OrilliaMatters welcomes letters to the editor at [email protected] or via the website. Please include your full name, daytime phone number and address (for verification of authorship, not publication).
More and more often, I question where this province is going.
I walk through my local grocery stores and see aisles lined with shelves devoted to beer and wine, squeezing out space for real food. My evening television viewing is crowded out by commercials encouraging young people to gamble on every kind of sporting event. Gambling, all sponsored by Ontario Lottery and Gaming Commission and encouraged by the Ontario government (who profits directly). Alcohol and gambling are the two most common vices in history, now amplified and encouraged by our Conservative Premier.
Premier Doug Ford’s leadership is notable for acting first and thinking later. He is noted for solving problems by talking a big game but really, delivering nothing. Premier Ford cancels safe-injection sites which are saving lives from fatal overdoses — with a vague future promise of building more treatment centres. How does closing safe injection sites save lives now? It doesn’t!
The people with addictions are not going to disappear from a community, just find other places to do drugs. Hospital emergency departments will deal with more overdoses and more people will die. There will be more family heartache. The illegal drug supply is tainted with poisons that are killing users and safe injection sites help save lives. Doug Ford is criminally responsible for the deaths caused by the closing of safe injection sites. He will be long gone before any of these mythical treatment centres are built.
Premier Ford is coming to the rescue of some municipalities to break up homeless encampments. As with safe injection sites, his response shows minimal effort to improve the root issues of homelessness for these stressed communities. Ford seems to want to move the problem somewhere less visible.
The courts have said that it is unfair and unconstitutional to break up the encampments unless there is somewhere for the people to go. That seems to be a reasonable expectation, but someone would have to pay for such places. Premier Ford could have stepped in with money and other supports but has not done so, in a situation that has been called a crisis.
So, Premier Ford wants to bring in a law that he knows the courts have already rejected because it is against the human rights of the homeless. To use this unjust law, the Premier has hinted that he would use the “notwithstanding clause” to override the human rights of the homeless.
Ford is willing, in the middle of winter, to crush the weakest, most destitute members of our communities by using a legal loophole. Ford wants to appear strong by crushing the weak and defenceless. He wants the homeless affordable housing problem to seem to disappear at no cost to the provincial government by making the local communities do his dirty work.
More and more often, I question where this province is going. How low can we go?
David Howell
Orillia
