Down By The River
Chris Farley as ‘Matt Foley’ (SNL).
Perhaps the most memorable character of the late comedian, Chris Farley, was Matt Foley who lived “in a van down by the river.” In Winnipeg, where two rivers formed a nexus of settlement, there are few points where anyone could actually park a van down by the river and live in it. What is easy to do, and therefore often done, is pitch a tent along the riverbanks.
In recent years, riverbank encampments have multiplied. I’m not sure how many continue through our winters but in the warmer months, more camps than I am aware of blossom in a vibrant display of intoxicated improvisation. Besides the nylon rainbow of tents that originate from sources unknown, there are usually colourful augmentations with tarps, blankets, bed sheets and whatever. Ubiquitously surrounding all that are the hedges of detritus and loot typical of lives given over to dereliction for the sake of feeding an assortment of addictions. What goes into their veins is more important than what goes over their heads at night.
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The Glengarry Park encampment (CBC).
There is a socialist romanticization of these encampments and the people who occupy them as pitiable souls. Surely, most, if not all, are there because some trauma in their past steered them towards a feral fate down by the river. However, unlike the Great Depression where economic misfortune reduced many to live rough in temporary shelters, today’s riverbank dwellers are there when the welfare state has been historically maximal and getting larger year after year.
The paradox for society is that supporting an increasingly ballooning welfare state requires an increasing burden on taxpayers. While some people choose to drop out of society, others choose to be a part of it and contribute to the greater good. It is entirely possible and has been for many decades for someone to choose to never work and live ‘on the dole’, as the Brits would know it. If a young adult finds themselves on the margins of employability, they must deliberate on whether to take whatever work they can find to earn enough to at least put a roof over their head, or to surrender to the not inconsiderable mercies of the Nanny State with its legions of paid and voluntary workers who will even deliver those mercies to their tent door.
The more the working population is taxed to support the growing homeless population (which seems to correspond to the appearance of CERB), the more the minimum and low wage earners have to ask themselves if it’s worth the effort to stay on the paying side. I suspect most of the people who end up down by the river might have made early choices of career unemployment.
A friend of mine once told me that a person needs to support their own vices which implicitly means restraining oneself to the vices they can afford. Thanks to the ingenious enterprise of the black market, powerful narcotics have become cheaper and cheaper. Even so, the demands of such habits bankrupts the individual whether they work or collect social assistance and subsequently they end up in encampments down by the river which may not be as bad as it sounds.
I was surprised to learn that there was an encampment alongside the Red River as far south as the Fort Garry Bridge, a short prowl from the University of Manitoba where so many of today’s social workers acquire certification. (It’s difficult to keep track of just how many riverbank encampments there are and I can only hope someone in City Hall knows). CBC Manitoba reported on how some housed neighbours of the camp “along a well-hidden path in the city's Glengarry Park” are unsettled by the evidently seasonal presence of erstwhile Matt Foleys.
“Some in the area disagree… concerned about unsanitary conditions, noise and evidence of drug use over the years the encampment has been near (their) home.”
After adding the perfunctory acknowledgment that ‘many people experiencing homelessness are dealing with trauma and need to be approached with compassion,’ Councilor Janice Lukes was blunter about the realities of a homeless encampment calling the health risks “astronomical.” Where are people defecating and urinating and considering how many are intravenous drug users, where are their used needles ending up (hepatitis anyone)?
Although CBC interviewed a spokesperson for the encampment who assured the public broadcaster that “residents are all responsible for jobs like cooking and dealing with garbage,” the reporter did not ask just how and where ‘residents’ were disposing of their waste. A quick shot or even a few words from first-hand observation of some sort of improvised camp latrine management would have helped assuage Coun. Lukes’ concerns that the Devil was wiping the hindmost but if there was such at the encampment, the journalist did not say, much less utilize.
Camp spokesperson, Alan Urrutia (Justin Fraser/CBC).
The encampment spokesperson did, however, concede: “Maybe it's a little dirty. Yeah, I'll admit that. But we'll clean that up."
Of course, there are more than a few homeless shelters offering what might seem better lodging than living in a tent down by the river but as the spokesperson explains: "We don't like the homeless shelters… we like the wilderness."
An urban riverbank isn’t ‘the wilderness’ but being Indigenous, the spokesperson probably anticipated that description would play well with the CBC audience who are particularly adept at attaching subtexts of historic calumny when visually cued.
To the homeowners living nearby, however much issues of homelessness beseech the collective social conscience, the encampment has been a civil canker. How do unemployable people support their substance use habits? With theft and/or panhandling at most expense to those in closest proximity.
At other encampments, residents have stolen property that can be sold off as scrap metal. Copper and aluminum are high-value scrap so wire and bike thefts are common. Because clean copper is worth more, stolen cable is burnt to quickly strip it of its casing. Besides a host of other toxic chemicals, cyanide is released into the air when cables are burned. Bikes are stolen, not just for the convenience of prowling, but often for their aluminum content (usually tire rims and frames) and like cables, bikes are surreptitiously scrapped.
There was a time when City Hall would be keenly sensitive to the quality of life issues affecting ratepayers, but the social justice zeitgeist prevails now and it is more politically advantageous to side with the quality of life issues for the homeless. To her credit, Lukes is saying what her constituents are telling her: the encampment is a nuisance and at least a health hazard: "It's nice that you want to live like this, but you know what? For your own good, it's not healthy, and it's not healthy for society… I think a lot of people in the city feel that way."
It is illegal to squat on city parks but laws are only as good as the will to enforce them and, well, police are more likely to show up at encampments for wellness checks than to roust anyone. Besides the occasional police visit, campers can expect social service agencies to show up and compete for their patronage.
Regarding this encampment, St. Boniface Street Links showed up to take names and try to connect residents with the shelters and other resources available for the homeless. The Main Street Project arrived while Street Links was still there to inform campers that they had every right to remain where they were and helped guide the campers down the path of inertia with coffee and cookies. Maybe the Main Street Project threw in some clean needles, too, I don’t know, but this encampment was a long way from Main Street.
Charities at cross-purposes frustrate area homeowners who wish “all the social agencies to be on the same page with an appropriate budget.” Perhaps the problem is the sheer number of such agencies all vying for the appropriate budget to address or enable homelessness, as the case may be. What would be the appropriate budget anyway?
Of course, some residents want something to be done to address ‘the root causes of homelessness’ of which the campers are merely the fruit dropping to the ground along riverbanks and empty lots. No one blames the fruit for being the rotten consequence of a rotten tree and who blames the rotten tree for its rotten roots? The roots of homelessness lay elsewhere: it is the wicked cultivators of capitalism and materialism that plant such seeds in the minds of social justice activists who pushed the Overton window on the issue of homelessness so far to the left that no personal responsibility is ever assigned to the campers.
There’s never been a better time to be a junkie. Besides free needles and maybe soon free drugs, junkies can rely on resuscitation in the event of overdose. I heard of one former Downtown Safety Patrol staffer who remarked on reviving the same person five times on five different occasions with Naloxone. A lot of social justice discussion focuses on providing ‘affordable housing’ which usually doesn’t mean people have to do things that increase their ability to afford better housing for themselves. At the risk of incurring considerable wrath from the various Prefects respectively presiding over their competing fiefdoms, let me say that the hard fact is people living in tents down by the river have the housing that they can afford by choice.
The End Homelessness campaign is faced with the conundrum that, despite all their efforts, homelessness keeps increasing and homeless encampments keep spreading further and further away from the city’s core where dereliction traditionally gravitated. Recent shiny plans for revitalizing downtown Winnipeg feature a predilection for turning Downtown into a social services hub, especially for Indigenous people.
Even if these non-profit social agencies actually wanted to put themselves out of business by lifting people out of the ‘wilderness’ of homelessness, they would probably never be out of a job because there is that element of the human condition that will always choose the path of least resistance and the contemporary welfare state offers no resistance at all to the choice of dropping out of society. Who wouldn’t want to drop out of a settler colonial society anyway when it is lately responsible for so much intergenerational trauma through genocidal endeavours past and present, not to mention killing the planet in the by and by?
Why feed the colonial beast when it will feed you? And what it does not provide, you can plunder from the chumps with mortgages.
Camp spokesperson relaxing down by the river amongst the heaps of ‘fluid’ property (CBC).
“Feral Fate” would be a great name for a rock band. Is it taken yet?
You have such a way with words, Michael. I always look forward to your articles.
On the question of “services compet[ing] for their patronage”: it’s not just the political zeitgeist that we’re up against, it’s the huge number of people now employed in the industry built around harm reduction and homelessness. That career field has grown as fast as the problem itself. And it’s such a feel-good, righteous metier, that there’s no shortage of people aspiring to it. Bonus: current or former experience with substance use is now considered an asset.
In BC, the government has recently cracked down on pharmacies paying cash incentives to addicts who fill their prescriptions with them. That’s got the patrons howling that they NEED those illegal kickbacks. https://drugdatadecoded.ca/kickbacks/?ref=drug-data-decoded-newsletter (July 3, 2024).
They want the drugs (methadone, buprenorphine, etc.: Opiate Agonist Therapy; also, in some cases, safe supply), they want them free, they want to be able to take them “when they want” (i.e., as take-homes, not witnessed); they want the option to sell or trade them; and they want those illegal kickback payments from the pharmacies – because they “deserve” their fair share of the "profits" made off of them.
This is the news story the BCAPOM article references: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-patients-say-bc-pharmacies-offering-kickbacks-in-exchange-for/
I fondly remember my mother telling me stories about her father being too proud to accept dole during the great depression. Both my parents lived thru the great depression and had that same sense of pride that they passed on to their children as an important value as well as commonsense, frugality, perseverance and the importance of manners. Times certainly have changed and many people have become victims of circumstances beyond their control and are forced into homelessness. Still, as Thomas Edison once said, "Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time."
Good article Michael.