the mental health wards but that they can't take the pills without somebody to help them. That can be handled through very cheap, very simple housing. That would be progress. That would be getting a sizeable percentage of "the other" off the streets in our middle-class society. And we can't do it! We cannot bring ourselves to simply do it! We'd rather walk by them on the streets and say isn't it a pity, isn't it awful, isn't it terrible. It's astonishing and I take that as the most obvious and easiest.(back) -------------------------------------