DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA:
Homeless Canadians
Thomas O'Reilly-Fleming
University of Windsor
Canadian Scholars' Press Inc. Toronto 1993
Down and Out in Canada: Homeless Canadians
First published in 1993 by
Canadian Scholars' Press Inc.
180 Bloor St. W., Ste. 402
Toronto, Ontario
M5S 2V6
Copyright © 1993 Thomas O'Reilly-Fleming and Canadian
Scholars' Press Inc. All rights reserved. No reproduction,
copy or transmission of this publication may be
made without written permission.
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
O'Reilly-Fleming, Thomas, 1951 - .
Down and Out in Canada: Homeless Canadians
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 1-55130-017-6
1. Homeless persons - Canada. I. Title.
HV4509.073 1993 362.5'0971 C93-093975-1
Printed and bound in Canada
Dedication
To my dear mother and father,
Alice and William Fleming
For my beloved wife Patricia
and our beloved children,
Kate, Patrick and Thomas
To Scott Fleming, my brother
To James Fleming who rode the
rails and suffered
at the hands of the 'railway' bulls
To Tom Burgess, my grandfather
who experienced homelessness as a
boy firsthand
This page intentionally left blank 
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction xi
CHAPTER 1
Homelessness in Canada 1
CHAPTER 2
Drifting Into Despair 33
CHAPTER 3
Down and Out in Canada 59
CHAPTER 4
Life on the Streets 87
CHAPTER 5
Another Night in Paradise 133
CHAPTER 6
Ending Homelessness 163
Endnotes 179
This page intentionally left blank 
Acknowledgements
No book is a singular accomplishment and this one is certainly
no exception. There is a wide variety of individuals, organizations, and
others who have made a contribution to its completion and who
deserve acknowledgement for their efforts.
In Toronto the staff of several hostels and shelters welcomed
my research efforts and provided assistance by arranging for private
interview space. They are: Stop 86, Mercury House, Youth Without
Shelter, Seaton House, and The Metropolitan Toronto Family Shelter
Program. In the latter two cases the assistance of Bernie O'Leary and
Boris Rostovik were crucial to the completion of the project and they
deserve credit not only for their assistance and the lengthy interviews
they permitted me, but also for their caring attitude to their clients.
Several other organizations provided information on their services
and clientele including Beat the Street, Covenant House, The Daily
Bread Foodbank and Streethealth. In Oshawa, I am indebted to Terry
Dunn of Hostel Services who opened the doors for me. In Victoria, The
Association for Street Kids assisted in identifying hangouts and
provided me with statistical information on the homeless children
who use their storefront offices. In Vancouver, Sharon O'Leary gave
me a walking tour of the areas frequented by the homeless which
greatly aided my interview efforts. In Edmonton, my good friends Ian
James and Jackie Cormier provided me with a place to stay while I
conducted my last few interviews. In Windsor, Jennifer Gates of
TrilIium Cable donated information on homeless youth in the
Windsor-Essex area.
Barry Snodden, a former worker with Beat the Street who in his
spare time specializes in finding runaway children and whose
dedication was inspiring, took me on a guided tour of Toronto's west
viii . . . DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
end and through High Park which was invaluable in locating interview
subjects. Angie Simonitz, a former student of mine, facilitated my
interviews with the first of the youth shelters I approached.
Throughout the research process a number of individuals have
been supportive in a number of ways and, assisted me as the need
arose. My colleagues in the Department of Sociology and
Anthropology were extremely supportive of this research especially
Max Hedley. Several colleagues deserve special thanks and these are
Professor Mahesh Pradhan, Professor Claude Vincent, and Professor
Mansell Blair. Professor David Booth was a constant source of insight
and direction and I am grateful for his ideas. Professor Mary Lorenz
Dietz has been supportive of my research endeavours and made me
feel welcome in the criminological section of the department. The
Council of Deans graciously granted me a short sabbatical to finish
writing this book. Dean Kate McCrone, Faculty of Social Science and
former dean, Zbigniev Fallenbuchl, were highly supportive of my
efforts and I owe them both a great deal. Several of my colleagues at
various universities have provided criticisms of the work and ideas as it
was ongoing (whether it was requested or not) and the book has
benefitted from their insights. They are Livy Visano, Tullio Caputo,
Ken Morrison, Robert S. Ratner, Ron Hinch, Frank Pearce, and Barry
Clark. I wish to publicly acknowledge the support of his Eminence
Archbishop Emmet Cardinal Carter who has long worked tirelessly on
behalf of our underprivileged citizens.
A number of colleagues at Ontario universities provided me
with various forms of assistance during the duration of the research
for this book. They are: Bill Bateman and Dr. David Nimmo of
Woodsworth College in Toronto; John Beattie, past Director, and
Richard V. Ericson, Director, of The Centre of Criminology, University
of Toronto; Roy Bowles of Trent University; Durham College
(Oshawa); Patricia Armstrong, York University; and Ken Morrison,
Wilfrid Laurier University.
I owe a special debt to four individuals who have deeply
influenced my sociological imagination during the past twenty years.
The late Ian D. Currie was a source of inspiration and his death in 1992
was a great loss to the sociological community in this country. The late
Peter Kong-Ming New allowed me to tag along as his assistant while I
was at University College and supported me throughout my graduate
studies. Professor Terrence Morris honed my research skills while I was
a graduate student in London, England. Finally, Professor Richard V.
Ericson, currently Director of The Centre of Criminology, University of
Toronto has been a source of support and inspiration during the many
years I have known him.
Acknowledgements ... ix
My family in Toronto made possible much of the research that
underpins this book by allowing my family and me to park ourselves in
the house while I went out roaming the streets of Toronto. Alice and
William Fleming put up with us and we are all grateful for their
support. Scott Fleming spent a great deal of his leisure time discussing
the material in this book and playing video games with me, and I am
sure this book could not have been completed without his unstinting
support. Two of my students, Peter Brady and John Cater, acted as
research assistants providing me with materials and encouragement.
The three word processing personnel who re-typed endless
versions of the manuscript, I am eternally grateful to; many thanks
Diane Dupuis, Pat Jolie and Lucia Brown. The office staff of the
Department of Sociology and Anthropology protected me from an
onslaught of callers and put up with endless printings on our
department laser machines. They are Andria Turner, Perry Pittao and
Sue McGilveary.
The professional manner in which Tim Wayne, Editor of
Canadian Scholars' Press handled this project was a refreshing
experience at a difficult time in my life. Pamela Hamilton was efficient
and a pleasure to work with.
Finally, my greatest thanks is to those homeless people who
took the time to be interviewed by me in my travels. I hope I have
done your lives justice, and that this book, in some small measure,
prompts those with the power to redress the injustices we inflict upon
the homeless in Canada to act, and act quickly.
This page intentionally left blank 
Introduction
In 1987, on a trip to Wolfville, Nova Scotia I was visiting the
local mental hospital when someone related that Maxwell Jones lived
in town. Would I like to have lunch with him? Having spent more than
a year studying psychopaths at The Henderson Therapeutic
Community in Sutton, Surrey in the late 1970s I thought they were
joking that the founder of the leading institution in this field, was
living in a sleepy east coast town. But Max was indeed there,
sequestered in his pristine little bungalow overlooking the Annapolis
Valley, now 73, suffering from angina but possessed of the mind of a
man at the peak of his powers. We spent a lazy afternoon in a local
restaurant reminiscing about his early days as a psychiatrist in postwar
London. Our talk drifted to Orwell and the Victoria Embankment, a
favourite subject, and Max related the story of how he came to be
regarded as one of the leading figures in psychiatry in this century in
his modest way. His mind took me on a journey into an era long past,
and onto new roads of thinking. "As a young psychiatrist I knew
nothing of the lives of the down and outs, the homeless, those who
lived by their wits, so I realized I had to listen to their stories. That is
how our psychotherapeutic approach evolved. The homeless knew
best how to treat one another and I simply went along for the ride."
1
Max, of course, did far more, but it was that synchronous meeting that
began to reawaken in me an interest in the lives of those who exist on
the margins in our society. Perhaps I was more receptive than I had
been in a long time since I had just been fired from my job, and the
homeless seemed not so far removed from me.
Over the next few months I began to notice, more and more,
the homeless in Edmonton and Toronto. On one trip east, an old
friend related the story of a high school acquaintance of my wife
xii ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
Patricia's who, now in her thirties, had degenerated into a 'bag lady.'
One night I was confronted by a spectre of a woman begging for
money for food in downtown Toronto and talked with her about how
she had arrived on the street. Her image haunted me for a long time,
and it still does, and I found myself embarking on a sociological
journey that would take over four years to complete. Earlier in my
career I had benefited from my association with the late Dr. Peter
Kong-Ming New, and it was under his tutelage that I commenced the
learning process of becoming a field researcher. One of the first
projects I completed was a study of skid row in Toronto, on which I
lived for a period of time in order to understand the full meaning of
the day-to-day activities of my subjects. I found myself now able to see
the homeless whom I had just so recently found invisible. I suspect
most of us train ourselves to avoid contact with the homeless. We
learn to ignore their existence, viewing them as a nuisance, as lazy,
shiftless, or potentially dangerous, and to develop avoidance rituals
when we come into contact with them. They are an affront to the
work ethic that propels us hurriedly and efficiently from one
destination to the next. In this, they harken back to the hippies of the
late 1960s whose disdain for the capitalist enterprise evoked
considerable recrimination at both the personal and public level. The
sociologist Steven Egger has referred to victims of serial murderers,
who are drawn from the ranks of prostitutes and ethnic minorities, as
the 'less dead' since they are somehow less valuable people in our
society.
2
 In reworking this model, the homeless for us are at once both
less deserving, reflecting our intolerance of those who are idle and
threaten to interrupt our daily activities, and frightening, for they
remind us of the short distance fro m homefulness to homelessness.
Our general societal attitude of dehumanizing the homeless or
even of outright anger towards them is a phenomenon I have been
constantly reminded of during my research for this book. It was
common when I explained my work to others to receive comments
such as, "Why would you want to waste your time studying hopeless
bums?" or "I wouldn't want one of them in my house" or "Don't you
find they're all drunks?" or "The homeless can't be helped because
they don't want it." But equally, many with whom I conversed on the
subject, although somewhat reluctantly after some of these initial
reactions, were sensitive to the problems faced by the homeless in our
country and genuinely curious about a social group that they knew
little about. A sad fact of our growing and centralized modern society
is that few of us have any direct experience of many forms of human
behaviour. As citizens of Marshall McLuhan's "global village" we are
acutely aware of developments on a minute-to-minute basis
Introduction ... xiii
throughout the world yet remain isolated in our own
neighbourhoods. The environs of the city are less an inviting
panorama to many than an urban battleground to be navigated as
with all due speed and with appropriate evasive manoeuvres. We
have come to rely increasingly on the media to fill in our knowledge
about the netherworlds in our society.
3
 But homelessness is not a topic
that most Canadians find palatable. We tend to think of it in terms of
a problem that occurs, like epidemic levels of violence, south of our
borders.
Homelessness has been the subject of innumerable books and
articles in the United States in the past three years as public interest in
the subject of what is to be done about the homeless has mounted.
4
Homelessness has become a central topic of debate in North America
about how our society cares for or neglects some of its weakest
members. Homelessness has been the focus of important movies. In
The The Fisher King, Robin Williams portrayed a college professor
driven to homelessness by the senselessness of the slaughter of his
wife by a mass murderer. On the street he is the victim of a brutal
beating by thugs who want him to stop 'dirtying up' their
neighbourhood. Another movie, Curly Sue presents a picture of the
'new' homeless, remnants of ruptured families, nameless victims of
political and economic inequities in our society. While the media
dramatizations have largely been American, the powerful images and
moral issues they raise are relevant in Canada, more so now than at
any time in our history. Canadians who live in substandard or
overcrowded housing constitute the 'prehomeless' who teeter on the
verge of homelessness. In late 1992, estimates on the number of
homeless can reasonably be adjusted for the effects of the worst
economic recession since the 1930s. More Canadians are unemployed
in this country than at any time in history. Some 500 Canadian jobs a
day were lost every day for the past three years according to Statistics
Canada data released in October 1992.
5
 Canadians who always
thought their jobs were secure suddenly find themselves without
employment, and increasingly these are people who are
unemployable, either due to age or lack of appropriate skills. Despite
considerable rhetoric governments invest in retraining only a small
percentage of the unemployed. As large employers shut their doors
for good, and the world's largest real estate company, Canadian-
owned Olympia and York declared bankruptcy in May, the full depth
of the fiscal crisis began to hit home. Many of you reading this book
will know someone personally who has lost their employment
recently. Few Canadians feel secure in their employment, and at least
xiv ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
as many fear they may lose their life savings when they are made
redundant.
Homelessness is neither as invisible nor as far-removed from us
as we might have once hoped. The Canadian homeless whom I have
interviewed are overwhelmingly average, drawn from all walks of life,
all social and economic strata, males and females, singles and families,
young children and old, from a wide cross section of ethnic and racial
backgrounds. Homelessness is not unique to one region of Canada
nor, as a recent study by The Addiction Research Foundation has
clearly illustrated, is it an exclusively urban problem.
6
 Few of the
homeless stand out on our streets. One can pass them by without the
slightest idea that they are without shelter for they fit in with the
crowd. In a sense, part of their invisibility lies in their unremarkable
appearance. Again, our lack of experience with the homeless might
lead us to believe that they must necessarily act in some bizarre or
untoward manner.
It is often a difficult and emotionally moving experience to talk
with homeless people. One young woman, barely sixteen, spent hours
describing a life of sexual abuse in her familial home followed by her
graphic and non-emotional discussion of life as a street prostitute.
Interviews like this deeply moved me, to tears, then anger, and
provided a catalyst for my research, and refocused my attention on
praxis issues. Throughout the research process I have attempted not
only to understand as fully as possible the position of homeless people
in our society, but also to appreciate it from their perspective. This has
not been a hard task. Almost without exception I have been
profoundly impressed not only by the sense of idealism that homeless
Canadians express even when their own lives are undergoing dramatic
transformations but by the value of each of their lives. Everyone of
them has something to contribute to their nation.
This book is written in a direct sociological style so that it will be
accessible to the greatest number of readers. It is my contention that
university-based researchers and writers have an obligation to present
their scholarship to the greatest number of people. In a very real sense
this extends the boundaries of the university to include all of those
within society who would like to learn. While there are fields in which
the argument demands language and form that eludes the average
reader, or is directed towards a specialist audience, the issue of
homelessness is not one of these. In fact, I contend that the
"academatization" of such social issues is what relegates them to the
status of unresolvable problems that can only serve as the grist for
'further study'. While I have disagreements with some features of
constitutive criminology, the necessity to move the focus away from a
Introduction ... xv
continuing dialectic to immediate praxis (from discussion/debate to
action) is an approach that I believe readers will agree is warranted
after reading this work.7 Homelessness demands attention from the
public, policymakers, researchers, social workers, caregivers, and
anyone else who cares about the weak in our society. Social science is
now assuming an important function in legal cases in our country as
judges grapple with interpretations of individual rights under The
Charter of Rights and Freedoms. I would argue that the average
Canadian not only deserves to be informed about an issue that costs
us countless millions of dollars each year, but that education on
homelessness and the corollary questions it raises is long overdue.
Academic readers will find that I have left them pathways to follow
for future research in reference notes in this book, and in several
articles that I have published on the topic of homelessness.
The journey that I took into the world of the homeless took me
to countless locations across the country, in back streets, on park
benches, in coffee and donut shops, hamburger joints, hostels,
shelters, bars and flop houses. The interviews with the homeless which
inform the analysis for this book consist of 219 interviews conducted
in six Canadian cities over three provinces.
8
 I interviewed homeless
people from 1987 through to the present in Victoria, Vancouver,
Edmonton, Toronto, Oshawa, and Windsor. These included persons in
all of the major categories of homeless persons in this country: single
men, families, single mothers and fathers, teenagers, single women,
senior citizens, refugees, and immigrants. My interviews were
conducted wherever the homeless congregated in the street or in
shelters and hostels that agreed to let me interview their clients. Two
methods of recording interviews were used; where appropriate
interviews were tape-recorded with the permission of the homeless
person. In other cases, notes were taken either during or as soon as
practical following an interview if the subject objected to being tape-
recorded. Many homeless people do not feel comfortable with
"official" recording of their views fearing intervention by any one of a
number of social control agencies. All of the research subjects were
granted both anonymity and confidentiality. All of the principal
subjects, names were changed to protect their identity and some
relevant information has been altered to make them unrecognizable.
The underlying methodology was the depth interview
technique supplemented by observation in both shelter and outside
settings. The clearest statement of this technique and the process of
interpreting social reality are provided by Denzin in his book
Interpretive Interactionism. Denzin's overview of the perspective
draws upon a long tradition of thought and research in the field of
xvi ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
qualitative research. It comprises, essentially, the attempt to "make
the world of problematic lived experience of ordinary people directly
available."
10
 Basically the approach has fiv e major strengths:
1. It can help identify different definitions of the
problem and the programs being evaluated, for
example, how persons interpret the processes of
becoming and being a 'homeless' individual. The
'thick descriptions' generated by this form of
interview data permit the contrasting of the
perspectives of various social actors who are involved
in this area of human agency.
2. The assumptions held by various interested parties,
social workers, the homeless, housing authorities,
innovators, on-line professionals, politicians, and
interest groups, can be located and shown to be
corrector incorrect.
3. Strategic points of intervention into social situations
can be identified. In this way, current approaches to
services, and alternatives available to the homeless
can be improved and evaluated.
4. It is possible to suggest alternatives from which
policies, programs, and the problem can be
addressed.
5. The more qualitative, interpretive materials
furnished by this approach supplement the areas
that statistical data and a statistical approach cannot
contribute to.
There are, furthermore, five stages or steps in the interpretive
process which are applicable to this research project:
1. The deconstruction and analysis of extant
understandings of the problem from existing
literature. This comprises a review of literature which
pre-dates the formulation of the research questions
which underscored the project.
2. The capturing of the phenomenon through
interview techniques, and obtaining multiple
instances of it.
3. The bracketing of the phenomenon so that its
essential structures and features can be uncovered.
Introduction ... xvii
4. The act of construction or putting the pieces back
together.
5. Contextualization, or locating the phenomenon back
in the natural social world.9
While I had initially planned to interview in several other major
cities I found that this was unnecessary for two reasons. First, many of
the homeless are mobile and it soon became apparent that
homelessness is a problem that is not situated in one location with
features specific to that location. While rates of homelessness may
vary from city to city, the lived experiences of the homeless are not
bound by these geographical boundaries. Secondly, common themes,
experiences, and epiphanies soon emerged in the interviews
conducted, so that I found that the data were beginning to become
repetitious. While I would not wish to contend that I have
documented every form that homelessness takes I believe I have been
able to produce representative data on this problem. Generalizations
have reasonably been made from the sample collected. I have no
doubt that, for example, native Canadians represent a significant
number of the homeless population in Winnipeg and Saskatoon.
There are obviously problems and experiences that are effected by
their location on the prairies. However, I would also contend that not
only did I have interview data from homeless native Canadians who
had experienced homelessness in these cities, but further I was able to
draw upon published material and interviews with front line workers.
I have not, due to the limitation of my own resources, been able
to document the experience of rural homelessness. Neither have I
been able to fully examine the relationship between homelessness
and AIDS, a social problem that has received some attention in the
American literature. This is not a study that can accurately tell anyone
how many homeless people exist in Canada tonight, but this was not
my intention in embarking upon this research. To me, it makes little
difference whether there are 10,000 or 100,000 homeless in this
country because any number of homeless are too many in a country as
wealthy as Canada. As foodbank lines grow each month, hundreds of
thousands of Canadians, many who are working poor, recognize the
depths of the current economic decline in Canada. Foodbank co-
ordinators are becoming increasingly aware that the public's capacity
for generosity is waning not only because of their own declining
resources and fears concerning their ability to survive, but because
there is a limit to society's benevolence. 1 1 Par t of what is illustrated in
this book is the accelerating movement of all levels of Canadian
government out of the provision of safety nets for our most
xviii ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
vulnerable citizens. As the homelessness crisis has grown in Canada so
equally have governments kept pace by withdrawal from programs.
This has occurred in the crucial area of affordable housing as well as in
other core areas of social welfare.
Unfortunately in this country the homeless have not been able
to organize as an effective political voice. Incredibly it was only in the
last election that the homeless were permitted to vote due not to
government action, but advocacy action on the part of a church group
which brought a legal case on behalf of those with no fixed address.
Although this denial of the democratic privilege would be scandalous
if it had applied to minorities or women, the plight of the homeless
had gone virtually unrecognized in this regard.
In the book that follows I have tried to remain true to the
visions that homeless people expressed to me in our interviews. This is
the first book that provides a national overview on homelessness in
Canada, a country that has seen little academic interest in this
troubling topic.
12
 My intent in writing this book was initially to simply
explore the homelessness problem in Canada, but my experience has
convinced me that academic books must, in some instances, provide a
basis for social action. For the first three years of this project I was
unable to convince any public or private agency to contribute funding
to enable me to carry out this research. In common with many
research projects that examine social ills there is not a great deal of
enthusiasm amongst funding agencies to underwrite critical
scholarship. I have attempted herein to develop an analysis of the
lived experience of the homeless set within the larger framework of a
political economy analysis of those forces that both sustain and
provide a catalyst to homelessness as a growing social crisis. My
extensive review of the existing research literature indicated that not
only was there very little work to build upon in the Canadian context,
but that there were no studies in the voluminuous writing on
homelessness that combined these two levels of analysis.
There is much in this book that will be painful and shocking for
readers to experience but that is, in most respects, the condition in
which homeless Canadians must live everyday. As you read this book
you might ponder the meaning of home to you, and what being
without a home would also mean in your life. I hope that those who
read about the lives of their fellow Canadians will both individually
and collectively make homelessness what Orwell called a "living
issue," and that we will find the means to bring homeless women,
children, and men back "in" to a decent standard of life.
Homelessness has remained a silent national shame for far too long.
CHAPTER ONE
Homelessness in Canada
Introduction
In 1990s Canada, the problem of homelessness remains an
enigma. The homeless are largely a social crisis for which there is no
audience. There is little political currency to be made in championing
the cause of the weakest in our society, those who are without benefit
of shelter. They are a disenfranchised and forgotten group who only
enjoy the momentary penetration of media attention at a moment of
intense, yet arbitrarily selected crisis, and then fade into the
netherworlds of our city streets.
1
 They are the dispossessed and
hidden people of our society, existing on the dark edges of prosperity.
The homeless fuel our fears and act as a lesson for many of what
happens when one does not adhere to the central dictates of our
society. If there is little controversy centring around the homeless
problem is it any wonder given their marginal existence? They escape
public gaze, and largely elude our understanding. Little attention has
been paid to their plight. During the United Nations Year of Shelter
for the Homeless in 1987 efforts to address the homeless problem in
Canada amounted to little more than a token effort.
2
In the United States, where the homeless have not been passive,
lobby, protest and action groups formed during the 1980s have been
instrumental in bringing a greater public awareness of their problems
at a variety of governmental levels.
3
 Their protests, including one
during the inauguration of President George Bush, have brought
national attention to homelessness, but have not resulted in
substantial gains in the services provided for the homeless, or in
2 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
reaching solutions meant to end the problem altogether. In Canada,
the mayors of the sixteen largest cities met recently and cited
homelessness as the major problem that most of their respective
metropoli must deal with at present. Former Mayor Art Eggleton
indicated that Toronto has a homeless population numbering in the
tens of thousands. He appealed to citizens in his 1991 New Year
speech to help those without shelter in his city.
4
 More and more, the
issue of homelessness is being propelled out of the darkness and into
the centre of a growing, fierce public debate about the nature of our
society and the way we will deal with massive social maladies.
Most Canadians know very little concerning homelessness.
Their stereotypical images of the homeless are drawn from
momentary and often fearful glimpses on downtown streets or
random media images. A series of documentaries, television
programs and movies have created fleeting pastiches of homelessness
based almost totally upon the American experience.
5
 So rather than
inducing us to think seriously about homelessness in this country these
depictions provide a powerful comforting mechanism. We think of
people living on the street as a problem that is epidemic in the U.S.
but is insignificant in Canada. These images also serve to reinforce
mythical images of the homeless in our country that are outdated; the
old drunken skid row bum, the bag lady, the teen hooker in her mini-
skirt waiting for a john. The situation of homeless persons in this
country bears some similarities with that of their American
counterparts. But as with any socially produced problem there are
features of this growing population that are reflections of a unique
Canadian environment. While the Canadian public has been the
recipient of very little information on the plight of the homeless
individual it is arguable that the average citizen's consciousness
regarding their plight has received some stimulation. While there is a
substantial group in society that would prefer to characterize the
problems of the homeless as personal failure or pathology, most
would be quick to recognize the larger structural forces; i.e., the
economy, unemployment, family breakdown, as influential in sending
many literally packing to the street. They understand this at a gut level
because of their own precarious existence balancing on the edge of
the vast gulf of homelessness that confronts every person. Whether it
is the auto worker in Windsor who sees the spectre of unemployment
looming in the near future or has already forfeited his/her job, the
woman who is being battered and thinking about a way out, or the
young teen who has dreams for a life in the big city away from an
abusive home, the world of the homeless is so close that it often
proves more comforting to think of it in terms of a crisis somewhere
Homelessness in Canada ... 3
else rather than to consider the personal suffering and anguish of the
homeless. A Gallop poll conducted in 1990 demonstrated how close
the slide into homelessness is for most of us. They found that 20% of
Canadians could last between one and three months if they lost their
job, but a full 29% would be ruined within a month!
6
 These are
sobering statistics that begin to inform us of the thin line that
separates those with a home from those in the street.
We have not seen the development of any strategies for
dealing with the elimination of homelessness arise from government.
In almost completely ignoring the growing homeless problem in
Canada, the federal government has continually cut funding for low
cost housing projects even during the during the 1980s and 1990s
when recession driven inflation has swelled the number of homeless
and near homeless persons to new highs.
7
 This has occurred in an era
when the cost of housing has risen unbelievably quickly, outpacing
the ability of large numbers of Canadians to ever consider home
ownership, and for many, to even have a safe roof over their heads. At
the provincial level we have seen little initiative to provide affordable
housing for the variety of homeless who inhabit our streets. Much of
the innovation has come at the grass roots level from homeless
organizations, or creative shelter staff who have used their experience
to find new solutions to a persistent problem.
Even though there has been very little research on the homeless
condition in Canada there are already a considerable number of
debates concerning the 'causes' of homelessness and the possible
solutions to it. Homelessness by its very nature raises disturbing
questions about our vision of ourselves and our society. How can so
many Canadians be disenfranchised in a country that is so financially
wealthy? What is to be done about homelessness, and why do we
have homeless people at all? Why do so many children seek a life on
the mean streets where violence, the sale of sex, and drugs are a way
of life? Shall we ignore the homeless amongst us, and learn as one
woman informed me, 'to step right over their carcasses' on our
streets? The role of various levels of government in dealing with the
homeless problem is one that is of central concern to this book given
the failures that for too long have marked our approach, or lack of it,
to the homeless.
We live in a country of great diversity and political
contradictions that colour our approach to social woes. At the federal
level the conservative government espouses policies in keeping with
its American and British counterparts whose countries have served as a
dress rehearsal for our future treatment of social ills.
8
 Conservatives
favour 'free-trade', competitive capitalism, 'trickle down' economics,
4 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
tax breaks and incentives for the wealthy, and the cutting of social
welfare schemes to the bare bones. Universal medical care in Canada,
and unemployment insurance have already been cited by American
politicians as 'unfair subsidies'. Liberals and New Democrats have a
seemingly more humane approach that calls for the shifting of tax
burdens, increased support for the most economically oppressed, and
a role for the welfare state that is maintained at a reasonable level to
accommodate the social ills produced in this country. However, in
times of fiscal crisis, these good intentions are likely to, and have been
fading rapidly.
Being without shelter is not a new phenomenon in our country.
But neither is it a social problem that has been the focus of any
considerable amount of public attention. This is a disturbing fact in
itself. This book is the first one in this country to deal with the
growing problem of homelessness, a problem that by the account of
all reasonable sources has reached staggering proportions.
Homelessness has become a national crisis that is in need of
understanding, public attention and action. A more just society
demands that the problems of the homeless become human problems
of real people, and are not simply understood as a faceless 'crisis' that
exists somewhere out there in the dark reaches of our cities.
9
The term 'crisis' is one that I use with appropriate caution. It is a
word that has been much overused in the media, trotted out when we
wish to underscore the urgency and importance of our own beliefs,
but I believe the term is warranted, and by the end of your reading of
this book, I believe you will also agree with this assertion.
There is still a controversy that exists over the number of
homeless people in our country and this problem is addressed in the
pages that follow. Whether one agrees with the estimates of social
action agencies that the number of Canadian homeless numbers
between 100,000 and 250,000
10
 or accepts a more conservative
reading of the gravity of the situation, there is no doubt given the
evidence provided by hostels, emergency shelters, advocacy reports,
conferences, and government reports that a number of conditions
exist:
1. Homelessness is a problem that has been growing
consistently throughout the 1980s and began to
spiral in the late 1980s as recession, unemployment,
and inflation impacted upon Canadians, recently
reaching unprecedented levels in the 1990s;
11
Homelessness in Canada ... 5
2. There is a lack of affordable housing in major cities,
which is a consistent factor associated with the rise in
the homeless population; 12
3. The composition of the homeless population has
been changing over the 1980s and now young men,
teenagers, and families with children predominate
amongst homeless Canadians.
13
4. Refugees and minorities are over-represented
amongst the homeless.
14
5. There are a growing number of homeless
subpopulations who require not only decent housing
but a variety of social support, medical, and
counselling services. These include AIDS sufferers, the
mentally disordered, substance abusers, and those
with chronic medical conditions.
By 1992, as this book is being written, the condition of
homelessness is one that cuts a wide swath across the social fabric of
our society. We have become a less kinder, less gentler society where
the list of persons who have become embroiled in our homeless crisis
is long and inclusive. Women, men, and children from all
socioeconomic strata; drawn from all racial and ethnic groups; those
who are unemployed and those who are underemployed; the old;
abused and battered mothers and their children; released prisoners;
persons with AIDS; children who are runaways; the mentally infirm;
alcoholics; drug users; the sexually abused and the throwaway people
of our society: refugees, immigrants, and many who once held a place
in the mainstream of society.
What is Homelessness?
Homelessness is a contemporary term that has its roots in the
expansion of the numbers of persons without shelter that began to
climb during the 1980s in North America.
15
 This is not to say that
homelessness is a new phenomenon. During the 1930s in Canada
thousands of men traversed this country looking for work in the midst
of the Great Depression. They literally 'tramped' the streets of their
home and native land looking for a stake in society. In British
Columbia many were herded into work camps in the northern part of
the province to keep them from forming into a collective social force
that might have the power to disrupt the current government of the
day.
16
 The homeless men of this era were viewed in two very distinct
ways. Average Canadians saw them as men 'down on their luck'
6 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
waiting for a brighter day to dawn. Police and government officials
often saw them as a potentially destructive political force that had to
be closely monitored and controlled.
Throughout history, Western society has had a very low
tolerance level for the visibly shelterless. In England, vagrancy laws
were enacted as early as 1349 but since that point have been a
constant fact of common law and hence our conception of socially
acceptable behaviour for the visibly impoverished.
17
 Throughout
history, since that point, we have witnessed cyclical attempts to
control the homeless through both harsh and more humane
applications of the law, though the latter are extremely difficult to
find and often are of an anecdotal form. The plain fact is that we, as a
society, have little tolerance for those who plainly demonstrate in a
public place that the great dream of equal opportunity that underlies
our work ethic in this country does not deliver for innumerable
people.
18
 We recognize in municipal by-laws that prohibit loitering,
panhandling, begging or sleeping in public places a contempt for the
homeless. In denying the questionable pleasure of sleeping on an iron
grate in freezing temperatures, law enforcement agencies underscore
our interest in business over the rights of the individual.
Panhandling laws are a primary example of the hypocritical
attitude that municipal politicians have toward the homeless and
poor in our society. It is a municipal offence to panhandle or beg for
money in a public street. Persons apprehended engaging in this
activity are liable to a considerable fine, generally in excess of $50.
19
This heavy-handed approach of the law punishes persons who have no
money by fining them even more money they do not have. What are
we protecting by such a law, other than the sensibilities of passersby?
What place does such a law have in a just society? Why would we wish
to fine the hungry for having the audacity to ask pedestrians to
voluntarily give up a small amount of money? The answer is that we
are not fining the beggar for his request, but for his presence on the
street. Many view the homeless as undeserving of help. Their
condition is viewed as pathological, self-induced and self-selected.
They are, in effect, living rough because they are lazy, shiftless, bums.
The constant request of businesses to remove the homeless from
public places since they are 'bad for business,' and their almost certain
removal, gives credence to the view that the homeless are seen as
having less than full status in our society.
2 0
Whatever its roots it is certain that homelessness and poverty
are inextricably connected in our society. When all the existing
literature on the subject throughout Britain, The United States and
Homelessness in Canada ... 7
Canada is reviewed the central place of poverty in the creation and
maintenance of homeless persons is obvious.
21
Although a seemingly simply question, the idea of who is a
homeless person and what constitutes homelessness, requires some
consideration first of all of what constitutes a 'home.'
22
 All of us have
varying definitions of this term that include, though at a minimum,
visions of comfort, peace, and safety. While our ideas might be very
different depending upon our socioeconomic ability to purchase or
rent living space there is no doubt that some form of relative
permanency is involved. Most of us think of our friends and family
being close at hand, and we would visualize our furniture, special
possessions, food on the table, and warmth in the cold Canadian
winter. It is a place where one likes to be that is restful, providing a
respite from the demands of life.
When one does not have a 'home' it implies not only a true
sense of material deficit but provides a serious blow to our emotional
well-being. To find a place within our society requires a place where
one can organize resources to look or maintain a job and friendship
networks. Think for just a moment what it would be like if you were
to be removed from the place you call home tonight with only the
clothes you have on your back and the possessions you can carry.
Obviously this would be a situation that is not only highly traumatic
but that would pose great obstacles in terms of getting things sorted
out. Devoid of resources you have become a social threat, someone
who must now seek assistance without home, job, and often the
support of family and friends. As you wander the city streets, little or
no idea of where to find help, all of your actions are visible on the
stage of the urban theatre, and your audience is anyone who passes
within sight of you. From this place of personal and social
degradation, one can begin to understand the meaning of the reality
of homelessness.
The term homelessness is as difficult to pin down as are the
number of homeless in Canada to count. Homeless has been
conceptualized variously as 1. chronic—involving 30 or more days of
continuous lack of proper accommodation; 2. sporadic—wherein
individuals vary between domiciled and homeless for less than 30
days; or 3. situational—where homelessness is a result of acute life
crisis.
23
 The term has been the subject of a great deal of debate
amongst academics and policymakers, and disturbingly much of the
debate revolves fundamentally around who will be the subject of
social relief efforts. There is no doubt that there are varying degrees
of homelessness from those who are temporarily displaced fro m their
homes to those who are without shelter for periods of from several
8 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
months to years. There are also a small number of homeless who
choose the lifestyle avoiding contact with other people, or simply are
content to wander the streets freed of responsibility. Dictionaries
printed prior to the 1980s often do not contain any reference to
homelessness. One must turn to definitions of the term vagrancy
which according to Cole's Concise English Dictionary (1979)
24
 refers to
concepts such as wandering both from place to place and in one's
speech, and shiftless or idle wandering without money or work. This
linking of the condition of homelessness with laziness as well as
criminal and quasi-criminal intent is common throughout not only
literature, but in popular images of the homeless.
25
There are several other connotations that must be considered
when constructing a definition of homelessness. Homelessness implies
that one has been thrown out of work, housing, and appropriate care
and support, although as the interviews that inform this book clearly
illustrate, the homeless often suffer from either underemployment or
unemployment.
26
 But there are broader questions that must be
addressed in building a definition. Should homelessness also include
those who are in imminent danger of losing their shelter? At least
peripherally, it is important to realize that there are large numbers of
people in this country who are living in substandard conditions, both
urban and rural, which include doubling up in living space so that the
rent can be paid. Children often are now either not leaving their
parents home because of the unaffordability of accommodation, or
returning in the twenties and thirties. 'Piggybacking' is another term
that refers to the practice of one person renting an apartment and six
or seven other individuals moving in to make the cost of
accommodation affordable. Overcrowding, which includes large
numbers of people co-habiting in a dwelling which is inadequate for
the purpose, poses people at the precipice of a homeless state. One
report from Windsor had some 40 plus people living in a single-family
dwelling in which overcrowding had led to a homicide. We know that
jamming large numbers of people into an inadequate space has the
effect of increasing violence and socially condemned behaviour.
27
There are, of course, women who are the victims of domestic
violence who may leave their homes for short periods of time over a
period of years, and who are therefore temporarily displaced.
28
Alternatively they may find themselves in a period of transition as
they seek to re-establish themselves in an independent existence in
the community. Runaway kids may either be on the street a short time
or be 'serious' about staying long periods of time.
29
 One of the
problems that seriously hampers efforts to understand the depth and
complexity of the current homeless situation is the great variety of
Homelessness in Canada ... 9
definitions that have been used by researchers. There is little
agreement about what homelessness is, or who should be included in
any study of the problem. Residents of long-term single occupancy
hotels and subsidized hostels may or may not be considered homeless.
While it is obvious that without these facilities they would certainly be
out on the street, it is less clear if they deserve to be classified as
homeless. Residents of detoxification centres which dry out chronic
alcoholics, released prisoners, former mental patients, and juvenile
offenders who are currently living in halfway houses may or may not
be defined as homeless.
Two definitions arising out of research in The United States and
Britain provide a quite comprehensive definition of homelessness. In
1985, The Ohio Department of Mental Health proposed a definition
that would categorize a man, woman or child as homeless if they live
or sleep in: (1) limited or no shelter for any length of time; (2) shelters
or missions, (3) cheap hotels or motels, or (4) other unique situations
which do not fit the above categories but where the intent to stay, or
the actual stay, is 45 days or less.
30
 All of the definitions advanced so
far would exclude some individuals from the condition of
homelessness, and thus consideration in terms of social policy and
assistance. A preferable definition might be found then in the person-
centred definition. It has been the guiding focus of the interviews
conducted for this book that the only person who is in a position to
judge whether they are homeless or not, and need shelter or not, is
the individual who sees themselves in this way.
31
 The homeless should
also be seen to include those who judge that the accommodation that
they currently have is inadequate for reasons which make sense to the
person.
32
 While the majority of life stories you will read about in the
pages to follow come from people whose condition is centrally within
most competing definitions of homelessness, there are many who
exist in substandard accommodation who prove extremely difficult to
locate for the enterprising researcher. However, there is ample
evidence to underscore not only their existence as homeless persons
but also the inadequacy of their current living arrangements. This is
not a matter of degree either. It is not simply that a person is living in
accommodation that does not suit them; it implies places where lack
of heat, the presence of drug abusers in the halls, filth and insect
infestation, violence and human misery surround the residents. It may
include released mental patients huddled four in a room in boarding
houses, paying rents which mean impoverishment and under-
nourishment. It raises the spectre of single mothers living on welfare,
trapped in a cycle of poverty listening at night to the violence and
inhumanity to which their children must be exposed. All of these
10 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
people are part of the crisis of homelessness which exists in our
country.
In the end, the research question of exactly who is homeless
must come to rely not upon a definition developed by middle-class
researchers but rather from the perspective of those who are living
the experience they deem to be 'homelessness'. Research is often
guided by concerns which have little to do with, and accomplish less in
terms of, challenging the problem of homelessness.
33
 Whatever the
definition which evolves, homelessness must refer consistently not to
some absolute condition but to calculations of the degree to which
the current living standards, or lack of them entirely, varies from
housing considered to be standard in the adjoining community.
Other factors include the temporary or unstable nature of the living
arrangements, and the time period for which these conditions must
be endured. Additional relevant factors include the social isolation
and material deprivation of the individual(s) and these must inform
the construction of a meaningful definition.
34
 To translate this into
real world experience, would the young couple and their child who
have endured in one room that is devoid of windows under a tavern
fit into this definition? Camping parks have had a continual battle in
recent years with homeless families and singles who pitch their tents
and live in recreational facilities for the entire summer. One elderly
couple, both alcoholics, were living in mid-town Toronto in their
automobile, a common choice of homeless persons for shelter. Is a car
a home?
In a very real sense questions regarding who shall be called
homeless and how many homeless there are out there are somewhat
pointless. We require no more evidence that the problem is gravely
serious as you shall read in the pages to come. We have had that
information for several years now but little, and less, is being done to
address the myriad of problems that accompany homelessness. Like
our native Canadians, homeless people cannot await the outcome of
endless inquiries into their condition. In comparing their condition to
that of persons suffering from AIDS, homeless people suffer from the
same frustrations of being unable to get governments to respond in
any effective way to their predicament. While one would not wish to
make such a simple comparison, it is important to remember that
many of the homeless who are not helped will not be here to receive
help, when and if it is ever offered.
Homelessness in Canada ... 11
The Legions of Homeless Canadians
One of the great difficulties which confronts any attempt to
deal with and analyse the problem of homelessness in Canadian
society is the lack of consistent and reliable data on both the number
and composition of the homeless population. The inherent problems
in simply counting the number of homeless arise from the dynamic
and very fluid characteristics of a nomadic population. The ranks of
the homeless rise and fall slightly almost constantly although the
sheer number of homeless is almost staggering and certainly
unbelievable to the average Canadian. Statistics that we read on crime
are somewhat similar and can provide us with clues to understanding
the complexity of this seemingly simple problem. Figures on crime
that we are constantly assailed with in the media reveal only recorded
acts of crime, that is, those reported to authorities. Criminologists
reliably know that a great deal of crime is never reported for a variety
of reasons, some perfectly understandable, and some that arise out of
perceptions about our criminal justice system. Victims of sexual
assault, for example, very commonly refrain from officially reporting
their victimization out of embarrassment, fear of reprisals by the
assailant, or through lack of belief in the efficiency of the police and
other agents of social control to deliver justice to them. This
difference between crimes committed and crimes reported is termed
'the dark figure of crime.'
35
 With the homeless the so-called dark
figure which refers to the hidden homeless amongst us must be
assumed to be significant. Interviews with front line workers in the
field of homelessness quickly reveal that there are significant numbers
of homeless who avoid any unnecessary identification by social service
agencies. At an Oshawa hostel, some men and women will come to
the nightly free dinner, receiving it either in a takeaway bag or sitting
quietly avoiding interaction with others. They seek anonymity and
shun social control personnel who might class them as mentally ill or
otherwise in need of professional intervention and perhaps
institutionalization. This researcher, in traversing the streets of several
large and small Canadian cities, had no difficulty in locating homeless
people to interview, and in larger urban settings, like Vancouver and
Toronto, the problem was more one of not having the ability to
interview the numerous homeless I would encounter.
Several factors impact strongly upon the estimates developed
of our homeless people. First, there is the evolving nature of the
population in question. New members join the ranks of the homeless
every day of the year in Canada, others may leave permanently or for
a short period of time. Some homeless will spend a few days in jail, a
12 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
mental hospital (despite being sane) or with a friend, only to rejoin
those on the street. Second, there is a marked reluctance, as already
noted, for many homeless people to seek out assistance from 'official'
agencies, so many exist in the shadows almost totally elusive to the
researcher or social worker. Attempts to enumerate the homeless for
the recent American census required workers to travel through
abandoned factories, dark alleys, remote areas of parks and to areas
of the city which rarely see even the most stalwart and seasoned of
police personnel to seek out homeless people. In the 1991 census,
Canada attempted for the first time to count the homeless, but again,
their counts are likely to fall far short of the actual number of
homeless due to the reporting problems noted above. Still more
homeless elude counting efforts evidencing fear, apathy, avoidance,
and anger. Finally, the use of fictitious names by the homeless who
seek medical and social assistance is commonplace, so for anyone
consulting records from various facilities it is difficult to construct an
accurate picture.
There are a number of problems associated with attempts to
collect accurate statistics on the the incidence of homelessness in
Canada. Existing statistical data may be characterized as well
intentioned, yet haphazard, a situation whose problems can be traced
to the limitations of methods of collecting data. A brief review of the
ways of counting the homeless illustrates the difficulties facing
researchers. First, one might count the number of homeless on any
given night in various Canadian cities enlisting the help of social
service agencies, street workers, religious help groups, soup kitchens,
police, shelters and hostels. While this would present a somewhat
more accurate count than anything that has ever been tried in this
nation, there are a number of variables which would intervene in the
collection process including double-counting of persons, the
reluctance of some homeless to be counted and the limitations of the
abilities of researchers to find the homeless in the many resting places
they inhabit. Many homeless cannot be identified because they blend
with persons who inhabit the nightstreets of our cities in the early
morning hours. There are a small number of homeless who do not
wish to be identified in any way, and there are obviously some who
will not co-operate with any study.
A second approach could be to count the number of homeless
over a specific period of time, for example, for one year those
homeless who seek all forms of shelter accommodation, but again,
this would not take into account those who do not use such facilities.
It would not, as with the first approach, be able to identify those who
Homelessness in Canada ... 13
might fit into a broader definition of homelessness, as discussed
earlier in this chapter, who are simply not on the street.
Finally, we often fall back upon crude statistics that are
collected by hostels and shelters to make estimates of the homeless
population. These figures are subject to a great degree of variation
given that no uniform way of generating the statistics has been
developed and accepted by these helping agencies though
undoubtedly they would in all likelihood welcome the construction of
such a survey instrument.
No one agency has been delegated the task of collecting data
on the homeless in our midst so that efforts in this area have been
rather piecemeal. But neither would we want to construct a ministry
for homelessness with its attendant functions of more pervasive social
control. There is no doubt that such contributions are of value but we
are forced to rely for information on inconsistent and unco-ordinated
efforts by a great many organizations whose intent is good, but
whose techniques may leave a great deal to be desired. Helping
agencies such as shelters, hostels, halfway houses, church groups,
medical treatment facilities and the police provide us with a great
deal of information. Collectively, the impression is clear from the
observations and figures developed by these various sources. This is a
social phenomenon of growing proportions that is outstripping the
ability of the networks currently in place to deal effectively with its
many manifestations. The human tragedy and suffering have reached
levels that disturb even the most callous of workers. Facilities are
overburdened and underfunded, unable to provide the kind of real
support needed to move the homeless away from the welfare go-
round. Solutions are temporary, responding to emergencies and
having little capacity to effect long-term change. The homeless are
increasingly drawn from groups that are new to the street.
Media sources are of particular relevance for coming to an
initial understanding of the homeless situation that confronts us.
Journalistic accounts provide the most numerous accounts of the
homeless problem. While they are important they are fraught with
the problems which plague media reporting. There is a tendency to
focus upon the tragic and in many cases unrepresentative scenarios of
street life. While sensationalistic reporting can serve to raise public
concern and consciousness, it may also reinforce certain negative
stereotypes that harden the average citizen in their viewpoints. The
public attention generated by the media is short-lived. Soon there is
another pressing social problem, usually the next day, and very little is
done to address the issues which have been raised. Homeless people
are left feeling 'burnt', they have been used to sell a paper or raise the
14 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
ratings, or make us feel grateful during festive occasions, temporarily
paraded before us as symbols of the fate that can befall us. We may
feel momentarily concerned, but the images that fill our television
screens usually only serve to underscore widely accepted myths about
the undeserving nature of the homeless. The lazy wino, the welfare
recipient, the 'dirty' teen hookers all are not worthy of our efforts.
One American writer has said that for us, the homeless are, in fact,
shit.
36
 We do not want them to come near, we do not want to see
them, they are like so much human trash that we want something
done about. The police should move them on, the shelters should take
them in (as long as they do not locate in my neighbourhood),
anything which will remove them from view, so we do not have to
think about them. We pay little attention to the wider ills of society
that have brought them to the street. We pay little attention to the
thousands of men who use throwaway teens to satisfy themselves
sexually every day and night of the week. It is in reality far more
reassuring simply to assign blame to the homeless for their condition.
The media's presentation of the homeless crisis is predicated
not upon proposing any alleviation or removal of the ills created by
homelessness or even upon engendering deeper understandings of
the problem, but rather upon sales and viewer attention. Thus we are
stuck with periodic crisis reporting.
37
 The homeless have a brief place
on the stage on the screens of the nation filtered through the evening
news. Canada's third world is glimpsed only rarely by its citizens lest
we become too upset in the realization that so many with promise,
ability, and willingness to work have been cut out of the Canadian
dream.
Let us now turn to the efforts so far in Canada to count the
homeless. As I already indicated, in 1991 the Canadian government for
the first time in history attempted to count the homeless during the
census. Their efforts are likely to bring results similar to their attempts
to enumerate natives living on reserve settings, that is, they will draw
a partial picture that does not accurately reflect the diversity of the
homeless population. In 1987, Mallin made an examination of
emergency shelter and soup kitchen use and put the number of
homeless at between 20,000 and 40,000 individuals.
38
 However there
are consistent data that place the number of homeless Canadians at a
level between 100,000 and 250,000 people. This figure has been
developed by The Canadian Council on Social Development whose
advisers across Canada have collectively amassed a great wealth of
experience in working with, and on behalf of the homeless. Cardinal
Carter, the Archbishop of Toronto recognized the gravity of the
situation as early as 1987 when he called upon 208 parishes in Toronto
Homelessness in Canada ... 15
to assist the homeless in finding suitable housing.
39
 If we were to
argue that the figures above are inflated some ten times, we would
still, nonetheless, be faced with a social malady which may arguably
be the most serious which will confront Canada now and in the
immediate future. In consideration of the fact that these estimates
were made during the late 1980s, and that economic conditions have
deteriorated markedly since then, these may be viewed as quite
conservative.
As early as 1984, The Canadian Council on Social Development
estimated that there were 992,000 families and 1,025,000 unattached
individuals who were living in poverty. Of these groups, 98,000 family
members and 422,000 individuals were elderly. Overall, this
represented 4,544,000 persons who lived below the poverty line.
McLaughlin's one night count of persons using shelters on January 22,
1987 yielded the following enlightening statistics: 7,751 persons
sought shelter on that night; 61% were men, 27.5% were women,
and fully 11.5% were children under 15 years of age!
40
 Shelters for
battered women, in other words, held 1,271 mothers and their
children. General shelters in Ontario were running at 101.5% capacity.
This meant that people had to be turned away because of lack of
bedspace even on the coldest nights of the winter! There are many
people who perish on our streets each year in tragic circumstances,
having frozen to death for want of a bed. Nationally, McLaughlin
found that shelters were at 77% capacity, but this reflected uneven
usage, including shelters that were overflowing as well as some
working below capacity due to their policies of turning away persons
who are violent or ill, who are drunk or disorderly, whom they feel
may be disruptive or difficult to accommodate. By 1987 Canada had
472 facilities which were capable of sheltering some 13,797 individuals
nightly.41
The most surprising development, perhaps, concerning home-
lessness in the 1980s was the growing diversity of the sub-groups
which researchers were to discover. McLaughlin found that the 7,751
persons seeking shelter could be sub-divided as follows, giving clear
indication of the variety of persons who find themselves without a
place to call home:
1. 54.7% were unemployed, underscoring the fact that
not all homeless are without resources but that many
live in conditions of poverty or underemployment;
2. 51.5% of persons were receiving social assistance of
some kind;
16 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANAD A
3. 33.3% fit the categorization for alcohol abuse
devised by McLaughlan;
4. 20.1 % were current or former psychiatric patients;
5. 15% could be classed as drug abusers;
6. 9.4% had been evicted, and
7. 3.1 % were physically handicapped.
This latter group composed of persons who have either naturally
occurring or employment related handicaps were individuals who
popped up with surprising frequency in my discussions with homeless
persons. It was not uncommon for a person to indicate that the reason
they were now unemployed was due to a work-related injury that had
rendered them unsuitable for certain forms of employment. The
results of McLaughlan's survey, which constituted the Canadian effort
for the United Nations International Year of Shelter, found that .5%
of the Canadian population use shelters, and concluded that ".. . an
estimated range of 130,00 to 250,000 homeless people during the year
remains conservative."
When we examine the estimates available from some of the
major cities in Canada regarding the number of homeless in our
country it underscores the enormity of the problem that is gripping
the nation. By 1990 the coalition of social service agencies that services
the downtown area of Toronto, and which meets on a monthly basis
to exchange information and ideas, reliably estimated that 10,000 or
more young people between the ages of 16 and 24 are homeless in
Toronto on any given day.
42
 Research by Livy Visano, a sociologist at
York University, found that many of the children who arrive on the
street fall through cracks in the social fabric eventually to become
embroiled in street networks. His book, This Idle Trade, a study of
male street prostitution, provides us with a chilling vision of wasted
lives involving the sale of sex by young boys to anyone willing to pay
the cost. His book sends a clear signal that homelessness is not merely
displacement to the margins of society, but often involves induction
into the netherworld of drug use, deviant sexuality, and criminal as
well as quasi-criminal pursuits as a means of day-to-day survival.
43
 The
wide ranging social implications of this contribution were again
reflected in Marlene Webber's recent contribution Street Kids: The
Tragedy of Canada's Runaways, which involved interviews with
twenty-nine street kids in several major Canadian cities.
44
 Both of
these works provide compelling evidence that the societal
implications of ignoring this process, of literally letting children be
used and abused in this way, will result in crime, social and health
Homelessness in Canada ... 17
problems of enormous impact. In the end delinquency of this sort may
in the future no longer be a symptom of urban decay but rather a
direct cause of it.
45
Although the homeless population is not only larger, and hence
more visible, in Toronto than in any other Canadian urban centre due
simply to the sheer size of its population and its severe problems with
housing affordability and supply, one should not assume that other
cities are immune from the growing homeless groups within Canadian
society. Montreal was reported by 1987 to have homeless numbering
in the thousands by the late 1980s.
46
 In a 1986 newspaper article,
5,000 women alone were reported to be homeless and living on the
streets of the city. Similarly, reports in the daily press from Halifax,
Edmonton, Ottawa, Winnipeg, and Victoria
47
 serve to reconfirm the
growing size and diversity of the homeless population amongst us.
Homelessness is often created by forces outside the control of
its victims as I have already argued. In fact, the actions of supposedly
responsible governments can have a direct hand in adding significant
numbers to our homeless rolls. The hypocritical attitude of
governments, who often publicly bemoan the plight of our homeless
while on the other hand doing nothing, or as little as possible, to
alleviate the suffering, is best evidenced by the actions of the British
Columbia government. In preparation for Expo, landlords were
permitted to evict 791 persons from hotel rooms that they had
occupied on a long-term basis, and in total some 3,500 low income
housing units to provide accommodation for visitors to the fair
48
Some governments, as I have argued, not content to do nothing, take
an active approach to creating homelessness! Similarly, the comments
of Albert Ross, the former chairman of the Metropolitan Housing
Authority, underscored this apathy by policymakers when he stated
that optimism amongst applicants for low cost housing was
unwarranted given that, "little has changed in the 40 years he has
been involved in public housing."
In summary the number of homeless people in Canada is
significant, and numbers well over 100,000 nationwide given current
knowledge on the subject. Although the data sources are not
complete, nor in many cases the source of first choice, they do provide
clear and compelling evidence of a major social problem, which it will
be demonstrated throughout this book is both increasing and
diversifying.
18 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
Who are the Homeless?
If there is one fact that is irrefutable concerning homeless
people in Canada, it is their sheer numbers. To this may be added the
growing diversity of the people who find themselves abandoned by
society. Mallin conducted research into the use of shelters in Canada
and found that reports from all servicing agencies reiterate the
conclusion that the ranks of the homeless are now filled by women,
children and men, and in numbers that are greater than at any time
since the Great Depression.
49
 I would argue that these numbers may
indeed be far greater and reflective of greater social ills since women
and children, who were largely strangers to the streets until the 1980s,
now comprise a significant and escalating number of our homeless.
Moreover the demographics of the groups are not only changing
rapidly, but are coming to represent a wide spectrum of Canadian
society. In shattering comforting myths concerning the undeserving
homeless, researchers across North America have shown that a great
variety of sub-groups, as I have already argued, are represented
amongst our homeless peoples.
One study of men using the Salvation Army hostel in Ottawa
found that 47% of the men surveyed were under 30 years of age, and
only 5% were over the age of 65.50 In a survey of 29 American cities,
the United States Conference of Mayors in 1987 found that 34% of
the homeless were families.
51
 These figures not only presage the
future of the homelessness problem but point to disturbing trends in
the composition of the urban poor.
The gravity of the homelessness problem when understood in
terms of human suffering is overwhelming given the case histories
reported in The United States Mayors' report. Children suffer in
innumerable ways, reminiscent of the most disturbing of Dicken's and
Engel's well known accounts of the sufferings of the poor in Victorian
England.
52
 Families are usually separated both in the United States
and in Canada when they become homeless. In some instances this is
because a battered spouse seeks refuge with her children from her
husband or partner. When a mother, father and children become
homeless it is generally impossible to put the entire family in one
facility. It is standard practice to separate the husband into a shelter
for men while the mother and children are housed in a women's
shelter.
53
 This arrangement not only places an additional stress upon
the family unit but makes regrouping much more difficult. Hostels for
women unfortunately, as we shall explore in a later chapter in greater
detail, are not set up specifically for family groups, so that moms with
children often share common kitchen and bathroom areas with
Homelessness in Canada ... 19
women who are mentally ill, drug or alcohol abusers, or are
themselves prone to disruptive behaviours. Again, children are the
most vulnerable victims.
Many shelters across North America have 'policies' or 'rules'
that do not allow families or singles to stay in the shelter during the
day. This means that they must wander the streets with no resources,
prone to the dangers that inhabit the downtown core where the
majority of shelters/hostels are located in large cities. This reflects an
attitude that the homeless must not be permitted to be 'lazy' and 'lie
around the shelter all day', a sentiment echoed often by both staff
and residents of shelters interviewed by this researcher.54 Shelters and
hostels generally assume a role far more encompassing than simply
providing a bed, food and some meagre resources. They believe they
must discipline the homeless, provide social training if you will,
getting them up and out the door, looking for work. Idleness is a
luxury of the wealthy in our society, and so there is a consistent
attempt made to 'get them going.' Children experiencing these
conditions have no sense of security, are constantly associating with
frightening strangers, may be subject to removal from their parents
and placement into care, do not receive proper nutrition, and suffer in
terms of educational achievement and self development. Their self-
esteem is assailed on a daily basis as they suffer the brunt of society's
refusal to provide properly for their needs. Children are the silent
victims of homelessness. They have no advocates, no one to speak on
their behalf, to say how much pain they must endure. They become
strangers in their own society forced to move from place to place,
devoid of security, watching their parents tortured efforts to construct
a reasonable life for them. Their faces and the depth of pain in their
eyes tell the story but few in our society have heard it so far.
In 1986 a Task Force to examine rooming arrangements,
boarding and lodging was struck in Ontario by the Ministry of
Housing.
55
 They developed what they referred to at that time as
'brutal statistics' concerning the plight of low-income persons seeking
accommodations. They were concerned in their report centrally with
the question of why the number of homeless was rising in Ontario at
such an alarming rate. The current backlog of persons waiting for
public housing in Ontario is so great that many applicants had by the
late 1980s ceased to believe that there was any point in applying. On
March 25, 1991, The Toronto Star in a front page story reported that
more than 500 people a week in Toronto alone were joining the
waiting list for subsidized housing. By this date The Metro Toronto
Housing Authority had 12,310 families and individuals waiting for
accommodation which was reported to be the highest figure in 15
20 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
years. Barbara Watson, tenant placement co-ordinator for the
housing authority, commented on how grave the situation is, "It
means there are an awful lot of people out there who need
affordable housing and they can't find it anywhere else."Much of the
new demand has been created by legislative changes which now
permit refugees who were previously barred from applying for
subsidized housing to add their names to the waiting list. Fully 25%
percent of applicants are refugees according to Andrew Duffy who
wrote the article and this number can be expected to increase given
that there are 80,000 refugee claimants currently in Ontario alone.
Duffy also reports that many families have been on the waiting list for
three years.
In 1986 the Task Force found that Ontario welfare recipients
paid 64% of their benefits towards their rent each month leaving
virtually nothing for the other necessities of life. In December 1988, a
protest outside the Ontario legislature by welfare recipients (who
numbered some 500,000 in Ontario) graphically demonstrated the
plight of those individuals who are forced to feed their children
endlessly on macaroni as fresh fruit, vegetables and meat exist as
simply memories or infrequent luxuries. This group, the poor and
impoverished, skirt the edge of the ever-thinning line between the
accommodated and the homeless. They represent the potential, given
growing economic pressures, for a social disaster in the making, a
virtual hidden army of homeless who might, and give every indication
of being poised to, pour onto our streets.
In some Canadian cities, reflecting the trends in American
jurisdictions, homelessness has an ethnic character, that has been
referred to by some writers as racial in nature. Refugees and new
immigrants are certainly not the only groups affected, although their
numbers are growing as a percentage of all homeless. Some studies
have argued that young native people predominate as the homeless
in prairie cities like Winnipeg, Regina and Saskatoon.
56
 One author
concluded that these young people are at a dead end already with
virtually no hope of finding employment or housing, the victims of
racist discrimination against Canada's native peoples. In this sense
they suffer from the double stigma of not only being homeless but
native. Their homeless status only serves to reinforce racist stereotypes
that predominate in these communities amongst the members of the
dominant culture. It also serves to illuminate the rural genesis of this
specific group who have lived in the social isolation of Canada's
reserve system with its arguably over-documented problems of
alcoholism, poor medical services, and lives of frustration, boredom
and defeat.
57
Homelessness in Canada ... 21
'They're all Bums or They Want to be There':
Myths Concerning the Homeless
Despite, or in spite of, media attention that is short-lived, public
ideas about, and attitudes towards the homeless, suffer from a
general lack of knowledge. There is some question about whether
people lack information or 'do not want to know about it.' Behaviours
which are labelled deviant, that is, which bend or break the norms of
our society often involve behaviours of persons with whom the vast
majority of citizens have no contact. In the absence of good
information, cultural myths are perpetuated, and similarly, the lack of
political organization and power on the part of the homeless leads to
an ongoing misunderstanding of the basic nature of the problem. The
public's attitude is inconsistent, responding to well-publicized crises in
an often haphazard fashion. Moral indignation over the death of a
homeless person who has needlessly frozen to death can excite a call
for 'something to be done' but in reality the complexity of the
situation precludes knee jerk responses from accomplishing lasting
results.
58
 Thus very little of this public outcry results in basic reforms in
the area of provision of housing or services that are crucial to the
homeless person.
Various researchers have confirmed that myths concerning who
comprise the homeless have prevailed that have long ago lost their
usefulness and social relevance. The publics' perceptions are seen to
divide the homeless into several distinct groups none of whom are
deserving of help. First, some portion of the homeless are seen as
representing the independent and eccentric of society, who prefer to
live by their wits, eschewing contact with wider society and their
fellows. Second, it is assumed there is a large group of lazy,
degenerate bums who will simply not work. This is an attitude that
often is expressed concerning welfare recipients, and its
discriminatory view of moral character has been reflected in
'workfare' programs in which welfare recipients are forced to work to
receive their payments. A third group commonly identified by the
public as those who inhabit the street are individuals who are crazy or
dangerous and who deserve to be, or should be, forced into
institutions. The public here demonstrates a view contrary to many
healing professionals in the mental health field who have argued that
the community should form the centre of care for the mentally ill
rather than placing them in institutional settings for long periods of
time.
59
 A variety of laws in this country reflect this general view and
prohibit behaviours that are disturbing, irritating or that provoke fear
(whether this reflects the sensitivities and intolerance of the
complainant or not).The public both fears and finds distasteful the
22 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
homeless individual according to the leading research in this field.
60
Their attitudes often focus upon the alleged capacity of the desolate
for unprovoked violence.
Struggling for Survival on Mean Streets
Life on the street is the world of the immediate, the world of
survival. For the homeless person the pressing concerns of finding
both food and shelter, whether it is in the form of state provided
shelter, or any safe place to sleep is an activity that occupies most of
their day. From the beginning of the day, when those who sleep in the
crevices of our urban landscape begin to rise, cramped, damp, and
cold from the park benches, grates, dumpsters, and stairways, the day
becomes a constant slow trek with little purpose other than getting
through another day. The constant miles of walking necessitated by
the widely dispersed soup kitchens, shelters and other services, which
are not located for the convenience of the homeless, mean that they
are forever walking.
One of the places where homeless people gather is at the local
McDonald's restaurants which open their doors at 6:30 and whether it
is Halifax, Vancouver or Edmonton they can be seen lining up long
before the doors are open. Devoid of access to taken-for-granted
amenities of life, such as running water, toilet facilities, cooking
apparatus, they are virtually unable to groom themselves for the day
ahead. The perceived unhygienic appearance of the homeless is
associated primarily with those who are suffering from severe mental
conditions, or individuals who are caught in the throes of alcohol or
drug abuse. The overwhelming majority of the homeless are
extremely creative and resilient in presenting as 'normalized' an
appearance as possible. So effective are they at this, that aside from
some minor clues to their status, i.e., their presence in public places at
unusual times, or the condition of their shoes which wear at an
incredibly quick rate, they are indistinguishable from any number of
average citizens in our society. It is perhaps their enforced idleness,
born of lack of money and committments that separates the homeless
most tellingly from those citizens who are rushing to another time-
bound activity ever mindful of 'the time'. For the homeless time is a
concept with little meaning. Time is the morning, afternoon, evening
or night as I learned when I tried to arrange for interviews with street
people. If I was to say, "I'll meet you at two tomorrow," I found that
the person would beg off meeting me. "I can't make it then...too
busy..." A wise street worker clued me into this saying, "Try telling
people you'll meet them in the afternoon, that way people will show
up, say mid-afternoon. You'll have to wait but they are usually pretty
Homelessness in Canada ... 23
reliable." What was required then was to adjust one's perception of
the importance of time. The view of the homeless person like many of
us on holidays is very flexible when it comes to time and
committments.
Homeless persons first arriving on the street often have little
information about the services available to them. In 1990 it was
suggested that information booths be set up in bus stations and parks
frequented by the homeless to provide information on shelters,
hostels, foodbanks, soup kitchens, medical services, and other forms
of community help. It was not uncommon for persons interviewed for
this book to mention their initial naivete concerning street life. One
young man who had slept in doorways and on firestairs for several
weeks told me that it took him all this time to discover the existence of
hostels: "Shit, if I'd know about this kind of place I wouldn't a been
sleeping in doorways. Its only because I met a guy and told him what I
was doing and he told me about this place that I'm here. I never heard
the word 'hostel' before I hit the streets." It is this lack of co-
ordination of information that often disadvantages the recently
homeless at a time when help is most needed, and arguably could be
most effective in preventing a lapse into longer term homelessness.
The medical problems of the homeless are numerous and
largely reflect the lifestyle they lead. Their lot is one of degradation
and the sapping of human dignity. The will to fight out of this cycle of
despair is an ability which most of us assume we have.
61
 But this is
certainly because we are not under the constant assault of the street.
Homeless people are constantly on the move during their waking
hours and are baked by the sun in summer and frozen in the
unforgiving Canadian winters. Their clothes, often donations given to
shelters and thrift shops, are generally out of fashion, often ill-fitting,
and contribute to a presentation of self that can suggest a careless
attitude. Moreover homeless persons are often not properly clothed
for the season, so that flimsy unseasonal dress is common in winter,
and winter clothes are frequently sighted in summer, due to the
tendency of donations to be related to persons giving up old clothes
after a season of wear. Many on the street report good overall health
but medical research on the homeless indicates a myriad of medical
conditions that occur in this population. Ulcerated legs and blistered,
swollen feet are epidemic in the homeless; wounds that do not heal
and that are filled with dirt are often noticed by health officials when
treating the homeless; skin infestations such as lice, severe dental
problems, upper respiratory infections, conditions of the hands,
hypothermia as well as low grade depression and signs of stress-
related disorders are frequently found among the homeless. Alcohol
24 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
and drug use that provide perhaps a dulling of the humiliations and
violence of street existence lead to a number of medically related
problems both physical and psychological.
62
 One of the central
debates underlying attempts to understand the homeless revolves
around the issue of the prevalence of mental illness amongst the
homeless. This is the subject that occupies the discussion in the final
section of this chapter.
Mental Illness and Homelessness:
Deinstitutionalization as Marginalization
The arrival of large numbers of the released mentally ill on the
streets of North America heralded the beginning of the
deinstitutionalization movement and attempts to empty mental
hospitals of all but the most severe cases. Deinstitutionalization is a
term coined to describe the mass release of patients from mental
hospitals when social service budgets are in crisis. Resuscitating the
image on the Gemeinschaaft village, the community responsible for
the locking away of the mentally troubled was transformed virtually
overnight into the community of care. Hospitalized individuals would
benefit from exposure to the 'therapy' of community life, and so
critics of long term commitment would realize the goal of
reintegration of the ex-patient. In Canada, the closing of one large
psychiatric facility, The Lakeshore Hospital, meant that virtually
overnight large numbers of mentally ill persons were released into the
Toronto community. More specifically they emptied into the Parkdale
region of Toronto, a lower class neighbourhood adjacent to the
hospital where like their American counterparts they became
ghettoized in large boarding houses. Private entrepreneurs realizing
the potential for exploiting marginal and ofttimes ill individuals
functioned as mini-asylums dispensing ripoff rents rather than
therapeutic benevolence. These deplorable conditions became widely
known and the existence of large numbers of visibly disordered
persons in the area led to both stigmatization and isolation. As Scull
has demonstrated, the transferring of the mentally ill into the
community often does not attain the ends favoured by its
humanitarian advocates. Community treatment schemes for the
released mentally ill do not materialize as legislators fail to transfer
institutional funds into street front facilities for the now often
homeless mentally ill. Deinstitutionalization came to represent
economic saving and community neglect.
63
Homelessness in itself is a difficult and highly defeating
condition for the human spirit; madness only compounds the
problems faced by the wandering street people of Canadian society.
Homelessness in Canada ... 25
Baxter and Hopper
64
 reflecting current street philosophy in the
United States inform us these individuals are referred to as 'space
cases'. Scull
65
 uses the highly evocative term, 'human trash'. Both
phrases reflect the extremely marginal position of the homeless
mentally ill in the political and economic spheres of society. There is
no doubt, considering the volume of research in this area, that
deinstitutionalization is a national disgrace in both Canada and The
United States
66
 and has been for over two decades.
67
 Treatment for
those homeless who suffer from, or develop, forms of mental illness is
really a secondary consideration. Mere survival supersedes it in
importance as every available piece of literature amply illustrates.
The Homeless Mentally III or the Mentally III Homeless?
The current levels of mental illness among the homeless are a
difficult issue to resolve. First, there has been little concerted effort to
identify the nature of illnesses which present among these
populations. The central research question revolves around whether
mental illness is a causative factor in the drift into, and sustaining of,
the homeless condition or whether mental illness manifests as a result
of the homeless state of the individual. It certainly must be
hypothesized that depressive and stress-related conditions must
emerge from the overwhelming strains placed upon homeless persons
in their daily round of survival activities. Care must be taken however
to separate the homeless into distinct groupings: adult men, single
women, married women and/or couples with children, adolescents,
and lone children, as research results are not normally generalizabl e
across the various categories of homeless.
68
The existing research evidence is both contradictory and
confusing, and estimates of the occurrence of mental illness in
homeless populations range wildly from very little evidence of mental
disturbance to characterizations of the homeless as overwhelmingly
deranged. In a study of the Keener Shelter in New York it was asserted
that 84% of the 240 residents suffered from some form of mental
illness, and eighteen of these cases were deemed to be in need of
immediate hospitalization. Arguing in a 1985 article, Dr. Charles
Krauthammer
69
 asserted that 90% of homeless Americans could be
classified as mentally ill. Insisting that homeless persons either cannot
or will not seek assistance, Krauthammer concluded that these
individuals should be forcibly institutionalized for their own good. His
conclusions demonstrate the substantial flaws that fuel public myths
concerning the homeless. His policy recommendations are based on a
study conducted by Bassuk, Rubin and Lauriat (1984) of homeless
persons seeking refuge in one Boston shelter. The researchers found
26 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
that 40% of those studied suffered from psychoses, 28% were chronic
alcoholics, and 21% had personality disorders. The study had a
severely limited sample size, and was characterized by the authors as
only moderately in-depth. A further problem that hinders research
efforts in this area is the disagreement within psychiatric circles over
the basis of diagnosis, particularly poignant in studies where
untrained personnel are asked to evaluate the psychiatric history and
present condition of the respondent.
Hope and Young's research relied upon the reports of
practitioners in the field. They found that estimates of front line
workers put the number of mentally ill homeless at between 30% and
60% of their clients.
71
 This figure includes both alcoholics and drug
abusers. It is both a wide ranging figure and one which is difficult to
interpret, given the inclusion of substance abusers in the overall
figures. The Ohio Department of Mental Health found that 30.8% of
their sample had psychiatric problems and 64.2% said they had been
drinking some or a lot in the last month.
72
 Since over 90% of
Canadians regularly consume alcoholic beverages this is scarcely an
astonishing finding. The National Institute of Mental Health has
provided estimates that up to 50% of the homeless may suffer from
some form of mental disorder. Finally, The American Psychiatric
Association estimates that the number of mentally ill among the
homeless fluctuates between 20% and 50%. The so-called HUD study
found that half the persons currently using shelter accommodation
could be classified as mentally ill, including all forms of substance
abuse.
73
Within the Canadian context, McLaughlin (1987) found that
20.1% of her sample of persons seeking shelter were current or ex-
psychiatric patients, 33.3% were alcohol abusers, and 15% were drug
abusers. These categories have a considerable overlap but they do
raise the possibility, although not conclusively, of a somewhat lower
prevalence of mental illness among the Canadian homeless
population. Visano's research among street youth in Toronto raises
the issue of whether underlying psychiatric problems are discernible in
street populations particularly those individuals who do not seek or
are forced into psychiatric intervention.
74
 An overriding concern is
that the classification of homeless persons as mentally ill is not abused
given the vulnerability associated with powerless social status. Again,
some minor forms of mental illness are arguably 'normal' when
considered in relation to the ofttimes overwhelming gravity of the
homeless individual's or family's situation.
Homelessness in Canada ... 27
'Holes in the System': The Self-Selected Sample
Arguably the appeal of medicalizing the problem of
homelessness lies in the explanatory label and antecedent
characteristics that can flow from this reassuring concept. The
homeless are either mad or bad, i.e., mentally ill, substance abusers, or
engage in crimes of survival. Homelessness, therefore, is not
conceptualized as a condition linked to larger structural forces
(economy, family dissolution, the shortcomings of the welfare state)
but is rather a symptom of personal pathology. For many, despite
understandings forged over the course of this century on the nature
of addictions in the scientific community, addictions are self-selected
by the sufferer. Mental illness remains the broken mind that cannot
be healed. Crimes of survival warrant the intrusion of social control
apparatus and personnel and the criminalization of the homeless.
75
All of these explanations and attitudes reflect not only a fractionated
sense of homeless populations, but also inconclusive or otherwise
limited research data.
More current research on the incidence of mental illness among
the homeless has yielded much more conservative and convincing
results. They show a greater degree of correspondence with existing
Canadian research results. This does not mean however that there has
been any subsiding of the controversy surrounding this issue. Snow et
al. sought in their research to dissipate the myth of pervasive mental
illness in the homeless.
76
 The researchers interviewed a sample of 184
homeless persons who sought treatment at both local and state
mental health facilities in Texas. They concluded that the rate of
mental illness in their respondents hovered at between 10% and 15%
a figure far lower than that discovered in previous investigations
reviewed in this article. Much of this rate was based upon alcohol
abuse rather than simply reflecting psychiatric problems of the
sample.
Wright (1988) was critical of the findings of the above research
study.
77
 First, it ignores those persons who do not seek assistance
from the formal mental health system, or those whose records are
faulty for some reason. In a society which has adopted a policy of
transinstitutionalization of marginal populations, from institutions to
agency to street, back and across control boundaries, it is crucial to
note that, "Every care system has holes through which some people
fall."
78
 The size, number and width of these holes is of course, a
question of considerable importance. Many homeless, fearing the
threat of involuntary commitment as mentally ill persons, either
actively avoid or seek to minimize any contact with official agents or
28 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
agencies, or refuse shelter when a psychiatric clearance is required
before a bed will be issued. Some American hostels require a
psychiatric interview before admitting clients for shelter. In New York,
women are routinely referred to Bellevue which is a considerable
distance from most shelters. Fearing they will be classed as 'crazy' or
simply due to fatigue and frustration many simply leave. Canadian
shelters routinely require an admittance examination which includes
information on the person's medical background. For this reason,
many homeless persons avoid shelters that insist upon collecting other
than routine personal information. Students of the history of
psychiatry are well aware that not only is there little agreement over
basic diagnostic criteria (Wright, 1988)
79
 but that such criteria are
often applied to the certifiably sane who foolishly allow themselves to
be evaluated.
80
 Ropers further argues that the problems associated
with street survival may be difficult to distinguish from seemingly
chronic psychiatric symptoms.
81
 Thus Wright's criticisms as well as the
tactics of the homeless in avoiding medicalization of their problems,
and hence deviantization of their condition, are well founded.
Snow et al. utilized a criterion for the evaluation of the
presence of mental illness that is questionable at best and
demonstrates some of the inadequacies of existing research efforts.
82
Respondents were assessed as to whether they met the following
criteria: 1. prior psychiatric institutionalization; 2. designated
mentally ill by other homeless people; 3. conduct so bizarre or
situationally inappropriate that most observers would be likely to
perceive them to be disordered. To be classed as mentally ill the
behaviour of the sample members had to fit two or more of the above
categories. As Wright has pointed out, aside from debates concerning
what does or does not constitute a cognation of mental imbalance,
the assessments in the third category were carried out by field workers
with no clinical experience whatsoever.
83
 Mentally ill people might
well fit only one of the criteria, and so the estimate must be correctly
interpreted only as being only a 'lower boundary.' Finally, most of the
mentally ill homeless who fall within the age range of 20 to 39 years
of age are unlikely to have ever been institutionalized and the never
institutionalized now predominate amongst homeless persons.
84
Towards Comprehensive Data Collection
Wright et al. and Wright have recently begun to report on data
from their study of homelessness in 19 major U.S. cities.85 This sample
addresses many of the methodological problems associated with
earlier studies. In the first year of data collection 25,000 clients were
interviewed; more than 11,000 adults were seen more than once. The
Homelessness in Canada ... 29
study is broad ranging in collecting data from a number of key urban
areas, and avoids some of the pitfalls of non-generalizability that
characterize single-city studies. Trained mental health professionals
carry out the interviews. However, one criticism that Wright himself
has noted is that the sample members self-select to seek attention
from project teams.
Wright (1988) has reported that current data indicate that some
19.4% of adult clients show distinct signs of emotional problems or
psychiatric impairment. Despite the quantity of Wright's data and the
quality of the interviews, certain problems still present. It is difficult to
determine whether the form of mental illness or emotional difficulty
is transient, a situational or episodic emotional crisis, or chronic
psychiatric disease. Also, there still remains the complex question of
weighting the effects of homelessness upon the presenting mental
condition.
Directions for Canadian Research
The pressing need for exploratory research on the relationship
between homelessness and mental illness is evident within the
Canadian context. However overreliance on a medical model that
focusses upon individual characteristics of homeless persons such as
mental illness or substance abuse is seemingly not warranted by more
recent and far ranging research results within the American context.
Canadian research efforts can benefit from attention to the
development of universal criteria for key variables and terms which
have eluded efforts so far making comparison of data problematic at
best.
The problem of homelessness is significant within the Canadian
context and is likely to escalate within the near future. A 1990 Geneva
report concluded that Toronto was "the most expensive (city) in North
America. "
8 7
 Given the current crisis in the political economy which has
prompted rising interest rates, plant slowdowns and shutdowns, and a
general downturn in the business cycle, the spectre of increasing
numbers of homeless in Canada seems likely.
88
 What directions can
then be established for Canadian research efforts?
First, it is evident that a national study of homelessness in
Canada which is of a cross-disciplinary nature is in order. At present,
writing about the problem of homelessness in Canadian society is a
difficult process since we have no reliable figures concerning the
composition of the general population or sub-populations. This study
must explore not only the relationships between mental illness and
homelessness, but also the contexts in which such maladies arise. This
implies a research approach which goes beyond the 'self-selected'
30 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
sample and is able to investigate homelessness at the ground level. In
essence, I would argue that the clinical interview that characterizes
much of the American research effort must be used in conjunction
with or supplanted by depth interviewing of subjects in the field.
Stein, in reviewing the dress-rehearsal enumeration for the
United States Bureau of the Census, cites both the 'public
environment' of homelessness and the appropriateness and
advantages intrinsic to qualitative methods as evidence for their value
in researching this area of human behaviour. The 'extraordinary
contingencies' which this group must face and problems of 'defining,
identify and locating' make the use of qualitative approaches
necessary.89 Without them the 'understandings' our data generate
are suspect at best. The data which should be produced in Canada will
inform us through 'thick description' of the processes underlying,
contributing to or sustaining mental illness amongst those homeless
who display such problems.90
However, it is also important to eschew uni-dimensional
research approaches for those that consider the broader contexts in
which homelessness arises; i.e., the structural forces of politics and
economy which impinge upon the lives of those who eventually drift,
or are forced into a homeless status. A fully informed analysis must
also address the interaction between social control agents and the
homeless in the production of mental problems. It is only through
analysis at a variety of empirical levels that we can achieve a full
understanding of the problem which addresses the unique social,
economic and political formations that underlie this country.
Canadian researchers are in a unique position to benefit from
the experience of our American colleagues in this difficult area of
human behaviour. It is incumbent upon us to provide understandings
that permit the amelioration and hopefully the eradication of this
grave social problem.
The central dilemma that presents itself for homeless people is
the need to nurture the will to survive and to overcome the conditions
that can rob a person of human status. The often overwhelming
personal, social and economic misfortunes that lead to the street can
leave victims dazed for long periods of time. Crime victims often suffer
great emotional and psychological trauma for years after their
victimization. Why should we expect persons who are disenfranchised,
often with great rapidity, to suffer any less than other victims? To lose
one's place in society, to be thrown out of full status, to be in the
position of asking for help leaves people traumatized and often
unable to act. They may be in need of a period of time to regroup
their resources, to rebound from despair, for their battle will be one
Homelessness in Canada ... 31
that must come in the few moments in the day when survival is not a
completely overriding concern. Those moments are fleeting and few,
and therefore we should not be surprised that the homeless may take
long periods of time to re-establish themselves in the mainstream of
society.
In the chapters to follow we will explore the reality of
homelessness in Canada by examining the paths to homelessness and
the lives of the people who we call homeless. Life on the streets and
the lure of sex, drugs and escape will be discussed as well as the
interaction of people on the streets. The causes of homelessness at
both personal and societal levels will be analysed to provide an
integrated analysis of the homeless problem. Finally we shall explore
policies for ending homelessness through the organization and
empowering of homeless persons and the creation of viable
alternatives to the present systems of social assistance.
This page intentionally left blank 
CHAPTER TWO
Drifting Into Despair
Roads to Homelessness
In Canada, the spectre of homelessness is not one that most of
its citizens have to regularly contemplate. However, the forces that
propel persons to a homeless existence are perhaps closer than most
of us care to imagine. Indeed, the question may be, what keeps us
from the street? Canadians have recently reported that their ability to
live on their current resources would allow them, on average, to
survive for a period of only one to three months. Many could not ward
off the loss of their accommodation for more than a month. There are
two broad categories of forces which create homelessness; the first
are political and economic forces in larger society that manufacture
the conditions that give rise to wide-scale homelessness. The second
group of factors that lead to homelessness involve a variety of social,
personal, and societal factors that together are the catalyst for this
drift into despair.
Political and Economic Factors
Let us begin this chapter with an examination of the political
and economic forces that have a direct impact on this social problem.
During the 1980s, successive Canadian governments at both the
Federal and Provincial levels have allocated few resources to the
creation of low cost housing. This occurred in an era when supplies of
affordable housing, particularly in large metropolitan areas, shrank at
an alarming rate. The process called gentrification, that is, the
renovation of older houses in urban areas, had a two-fold effect that
34 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
impacted most forcefully upon the economically weak in our midst.
First, the large stock of single-room boarding accommodation dried
up during the 1980s displacing large numbers of skid row residents,
boarders, and those requiring cheap shelter. Second, new forms of
housing did not emerge to fill this gap, as incentives to investors to
create this form of housing were absent from government policy
initiatives. Some landlords recognized the profit to be made even
from those who are most economically disadvantaged and offered
cramped and substandard accommodation to those on the lower end
of the economic scale. There was however little attempt to develop
low cost housing that was really affordable for those who subsist on
welfare, disability, limited pensions or other forms of social assistance.
The 1980s may also be characterized as an era in which the gap
between rich and poor accelerated in Canada. Not only do we
discover the poor caught within a cycle of welfare entrapment
wherein they are unable to develop sufficient resources to escape
their impoverished condition, but the emergence of new forms of
charity signal clearly the abdication of social responsibilities by all
levels of government. This involves the reliance of government on
private or society sponsored charity as a basis for ameliorating
conditions of poverty. Consider that the Canadian Senate reported
this year that over one million Canadian children are poor.
1
 Realize
that this means that one in six children in our country lives in poverty.
Fully half of these children would starve if it were not for food banks.
Food banks supply them with their basic nutritional needs. Is this the
same Canada that Senator Keith Spicer recently referred to in terms of
a poetry of spirit? Spirit is a luxury of the rich and well-fed. The
government's refusal to acknowledge and address need in a
meaningful way, that is, through the provision of food for Canadian
children, impacts across their lives. It affects their performance in
school and ultimately limits their life chances. It means that they have
less stake in a society that has not made provision for them. Finally, it
means that we require an urgent restructuring of our priorities in
spending by governments.
When you think that almost 30% of children in Metropolitan
Toronto go to school hungry every day, and the number across
Canada that are similarly undernourished, it gives one a gauge of the
enormity of the problem.
2
 Indeed, Canada, according to Carolyn Jack,
president of Comic Relief, an organization which raises money to
alleviate the suffering caused by poverty, has written that Canada is
second only to the United States in the rate of child poverty among all
industrialized nations.
3
 This is nothing less than a national disgrace,
and that it continues, and grows, is a shame to this nation and its
Drifting Into Despair ... 35
people who have done little to alleviate this problem. When one also
considers that there are over 1,100 food banks across this country and
only 625 McdonaId's outlets the reality of the grip of poverty has some
measure.
4
Governments, federally, provincially and municipally, have
been content to let private organizations set up food banks to keep
up with the ever-increasing demand for food. Users of food banks
span every part of the lower socioeconomic scale from those who are
entirely without income to those who find that government
supplements, welfare, disability, mother's allowance, or
unemployment benefits fall short in meeting their basic living
expenses. Many food bank users are employed individuals who find
that their paycheques, like those of their 'dependent' neighbours, do
not allow for eating.
The question (among many) that this raises is, "Why are
governments in Canada willing to let hundreds of thousands of our
citizens rely on charity to eat?" Why indeed should any of us allow this
situation to continue and grow? One of the paradoxes that paints this
clearly as a matter of political will is the obvious surplus of money
available to endlessly promote a "Yes" vote in the Canadian
referendum in the form of media advertisements, pamphlets and
personal appearances by politicians whereas no money can be found
to end this cycle of dependency. The evidence which is steadily
mounting is that the public has reached, and now moved beyond, its
greatest capacity for limitless charity. This reflects a diminishing ability
for Canadians to assist others in such a fashion when record levels of
unemployment are being recorded, and individual citizens feel
insecure about their present and future economic condition. In every
arena of social and community work the effects of "the great
depression of '92" have meant that budgets have been frozen and
that they are increasingly unable to assist deserving potential
recipients. The limits of benevolence seem to have been reached or we
are balanced precariously near the edge of this state of affairs.
Throughout the 1980s Canada also experienced growing
unemployment that is now running at historically record levels. The
free trade agreement heralded by the Mulroney Conservatives as the
economic inducement to prosperity has proven to be the economic
undoing of Canada. Sociologist Gordon Laxer has referred to Canada
as a resource rich country that is 'open for business/ that is, to
economic exploitation from other countries.
5
 Under 'free trade' a
misnomer for the potential exploitation of the Canadian worker, the
removal of sundry labour rights, medical schemes and social welfare
entitlements, the rates of unemployment have risen astronomically.
36 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
Canadian business bankruptcies are at an ail time high, as many
businesses are simply folding up and heading for the cheap labour
havens of the United States. Little is, or seems to be, or can be, done to
protect Canadian jobs.
This downturn has naturally had an effect upon the lives of a
large number of Canadians. In Windsor, Ontario, the centre of
automobile manufacture in Canada, unemployment had reached
almost 30% by May of 1991, and the welfare role estimated by
municipal officials reached almost 6,000 by mid-summer.
6
Increasingly, Canadians also find it difficult to rise above the poverty
line due to inadequate pay levels. Many of the highly paid
manufacturing jobs are rapidly disappearing with the advent of new
technologies and the flow of plants to the United States, and soon to
Mexico in the wake of trilateral free trade agreements. These are
being replaced with jobs that are in the low paid service sector, the
kind of jobs that pay minimum wage or near to it. Examples of this
type of job include work in the hotel industry, security guard
positions, restaurant staff, clerking jobs, and sales jobs in many retail
industries. This form of employment does not constitute a 'living
wage' for many who must provide their own accommodation as the
analysis presented later in this book clearly demonstrates. Although
one can survive on this wage if living with parents or other relatives,
or if the wage is simply a second income, this form of
underemployment is insidious in its effects. It was common in
interviewing persons for this book to find men and women who were
working supposedly 'full-time' jobs in the industries mentioned above
and other related jobs, who could not afford to rent reasonable
accommodation and so found themselves living in shelter or hostel
accommodation. Research conducted by The Social Planning Council
of Metropolitan Toronto confirms this problem. The rate of poverty
for young families has risen since the mid-1970s from 25% to 47%,
and the rate has also risen dramatically in other sectors of the
population.
7
Social, Personal and Societal Factors
The more micro processes that lead to homelessness involve a
variety of social, personal and societal factors that have not been
thoroughly examined by contemporary researchers in Canada. Little is
known, if we examine research by academics, about the kinds of
contingencies that cause a person to slip into homelessness.
8
 Is it the
case that the individual who becomes homeless chooses the wrong
path in the road, or is it a series of miscalculations, poor choices, and
personal tragedies that propel one on into homelessness? Let us
Drifting Into Despair ... 37
briefly examine the general areas that have been identified by
homeless persons themselves as important in causing their present
state of affairs. One of the central arguments of this book is that
homeless people have not only been largely ignored by researchers,
but that even when they are researched it is often in the third person,
that is, not by allowing them to relate their own life experiences but
by seeing them simply as victims of various systems of social control
and exclusionary practices. In contrast, at critical junctures
throughout this book the voices of homeless persons are heard. They
are able to relate their life experiences in words and images that make
sense to them, and which convey the starkness of their condition. Let
us now briefly explore some of these key factors.
1. Family Structure and Pressures on the Nuclear Family
Traditionally, the family has been thought of as a haven from a
violent and unforgiving world that is constantly assailing its members.
The family nurtures individuals in this vision of domestic life providing
members with love, care, and attention, all essential elements of a
healthy life. In actual fact, academic research has demonstrated that
far from being a haven from a violent society, the home is the centre
of violence in our country. Women, for example, are at far greater risk
of assault in the home than on our streets as criminological research
has consistently shown.9 Children and the elderly have been
recognized in the past two decades to be victims of physical, sexual
and emotional abuse in the home as we have come as a society to
recognize behaviours that have previously not been spoken about or
hidden behind closed doors. The Ontario government recently
recognized the wide extent of this problem, which some have called
an epidemic, in allocating millions more dollars to the building of
shelter facilities for battered wives and their children.
Many of the teenagers that come to our streets, in fact the
overwhelming majority, have been the victims of both physical and
sexual abuse. They seek the streets as a relief to a constant backdrop
of abuse and violence that has become intolerable in their teen years.
The pressures on the family unit in our society also lead to family
breakdown and dissolution at an increasingly frequent rate. Since the
introduction of more liberal divorce laws in 1983, the number of
marriages that end in divorce has increased exponentially in
comparison to the pre-1983 era. The traditional nuclear family, of a
male and female and two children, has succumbed largely to the
pressures of a society which hypocritically lauds the value of the family
on one hand, particularly when it can bring political gain, while
constantly either undermining the ability of parents to support
children or accomplishing the same end through sheer inaction. Tax
38 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
systems do not assist the family in helping their children. Day care,
recognized as a necessity for two decades has not been a government
priority and so many mothers are forced to remain in the home,
and/or take low paid part-time work because they cannot find, or
often times finance, adequate, quality day care. Although many
politicians are quick to cite the importance of the family to Canada's
future, few take this beyond posing for publicity photos or making
public statements to this effect. Politicians, not surprisingly, often
make use of their own families in publicity photos to instil in the
voters the sense that this is a person in touch with family people,
responsible and caring, but this has not translated into action on
behalf of families or family members.
We see increasingly families that do not fit the traditional mold,
and this may be a positive step. Blended families consisting of partners
from previous marriages and respective children, single parent
families, single sex parenting families, and father headed households,
are collectively far more common in our society than traditional family
forms.
10
Women, children and the elderly are often rendered homeless
or come to the street to escape the violence of family life. This was a
theme repeated throughout the interviews conducted for this book
and one that is common to front line workers who attempt to assist
these people. Whatever the dynamics it is clear that for many
thousands of Canadians, most especially women and children, families
have become dysfunctional, unable to supply the nurturing and
support that we have come to associate with this institution. For them,
as you shall learn, homelessness seems a preferable condition.
2. Personal Troubles
One of the most perplexing things for persons who are not
homeless to understand is why homeless people wind up on the
street. We have already ascertained that there are both wider societal
pressures that contribute to this problem, as well as difficulties
associated with family structures. There are a number of personal
contingencies that also impact on the production of homelessness,
and they are worth understanding at a more general level before we
move our attention to the specific or individual dimensions of this
phenomenon.
In attempting to understand these processes I have identified
several 'themes' that permeate the explanations offered by the
homeless on the forces that propelled them to wander the streets.
Many of these contain elements that straddle the twin dimensions of
the personal and the public. They are often difficult to separate or
categorize due to this overlapping. This having been said, I have tried
Drifting Into Despair ... 39
to address the key issues which consistently arose in conversation with
homeless persons. These may be summarized in the following way:
3. Unemployment
The loss of a job may precipitate homelessness. Many are not
prepared for the closure of a plant or forced retirement at an age
when re-employment, especially for the low skilled worker, is unlikely.
Those who have been employed in low paid jobs are less likely to have
the financial resources to survive long, or the ability or aptitude to
commence retraining (if this is available at all). Similarly, the loss of
work has been associated with alcohol and drug abuse and can
precipitate family violence and breakdown.
4
4. Alcohol and Drug Abuse
The misuse of drugs and alcohol is a constant theme of street
life. In some cases alcohol and drug abuse precipitates the drift into
homelessness. For a majority of street kids, drug and alcohol abuse
commence after arrival on the street as they both try to avoid the
reality of their existence in a world characterized by violence, mistrust
and degrading activities and seek to acculturate to their peer group.
11
5. Mental Illness
Approximately twenty percent of the homeless have been
found through various studies to suffer from some form of mental
illness. One must be cautious when examining these figures. Is the
mental illness the condition which contributed to their status as
homeless or have they developed a form of mental instability since
their movement into the world of the homeless? This seemingly
simple question is one that is difficult for researchers to cope with, for
not only is there substantial disagreement over the diagnosis of what
constitutes mental illness amongst psychiatrists and those who
observe the mental health system,
12
 but it is exceedingly difficult to
determine the effect of homelessness on one's mental condition. If
you think about the stresses that you must face, try to imagine facing
the stresses associated with attempting to survive on a daily basis on
the street with no shelter, no money, and no food. Medical authorities
have long been aware of the effects of stress on one's physical and
mental well-being. Little wonder that a disproportionate number of
the homeless shown signs of mental illness. The release of substantial
numbers of the mentally ill into the community occurred during the
1970s and 1980s when the reigning philosophy of the mental health
movement was that confinement in a mental hospital was not
humane. The community, in this scheme, would help to heal the
walking wounded as governments poured more resources into
community help schemes. Unfortunately, the development of
40 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
community facilities was grossly inadequate and released mental
patients simply became the prey of eager slum landlords in places like
the Parkdale district of Toronto.
6. Legal Troubles
The presence of a criminal career is a factor in the creation of
homelessness amongst a small proportion of persons who find their
way into hostels across Canada. Released prisoners, as The John
Howard Society has graphically demonstrated, suffer from an
overriding stigma. For prisoners perhaps the most difficult period of
their confinement begins with their release from prison. It is at this
point that they are the most vulnerable and the most in need of
assistance. However, for many, limited financial and personal
resources mean that they wind up occupying a bed-space in a hostel
for men, if one can be found, and competing with others for a job in a
time when our number of unemployed is at an historical high. With a
criminal record their chances of success are severely limited when even
those with good work records find it hard to break out of the cycle of
homelessness.
7. Castoffs
Amongst seniors, the spectre of homelessness has generally not
been with them during their adult years. Although there are some
seniors who have been living on the streets for many years, these
regulars are the exception rather than the rule. Increasingly seniors
are finding themselves falling through the social welfare net, which
we assume protects us. As families become increasingly caught up in
processes of inflation, unemployment, and marital dissolution, senior
members of families often become a redundant hardship that families
are either unwilling or unable to shoulder. In the United States, a
disturbing trend is the abandonment of unwanted seniors and
Alzheimer's patients in hospital emergency rooms. Women seniors
may find themselves considerably financially weakened after the
death of their spouse, and indeed, widows account for an alarming
number of the poor in this country. We simply do not make proper
provision for women at many levels of our society throughout the life
course.
8. Problems in Cultural Adjustment
Several of the women and men interviewed for this book were
either recent immigrants or refugees in this country. One of the
supervisory staff of Seaton House shelter commented that,
"Immigration officials give these people maps of Toronto at the
border with a big red circle marked around our shelter. That's because
they know we can't turn anyone down." A common theme in the
Drifting Into Despair ... 41
story of homeless immigrant women is that they came to Canada on
the advice of a relative but following a brief stay they were no longer
welcome in their accommodation. So a life of homelessness, often
characterized by drifting from one city to another, in an alien country
began.
9. Running out of Resources
Like most of us, those who eventually become homeless have
some form of familial resources they can call on to keep them from
going to the street. However, it may be that homeless people possess
slightly or appreciably fewer personal resources whether in the form
of accommodating relatives, finances or friends to impose upon for
shelter to 'get up on their feet/ than those who do not become
homeless. This is a theme that will be explored throughout this
chapter and in the remainder of the book.
"No Matter How Bad it is at Home
Its Worse on the Street"
In Metropolitan Toronto, as we have already learned, there are
over 10,000 young people who are homeless. Although under
Canadian law teenagers graduate into adult status at the age of 18,
accommodations under social service guidelines extend this age of
societal protection to 24. While it is rare to see or hear of children
under the age of sixteen on the streets, there are numerous sixteen,
and seventeen-year-olds who inhabit the netherworld of the
downtown core of our cities.
13
 The Yonge Street 'strip' in Toronto is a
collection of strip taverns, movie houses, pornographic book stores,
electronic stores, video game arcades, record stores and restaurants
that stretches from Bloor Street in the north to Dundas in the south.
Homeless teens walk a track that also extends this area to periphery
areas along adjoining Wellesley and Jarvis streets cutting through the
'pink ghetto', an area of gay-oriented business and accommodation
running along Wellesley. In the heat of summer nights gathering
places serve the function of an old city meeting square where
hundreds of gay men crowd the streets or loiter on the steps of the
local coffee shops.
Yonge street is where the teens 'hang out' throughout the day
and night. Unlike conventional citizens who must live by a watch,
homeless teens unless they have acquired shelter that has an imposed
curfew, spend the days and most of the nights engaged in a variety of
activities that are a futile attempt to ward off boredom. This is the
type of boredom generated by a lack of financial resources so that the
vast majority of pursuits we regulariy enjoy, and which generally rely
42 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
upon money, are not open to the homeless teens. A great deal of
time is spent in conversation with other homeless teens in the parks
and parkettes that line or lie a block from Yonge. Alternatively, teens
seek money or connections for drug 'scores' so that they can find
escape from sheer boredom through chemical comforts. This forced
idleness is degrading and teens often feel the pressure of societal
condemnation. Passersby will resort to remarks about their laziness or
appearance and concerned business people have shown a tendency to
telephone the police to roust young transients. Canadians, in common
with their British and American counterparts, have shown a very
limited capacity for tolerance of loitering behaviours both historically
and in contemporary society. Alan Borovoy, the Chief Legal Counsel of
the Canadian Civil Liberties Association contends that this
characteristic makes it difficult for people to engage in behaviours
that are very legal, but simply irritating to specific segments of the
population who will resort to the police to 'hassle' young people, and
other visibly homeless persons.
14
Police officers have an ambivalent attitude towards homeless
teens. For those who are obviously young or new to the street the
police have a policy of resorting to scare tactics to get the teen to
leave the street scene. They are painfully aware of the rapid decline of
young people, and their maturation into adult vices when exposed to
street networks. The police tend to view many homeless kids as a
nuisance that they are called upon to deal with in the absence of
sufficient social work intervention. Despite the existence of
organizations that send workers, often ex-street people themselves,
on a nightly basis to counsel and assist teens to get off the street,
there are simply not enough resources or bodies to do an adequate
job. Police are frustrated by their innate instinct to help on one hand,
and the problems which street kids often present in terms of their
own desires to stay on the street.
When teens arrive on the street it is for a variety of reasons that
we have already discussed. Far and away, however, two reasons
predominate in their drift into streetlife. First, and overwhelmingly
foremost, is a prolonged history of physical and sexual abuse in the
home. Secondly, and relatedly, family troubles characterized by
remarriage situations that do not work out figure prominently in the
stories of many street kids.
15
Once on the street the teen has few of the resources needed for
mere survival. They quickly assess their financial situation and realize
that they are unable to stay on the street without money. As they
'hang out' on the street corners they become recognizable to street
regulars who have regular haunts where they 'hang' with their
Drifting Into Despair ... 43
friends. These street friends are seen as a form of family that will
protect them in situations where they are personally threatened. On
the other hand, this trust does not extend to concerns of money or
drugs where the rule of the street is to trust no one. New recruits can
often contribute financially in their first few days on the street with
money for food, cigarettes, drugs and alcohol, and in some cases
perhaps temporary shelter. However, when their resources dwindle
they are faced with a realization that either they must secure a job in a
low paid occupation (most frequently in a burger restaurant or a
pornographic bookstore) or turn to prostitution to stay alive.
Although many readers might ask why they do not take advantage of
shelters, hostels, welfare and other assistance the answer is quite
simple; many do not realize that such services exist or they do not wish
to deal with bureaucracy. In fleeing the abuse of adults they have no
wish to place themselves under the control and whim of another
group of adult helpers whom they may initially regard as just as
abusive as those they have just shed.
Prostitution offers a form of seeming freedom for runaway
teens. In selling their bodies both girls and boys are able to exert what
they consider to be a form of control over what they are doing.
Although it may sound odd, they can decide which 'John' or customers
to go with, and which may be refused. They are able to barter for the
price of their services. Finally, they claim to be able to make large sums
of money from prostitution that are not available in other forms of
work given their age, lack of education and lack of experience. They
are also free from the perceived restrictions of punching a time clock
or listening to the boss give orders. Many of their references are to
restrictions of time interestingly enough, and this is of importance
given their disdain and ignoring of time, once homeless. These
'freedoms' often referred to by street youth are short-lived. The black
shadow of drug use invades their world as they turn to cocaine, the
favoured drug of young hookers to dull the senses of a degrading
existence. They work impossibly long hours using drugs to keep them
awake as they search for Johns, drugs, food and shelter, often staying
awake for periods of several days. The degree of their needs will
quickly dictate whom they will perform sexual services for and at what
price. It was often surprising to initially hear of the sums of money
made by young teens as they sold their bodies in the headlight glare
of cruising Johns, cars. Figures of $200 or $500 per night are not
uncommon depending upon the age, desirability and negotiating
skills of the prostitute.
15
 Obviously the rule of thumb which
permeates street sales of sex favours the youngest of prostitutes.
Youth, whether on the street, in magazine ads or in most of the
44 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
commercial exchanges in our society motivates middle-aged male
buyers who are overwhelmingly the customers of teen prostitutes
(and purchasers of pornography).
In their search for a release from misery and despair homeless
youth often find a life marred by hopelessness, sexual degradation,
drug use, and transitory acquaintanceships. For all the bravado that
street youth demonstrate in yelling to one another from the doors of
arcades, in leading a kind of circus of the street, their grim reality only
becomes illuminated in the dead of night. As the bars, strip joints and
burger places close their doors after midnight, the world of the
homeless teen who finds himself or herself without shelter, either by
choice or because their are no beds or they have worn out their
welcome at the agencies, begins the night wanderings that
characterize life for homeless youth. Those that are 'lucky' may get an
offer for a place to stay with a 'John' in exchange for sex either at their
home or in their car.
17
 Many wind up resting fitfully on park benches,
curled up on the heat grates or shivering in the cold as the iron grates
impress a pattern in their backs. Some gather in the all-night
restaurants where they chat, smoke and drink coffee, nodding off on
the hard stools waiting for daybreak and the opening of the first
burger place.
From lives of sexual, physical and mental abuse they have
moved to a world of violence, unforgiving and quick to age them. For
some, they are a lost generation, joining those children who subsist
on food bank donations and who have little stake in a society that
they perceive as having turned its back on them. Few have any idea
anymore about what having a 'home' is. It is like some distant shore
that they have never seen, an ideal that can never be realized.
"Home" said one young man, "Home is where someone else lives."
"Life Has Not Always Been Kind"
She calls out to the man on the street,
Sir, can you help me?
It's cold and I've nowhere to sleep,
Is there somewhere you can tell me?
He walks on, doesn't look back,
He pretends he can't hear her,
Starts to whistle as he crosses the street,
Seems embarrassed to be there.
18
Drifting Into Despair ... 45
A teenager, 16 years of age sits on the pavement at
Yonge and Wellesley. He is wearing jeans, a t-shirt and a
summer jacket. The temperature is well below zero. He
holds up a sign that reads, "Would rather beg than
steal." Few stop to throw money into the cardboard box
at his feet.
On Yonge at St. Clair it is Sunday morning. A man of
twenty crouches against a lampost. A sign is wedged in
front of him, "Will work for food."
A deaf woman tries to stop pedestrians to ask for spare
change. She is pushed unceremoniously out of the way or
avoided physically.
These are all faces of homelessness that have become familiar
on Canadian streets in the past decade. Scenes of despair and
hopelessness that are repeated daily in ever increasing numbers.
It is winter in Toronto and the temperature has fallen well
below the freezing mark. Christmas is only a few days away. On
fashionable Bloor Street a jewellry store displays watches in its
windows that are priced at $10,000. A few yards away a woman stands
trying to find shelter from the stark and chilling wind. She is around
50 years old, but there is no way to tell accurately for the street ages
people well before their time. Her clothes consist of a worn ski jacket
whose colour has faded with overuse and lack of cleaning, a pair of
leisure slacks, ill-fitting, suited to summer wear, and a red woolen
toque drawn low across her ears. Beside her a restaurant, warm food
and warmth beckoning to passersby. She holds a sign in her shaking
hands that few bother to read. The sign says simply, "Life has not
always been kind, can you help?" Few stop to give her some change,
she is left to freeze in the howling winter winds, a woman, ignored by
her fellows, invisible in her despair.
There is a sense in which people feel that the homeless will
somehow drag them literally away from their lives, that perhaps it will
as one homeless woman expressed it, "rub off". Perceptions of the
homeless as derelicts, alcoholics, or mentally ill and hence
unpredictably violent individuals pervade pedestrians' views of the
homeless. This is nowhere more amply illustrated than in the case of
homeless women who seem to engender a greater wrath than that
visited on their male counterparts. As in most areas of human
interaction, women find themselves the object of intense scrutiny,
anger and violence. Exposed on the street, women bear a form of
double stigma, that is, they are seen as having failed in the roles
46 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
ascribed to women as caregivers and nurturers of life, and secondly,
they have failed to stay off the street. This additional burden colours
the views many hold of women on the street. There is an assumption
that the women are sexually available due to their disenfranchised
status. This is particularly true of young women on the street.
Homeless women present two extremes of street life if we wish to
consider the stereotypes which persist in our visions of the homeless.
Young women quickly become the objects of intense efforts to move
them into a career of prostitution or they move towards this role
because of the need to survive. Older women are seen as 'bag ladies' a
term which has developed due to their habit of carrying their personal
possessions with them in numerous plastic shopping bags. Our vision is
quite myopic; we see individuals who fit these roles, and they in turn
reaffirm our conceptions as accurate. Although I would not want to
argue that these two types of women do not exist amongst the
homeless, it is naive to assume that most, or many, 'fit' into these
limited categories.
One Canadian researcher, sociologist Lesley D. Harman,
conducted an in-depth study of women using a Toronto women's
shelter. She found that homeless women are both "visible" and
"devalued" in our urban centres. Harman argues that the anomalous
nature of homelessness for women is contextualized with normative
prescriptions regarding the "normal" roles allocated to women in
patriarchal social relations. Women's homelessness is thus unnatural
within this taken-for-granted ideology which permeates male-female
relationships and perpetuates mens' ability to exercise dominance.
While a woman's place remains stuck within the domestic home both
literally and figuratively (despite outside employment) then visibly
poor homeless women contravene this cultural stereotype. Moreover,
moving beyond Harman's argument one can argue that homeless
women's presence in 'deviant' spheres mounts a direct challenge to
this established hierarchy. This is what Harman describes as "the
unexpected appearance of women in the public world."
19
Men have long been a central feature of homeless life in North
America as I have already argued. "Hobos" for example, have been
glorified in song and story, and are thus "normal" in the world of
street life. Women homeless are newcomers and our cultural
vocabulary has struggled to fit, or more accurately to exclude, them
from popular images which are informed by reality. As Harman
argues, the sight of poor, alone, destitute, cold and hungry women
literally embarrasses and disgusts us because of its eradication of the
image of women as mother, homemaker, and anchor of family life.
Further, we are likely to resort to concocting understandings which
Drifting Into Despair ... 47
are likely to frame the woman within a model of personal pathology.
We resolve our confusion in interpreting the presence of an
abandoned and degraded woman by "blaming the victim," arguably
the most expedient and least socially challenging route. The message
of Phil Collin's Grammy award winning song, the most popular tune of
1990, underscores the patriarchal relation evident in women's
homelessness as well as bringing recognition of the plight of homeless
women to the forefront of our consciousness:
She calls out to the man on the street,
He can see she's been cry in;
She's got blisters on the soles of her feet,
She can't walk but she's tryin'.
You can tell from the lines on her face,
You can see that she's been there,
Probably been moved on from everyplace,
Cause she didn't fit in there.
20
ATeenaged 'Woman' on the Street
Lisa is seventeen, and left home after her father moved in a
new girlfriend. Lisa and the girlfriend didn't get along. After weeks of
constant fighting she left her Mississauga middle-class home and hit
the streets. She is getting ready to go out to the streets for a night of
'carousing' as I interview her in a women's hostel. She is well-dressed
in an expensive black blouse with matching mini-skirt. Lisa has long
dark hair to her waist and is very attractive. 'Everyone says I'm
beautiful' she laughs. She is lacing up her full-sized Dr. Martin boots as
we talk.
Lisa is typical of a portion of the young women who have
begun to appear on the streets of our cities. She is not from a lower
socio-economic class background. She is not heavily involved in the
drug scene, 'only a bit of grass for recreation', and she is street smart
enough to avoid the pitfalls of drifting into or being propelled toward
prostitution as a way of survival. "Oh yah, I'm asked all the time if I'll
do it with someone, but there's no way. I've got boyfriends who'll buy
me stuff if I want it, but there's no way I'm going to sell my ass." For
Lisa, homelessness is a transitory state. She has left the parental home
with few resources. She has a high school education, but is cogniscent
that this will not get her far in terms of employment." Look, I slept out
on the street the first few days out, but it was just a kick. I met some
good buddies, good people, and they help me out if I need it. I got in
48 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
here, and now I'm going to get some job training and get a place of
my own."
Lisa has a job placement interview in a few days from our
discussion. At that time she seemed confident of getting a job soon
and leaving the hostel. The hostel, which services women only, has a
three month stay policy, after that she must move on, if not to her
own accommodation then to another of the hostels that service
young women only. At the end of the summer, a month after the
interview, I meet Lisa in front of the City TV studios on Queen street in
Toronto. She is standing near the windows trying to peer in at the
shows which are taped a few feet away. She has not been successful in
getting a job, and is still a resident of the hostel. Although she insists
she has not given up hope she is 'wasting' her days listlessly standing
near the television station hoping that she will 'meet a star who'll like
me.' Her fantasy is far removed from the world of the women's hostel
where she beds down each night, and from the middle-class home in
suburbia that she abandoned three months ago.
Women and Homelessness
A growing proportion of women who find themselves
abandoned to the world of the street are driven by marriages that
have failed or relationships that have disintegrated. Spouse battering
or domestic violence has become a significant phenomenon in our
society. Over the past two decades with the progression of the
womens' movement coupled with increasing academic and popular
interest in the area of violence against women, we have come to
recognize the widespread nature of this form of social abuse.
Throughout Canada, hostels specifically designed for women and
their children escaping violence have been set up. The number of
these hostels has grown over the last decade as officials from all levels
of government have begun to acknowledge the unacceptability of
violence towards women. Bob Rae's NDP government in Ontario
recently set aside some $3 million dollars for initiatives in both
housing and research to tackle this social problem.
Battered women represent a special category of homeless
person. Often they have emerged from a long-term relationship that
has been characterized by increasing violence directed towards them.
They often struggle for long periods of time before deciding to leave
their partner. The decision, as are all decisions effecting relationships
of significance, has inevitably been difficult to make. Battered women
are often embarrassed to publicly seek help for a problem that they
may wrongly believe is somehow 'their' fault. In cases of long-term
abuse they may suffer from low self-esteem which makes it painful to
Drifting Into Despair ... 49
reach out for help. In many instances, the spouse may threaten to
come after them and inflict more harm, possibly promising to kill the
person and/or their children as a way of forcing them to return. Many
women who become homeless in this group suffer from a lack of skills
to support themselves. This can include educational deficits, lengthy
periods of time away from the workforce, and problems with
childcare which would permit them to earn a living.
'Safe' houses for battered women are located in most urban
centres and are places where they can regroup and begin the process
of reconstructing their lives. This is a tough battle for most. They must
escape from the mental prison that has held them in abusive
relationships, and seek ways of establishing connections to wider
society. It is a period of transformation of 'self and the building of a
new identity. For most, homelessness is a temporary state lasting
several weeks to several months. The 'permanent' accommodation
that they often find, though, may be substandard and inadequate for
their needs. Escaping revenging husbands who become fixated on
intruding constantly into their lives becomes an horrendous burden to
bear. Most must face it over several years, for although they have
recourse to the police and other agencies, they prove singularly
ineffective when a determined abuser is intent on harassing his ex-
partner. For him, 'ex' is a relative term.
Besides familial violence, the ending of a living relationship
that is relatively positive can still result in a woman falling into the
trap of homelessness. How many women in Canada are involved in
relationships where they are financially quite dependent on the male
they are residing with? Even when a woman is working her salary is,
on average, likely to be far less than that of her male counterpart.
Despite best intentions, and legislative intent, pay equity has not been
realized by the majority of our female working force. When a
relationship ends abruptly, as they often do, a woman may find
herself without the resources to set up a home again. In large
metropolitan areas like Halifax, Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver, the
price of rental accommodation often outstrips the ability of women to
pay for space, that is, if space is even available! With availability rates
hovering at less than 1% in many cities, and the costs associated with
setting up residence, many women find themselves quickly ensconced
within substandard accommodation. Consider the factors that must
be accounted for: moving expenses, first and last months rent,
deposits (whether legal or illegal) and cleaning, let alone the cost of
furnishings, and one has some sense of the enormity of this
transformation which can often cost in the realm of three thousand
50 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
dollars or more. In large cities perspective tenants may be forced to
pay an illegal "finder's fee" tothesuperintendant.
Single women are particularly vulnerable to becoming
homeless when they are laid off or fired from employment. Since
women earn on average some 60% of what their male counterparts
are able to demand, they are less likely to have accumulated personal
assets and savings that will see them through job crises. As I have
already argued, it has been demonstrated that few Canadians report
assets sufficient to survive for more than a few months time. Women
who live on their own, I would assert, are more vulnerable than
couples or single males. When you consider that 56% of single parent
families in Canada are headed by women, and 64.7% of poor children
reside in such families, and that the family members live below the
poverty line, some gauge of the enormity of the problem is readily
apparent.
21
Age is also a significant factor in the drift into a homeless
status. Fully 59% of all the aged poor in this country are women.
22
Prevented by education and a patriarchal, male-dominated society
from taking their proper place within work spheres many senior
women in our country were not able to accumulate savings during
their life time. As they were not employees of a company they are not
eligible for private pension benefits, which often mean the difference
between living in poverty and living well in old age. For many of our
senior women the problem is also one of having been denied
participation in financial decisions during their lifetimes, so that on
the death of their spouse they are not accustomed to budgeting their
funds, or preparing for their future. Those who may live relatively
stable financial lives while their husbands are alive and bringing in a
secondary company pension as well as their own Canada Pension
benefits find that life on a single old age pension is unmanageable. If
they are without assets, namely a house whose mortgage has been
burnt, they may soon find themselves downgrading into cheaper
accommodation, and possibly soon unable to afford reasonable
accommodation. All of us are familiar with senior women in
foodstores purchasing small amounts of food, or even pet foods for
personal consumption, emaciated, ailing, alone, and unable to cope
financially. It does not take an expert in financial management to
realize that even when one has a 'good' pension plan that inflation
can rob it of much of its value over a period of a few years. If one
assumes an annual inflation rate of even 4% (it is currently 6.3%) the
buying power of our pension payment is reduced substantially over a
five year period, particularly if it is not indexed to inflation!
Drifting Into Despair ... 51
In the end these figures lead us to two disturbing conclusions.
First, those who are taking the brunt of the economic pressures on the
poor in this country are women and children. Secondly, single women,
single parent families that are headed by women, and senior women
all are the objects of considerable social apathy and disregard.
Mental illness also has a part to play in bringing women into
the sphere of a homeless existence. Women have, since the
development of psychiatry as a scientific discipline, been the main
objects of psychiatric interventions. Their problems have been subject
to medicalization rather than directing our efforts towards the
structural causes of their illnesses. The history of the treatment of
women under psychiatry is a long and sordid history of subjugation
and abuse that is not simply a long forgotten episode in the treatment
of women. In fact, a simple reading of the voluminous research
literature in the United States can lead to only one conclusion, that
the study of homeless persons in general is largely set within a medical
framework attempting to determine the type and degree of the
mental illness they are suffering from.
23
 Those who have traversed our
busy downtown streets are aware of the seemingly obviously mentally
ill. The woman screaming at the top of her lungs to passersby. The
streetman mouthing obscenities above the din of the cruising traffic.
These are familiar yet misleading examples, which again serve to
reinforce our images of homeless people, and particularly those we
might suspect suffer from mental maladies.
Yet many who are apparently suffering from mental disorder
are merely displaying the signs of normality in a street existence that
demands much of those who must survive on a daily basis. Ask
yourself how you might act if you spent the night sleeping on a park
bench with strangers constantly passing by you. It is not uncommon
for people to approach at three or four in the morning and ask for a
cigarette. If you are lucky the police will not roust you from your
bench. After fitfully sleeping, you must stiffly rise and begin walking,
looking for food, perhaps begging. If you have the energy you might
make one more attempt to hassle with the people at welfare or some
other social service agency. Another long walk in the heat of summer
or the cold of winter and you may be able to see if there will be any
space for you tonight at one of the few womens' hostels in town, that
is, if you did not act out so much last time that they have banned you
from the premises. Under these circumstances how might you behave?
Would your behaviour seem rational or insane, clear-headed or
disordered? Might you not protest verbally at the madness of it all?
We might also remember that the initial assessment of whether
you are disordered will be conducted by police officers. They are
52 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
responsible for the apprehension of persons who are a public nuisance
or are acting in a manner that suggests they are suffering from some
form of mental disorder. This is most pressing when the person is
presenting a danger to themselves or others. Obviously if a person is
holding a weapon and threatening to do injuries to others, or is
making clear suicidal gestures, the police have a legal obligation to
remove the person to a treatment facility. But often senior women
who have no obvious presenting mental illness are brought to mental
health facilities because of a lack of beds for women at city
hostels/shelters and the reluctance of shelter staff to accept women
who are troublesome, unhygienic, or difficult to manage in any way.
A growing number of homeless women are also being drawn,
according to a variety of sources, from the ranks of refugees. The
waiting list for subsidized housing in Toronto during May 1991
included a substantial portion of immigrants, both male and female.
Refugees often arrive in this country with few resources either
financial or personal. Often they are faced with both language
barriers and cultural differences that place them in a vulnerable
position. They find it difficult to obtain employment other than in
sectors of the economy where work is undervalued, and the
remuneration is not sufficient to 'start' a life in their adopted
homeland.
Lesley: A Homeless Refugee
Lesley's experiences since her arrival in Canada illustrate some
of the typical problems experienced by young women refugees in
Canada. She was raised in a family of nine in her native Jamaica.
Recently her father died leaving the mother with insufficient
resources to care for the family. Lesley is in her early 20s and has a
sister who lives in Montreal. At the encouragement of her sister she
came to Canada and applied for refugee status after a prolonged stay
in the country. Life in Canada seemed much better to her at first. She
shared an apartment with her sister and the sister's boyfriend. This
arrangement worked out for a couple of months until one afternoon
the boyfriend took advantage of Lesley's sister being at work. He said,
"C'mon now girl, you better be good to me." "He wanted to have sex
with me. He said if I didn't do it he'd tell my sister I was botherin'
him." I told him, "No, no way will I have sex." She found herself
uncomfortable in the home, and after her refusal to have sex with the
boyfriend he began to make life miserable for her. He finally
presented the sister with an ultimatum, and since her sister was
financially reliant upon the boyfriend, Lesley was forced to leave.
Drifting Into Despair ... 53
Lacking resources and a job she was able to get a place to stay
in a hostel run by a church group in Ottawa. She stayed there for a few
weeks but found the conditions difficult. The sleeping arrangement s
were dormitory style, and mixed 'normal' women, with the mentally
disordered as well as alcohol and drug abusers. Her sleep was
constantly disrupted by the moaning or screams of other women.
"Women would be moanin' and groanin' all night long. They would
steal your shoes if you didn't leave them on. A lot were sick, sick in
their head and would act strange. Oh and the smell was so bad from
some." She decided after a few weeks to travel to Toronto. She was
able to hitch a ride and considered herself lucky to get a low paid job
in a restaurant the day she arrived. She was also able to find a very
cheap apartment and moved in with no furniture.
The apartment was in a small building that she soon discovered
was frequented by drug dealers and their clients. The signs of drug use
littered the halls; old syringes, modified pop tins used for smoking
crack, and other refuse of lives of addiction. She met a young man
who moved in with her, a move that she thought would help her out.
Like many women she thought that partnering would help them both
to achieve stability. "I wasthinkin' and so was he that together we can
work and get it together, like two is stronger than one. Only, he was
like a lot of men; I was supposed to do the workin' and he would do
the spendin."
1
 This relationship lasted a few months and she was able
to accumulate a few possessions and some meagre savings. Her
boyfriend, however, met someone else, and one night when she
returned home from work her apartment had been emptied along
with her bank account which she had co-signed with her boyfriend.
He had also not paid the rent, pocketing the money.
As Lesley was a refugee and afraid of police she did not report
the incident. She was evicted the next day, and made her way to the
hostel in which I interviewed her. She still has her job as restaurant
help and is saving to find another place to live.
Men on the Street
Aside from the period of the Great Depression in the 1930s
when hundreds of thousands of men were thrown out of work in
North America and began to 'ride the rails' to try to find work, young
men have not formed a significant number of the homeless
population. Since the 1980s however, the average age of men on the
street has been consistently moving downwards. By 1990, the mean
age of street men in this country was 29 years. These are men who
cannot be written off as hopeless derelicts or as lazy, shiftless non-
contributing members of our society. While a small percentage of
54 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
homeless men suffer from problems of mental disturbance, and or
alcohol/drug abuse, the vast majority, approximately 80% or more,
are fit and able-bodied.
24
 It is noteworthy also to contemplate that
problems with alcohol and drug abuse often constitute the 'mental'
affliction of a significant proportion of the number of homeless who
suffer from mental illness as such behaviour is often classified as a
form of mental sickness by psychiatric authorities and social control
agents.
There are numerous factors that have played a part in the
production of this disturbing figure. First and foremost, perhaps, is the
impact of increasing unemployment in our country. While poverty and
lack of educational attainment can play a key role in disenfranchising
men, it is lack of reasonable employment that caused many of the
men interviewed for this book to be homeless. Outside of Seaton
House in Toronto, I sat and talked with a man from Newfoundland.
Seaton House is the largest facility for homeless men in North
America. It can accommodate some 700 men within its walls. Greg is
26 years old and dressed in neat pressed jeans, a plaid short sleeve
shirt, and clean running shoes. He is well groomed and would fit in
unnoticed on any college campus in the country. He is a bright,
interesting conversationalist and was eager to talk with me. He had
been living in Seaton House for a month when we talked. However he
has 'made the rounds' of the shelter and hostel accommodation for
two years. For him, the experience of homelessness is similar to that of
many other young men. He is bitter that there is little that seems to be
done in terms of providing employment for men in his position. It is
incredibly hard to find work in the economic downturn even though
he has a high school education. During his stay in Toronto he has
applied for some 200 jobs. He has 'been close, a couple of times' but
has never received a job offer.
Greg finds it difficult to even apply for jobs. On top of the
depression which comes with each turndown, there is the added
burden of constantly seeking a new place to stay, which takes
considerable time and effort. The ordinary tasks of life that make
many of us cringe take inordinate amounts of time and ingenuity to
complete for a homeless man like Greg. First, he must find paper, pen,
envelopes, and postage to apply for jobs. There has to be a place to
write out the application, so this means a walk to the library, the local
McDonalds, (The 'McOffice' of many homeless) or to 'Beat the Street'
a storefront agency which provides coffee, sandwiches, access to daily
papers, free local telephone calls, and a place to sit down and write an
application out. These are precious resources for homeless people, but
it is often difficult to keep applying for jobs. "A lot of guys just give
Drifting Into Despair ... 55
up, accept it like because you just get so frustrated, you know, there's
just so much a guy can take." Greg also finds that prospective
employers are often positive about his application but react
negatively when they see his address, which must be listed as Seaton
House. "I've had people say to me, 'Well you're just a bum living in a
rat-hole like that. We don't want you."' His spirits have not diminished
completely. He has recently met a young woman who has a subsidized
apartment. " If things work out, we'll move in together. It'll give me a
start. That's all I want."
There are many lost dreams in the stories of the homeless.
Young men who emigrate to the big cities of Canada: Toronto,
Montreal, Vancouver, Halifax, looking for a new and exciting life, a
chance at success that they have just dreamed about, or seen on a
television set. They come from small towns across Canada, the rural
heartland that is dying a slow and painful death under the onslaught
of high interest rates and the encroachment of large corporate
resource users. David, a goodlooking 20-year-old has come to
Vancouver looking for a job. He had been living with a family who
were friends of his mother after the divorce of his parents, and the
arrival of his mother's boyfriend left him 'odd man out.' He wanted to
come to the city to make a fresh start, hoping to get a job and settle
in. He rented a bachelor apartment in the downtown core with most
of his savings and set about looking for a job. After several weeks of
fruitless search he had also found his nights disturbed by the antics of
the landlord's brother who lived upstairs from him. "The brother
spent his nights listening to heavy metal music at mega-volume and
imbibing as many drugs and forms of alcohol as he could stand." One
evening when he was out the brother 'borrowed' the master key for
his flat and removed all of his valuables, including his life savings,
which as meagre as they were, he had not bothered to deposit in the
bank. That night he complained to the landlord who told him 'to get
the fuck out'. David did not complain to the police, a route that he
thought would prove fruitless. So, David found himself without a
place to stay, with his dreams in ruins.
When I talked with David he had been in the hostel system for
three months. He found himself unable to go out to look for work.
Demoralized, victimized, and too embarrassed to go to his family for
assistance he found himself 'dreaming' his days away walking in the
downtown areas of Vancouver. Although he still has hopes of
recognizing his dreams he finds himself unable to work towards them
at the present. In this, he is no different than many of his
contemporaries who were interviewed for this study. The 'drift' into
homelessness is a time of relative frenzy while a person tries to use
56 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
every resource at their disposal to 'stay afloat.' This activity occupies
the days of the pre-homeless. However, when an individual finally
finds themselves on the street, they experience a shock not dissimilar
to that reported by victims of personal crimes. David described it like
this, "When I walked across the threshold of the shelter it was like
someone had just hit me in the guts. I felt sick to my stomach. I'd read
about homeless people but they were different, bums, and that
wasn't me. Now, here I was just like them, one of them, a bum. It was
a shock that has left me numb ever since." This precipitous fall from
"fully human status" to that of street person leaves the individual
traumatized. As David noted, "You know you're at rock bottom but
you just can't shake it. You're homeless, a homeless person, that's your
identity now, everything else just drops away. It's like the rest of your
life never happened." Hostel life has become comfortable for him. It
requires no decisions. A bed, food, a car ticket, perhaps a dollar or two
of spending money is provided and this seems to sustain David as he
regroups emotionally. "It'll probably take me months more to get out
of this rut. I know I will, but it gets harder every day, you get used to
it."
"Troubles" of many varieties also bring men to the street. Crime
and criminal acts are a source of homelessness for many men. Released
criminals often find themselves in facilities for the homeless as they
are without resources following their stay in prison. Shelters and
hostels represent a dubious launching point into full civilian life after
varying periods of institutionalization. Those who have lost jobs may
also find their way to the streets. One man in his late fifties begging
for change on Jasper Avenue in downtown Edmonton had spent most
of his adult life working at a local hotel. They had provided him with a
minimum wage and a place to sleep and eat during several decades of
service. In 1990 he was suddenly informed that the hotel could no
longer employ him. His family had long since passed away, and he
found himself without work, friends, family or resources after a
lifetime of work. The shock had been immense for him as a man
possessed of low intelligence. This had led to severe mental problems
for him. He imagined that his mother was still alive somewhere in the
city where he had grown up, and he began to look for her. "She's on a
bench with me as a baby. She's crying and I must find her, only I can't
remember where the bench is." Upset and alone, he wanders
throughout the city looking for a world that has long since
disappeared, a victim of a world that did not care for his pain.
Old men wander our streets, abandoned, irrelevant, cast as
nuisances, people to be avoided, 'things' of little value for whom little
or nothing can be done. These social castoffs are men who have been
Drifting Into Despair ... 57
made 'redundant' in our society. There are many who have served
their country in times of strife, veterans who now find themselves the
objects of ridicule and scorn. It is educational to watch pedestrians do
their best to avoid the most obviously homeless. People will steer a
path several feet clear of homeless people to avoid having to look at
them directly, and to free themselves of the responsibility of
responding to their requests for a bit of spare change. The elderly
homeless are painful to observe, often dressed in clothing that is
completely inappropriate for the season. Today, in Windsor, it is 28C
and I encountered several homeless men wearing extremely dirty
winter parkas walking the downtown streets. I am uncomfortably hot
in this extremely humid of Canadian cities with only shorts and a t-
shirt on. One can only imagine what this senior citizen must be feeling
like as he half falls and half faints against a convenient light standard.
He is ignored by those on the street. "Another stupid drunk" laughs a
young man loud enough to be heard by the senior as he walks by. His
attitude openly reflects what is felt by many of the other people who
pass him on the street.
No Life for Families
When families join the ranks of the homeless it is not only a
more serious situation because it may involve children, but one that is
more difficult for our existing assistance network to deal with. The
spectre that haunted American newspapers, a picture of two sisters
barely more than seven years old holding a sign reading, 'will work for
food' is becoming commonplace in Canada. The sheer number of
families who are homeless is staggering. Families come to the street in
many of the same ways that other single persons finally become
homeless—under the onslaught of inflation, rising costs, and
increasing unemployment.
Families are often lauded as a centre of safe haven but as
research into wife and child abuse in this country clearly demonstrates
violence is not only commonplace in family life but abusers are drawn
from all socio-economic strata. Every year, for instance, some
hundreds of thousands of Canadian women are assaulted by their
partners, and these are only the number which are reported to
authorities.25 Abuse of children still suffers from social taboos
surrounding the reporting of violence or sexual behaviour against
children to the authorities. One in ten women in Canada will be the
victims of physical abuse this year. Violence, far from emanating from
the street, is more common in households across this country, and can
assume many forms from physical beatings, to psychological abuse, to
neglect.
58 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
The demand for our small stock of shelter space that can assist
battered women gives some indication of the severity of the problem
being generated by violence in our society. In 1985 in this country
110,000 children and their mothers sought refuge in public shelters. In
86,000 cases shelter was being sought because of violent actions by a
male partner. They had to compete for space in the 230 shelters that
existed at that time. Recently,
26
 the Ontario government, responding
to this problem, set aside millions of dollars for the creation of an
enlarged network of shelters for the victims of violence against
women that will begin to have an impact in the coming years.
Reports that emanate from a variety of social work contact
points that deal with battered women also indicate that many of the
children who reside with a battered mother have also been abused.
This abuse can take the form of assaults upon the emotions of
children, physical and sexual abuse. These forms of abuse are the most
common feature of the movement of teens onto the street to escape
the violent family unit.
Families who become homeless together find that another
bodyblow awaits them. There is little provision made across Canada to
accommodate families under one roof, and so the separation of the
male parent into a men's shelter is generally required. This makes
planning a path out of their homeless crisis more difficult and places
an incredible burden on the female parent who must now try to cope
in a shelter with family problems as well as the tensions and stresses
that homelessness produces. She is often in the position also of
having to protect her children from the violence and madness of other
residents of the shelter. Our society, both within shelters and in the
wider public realm, displays a great deal of contempt towards
children. Terrified children in shelters, displaced from their homes
and possessions, separated from their fathers, find it difficult to sleep,
or 'settle down'. Mothers are faced with the impossible task of trying
to take care of their children in cramped and difficult circumstances
that defy our imagination. In the chapters to follow we will explore
the street world of the homeless and the impact of shelter life on men,
women and children who must seek shelter from the storms of life.
CHAPTER THREE
Down and Out in Canada
Once / lived the life of a millionaire,
Spent all my money didn't have any care,
Took all my friends out for a mighty good time,
We bought bootleg liquor, champagne and wine.
Then I began to fall so low,
Lost all my good friends,
And had nowhere to go,
If I get my hands on a dollar again,
I'll hang on till that old eagle grin.
Cause, nobody loves you,
when you're down and out.
In your pocket not one penny,
And as for friends,
You don't have any.
1
"Living on Dreams and Little Else"
The street life of the homeless in this country is an experience
that the average Canadian has little knowledge of. Homelessness,
contrary to stereotypical images that have pervaded our views on
these persons do not underscore the fact that homelessness is more
60 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
than simply a material condition. Far more than this, it is a condition
that saturates the life of those subject to it. To say that the street is
'hard' does not convey the stark realities which the homeless must
confront on a daily basis. While we live in a society in which we have
been socialized, more or less through norms of behaviour, a process
Foucault has termed the production of docile bodies,
2
 many of the
homeless quickly become detached from this reality. The regulations,
conventions and rules that govern our lives and circumscribe our
behaviour become irrelevant for the disenfranchised. Middle-class
standards of behaviour and ideas concerning acceptable behaviour
represent a source of resentment, scorn and bafflement for the
homeless. These rules which appear at the sites where the homeless
must look for assistance are only a source of further alienation.
Homelessness is not a right in society, it is rather the subject for the
ministrations of charity, and the object of intense control efforts.
This implies an element of pathology in the behaviour of the
individual. Although larger political and economic forces may provide
a convenient backdrop for the presenting problems of the homeless,
explanations of their current condition are almost exclusively phrased
within the personal pathology model by social control agents and
agencies. Put another way, the question which this begs is, "What
problem in your behaviour has resulted in your current condition of
homelessness?" Solutions then are seen to arise not by addressing
structural issues that contribute to increasing numbers of homeless,
but in seeking to find resolution through changing the behaviour of
the individual, i.e., seeking employment, dealing with personal
problems, finding more permanent forms of shelter. In other words,
solutions which clearly put the onus back upon the individual to "do
something" about their condition. However, the inadequacy of this
solution is reflected in the high rate of readmittance to shelters, and
histories of long-term involvement with the shelter system on the part
of substantial numbers of homeless.
This chapter examines the street life of homeless Canadians.
Specifically we will explore several representative descriptive and
analytical sketches of homeless existence in Canadian cities.
Sex, Drugs and the Street
Youth Without Shelter is a hostel for teens who find themselves
without a place to stay and who want a break from the intensity of
downtown Toronto streetlife. Located in the far northwest suburbs of
the city it requires some measure of stamina and determination for
street kids to reach the facility on public transport, hitching or
walking. The cul-de-sac street that houses YWS is lined with halfway
Homelessness in Canada ... 61
houses for a variety of societal child misfits, prostitutes, the criminal
and the mentally ill. It is on the park benches that straddle the outside
of the house that I interviewed Cindy. Cindy has jus t recently reached
her sixteenth birthday. That was the day she left home for good.
Although she is sixteen, she gives the appearance of a much younger,
more immature girl and this is reflected throughout in her
conversation. Her voice is high-pitched and childlike. She is full-faced
and is dressed in jeans and a second-hand top that she picked up at
another shelter. After only a few months as a homeless person, she is
already a veteran of shelter life and knowledgeable about the hostel
facilities available to assist her.
Cindy: From Abuse to Abuse
Cindy had suffered through a childhood filled with many of the
problems common to street kids. Her mother and father were
physically abusive and negligent when it came to her care. She was a
latch key kid from an early age and the focus of constant beatings.
"My father used to belt me all around the house, and my mother too.
Nothing I did was right." Cindy suffered through the abuse for years
and her performance at school was "poor". She failed several times
and felt she had few friends. Then began the abuse that would cause
her to leave home. Her father entered her room one night,"He had
this funny kind of look on his face. He told me to shut up or else he'd
hit me...anyway he raped me." The incest continued for several
months; "He kept coming into my room late at night. He told me if I
told mom he'd kill me." When Cindy finally did approach her mother
with the story her mother turned on her; "She started yellin' and
screamin
1
 'You're a tramp, you liar, you're always telling lies.'" Her
mother physically assaulted her once again, and it was at this point,
with no support for her and the prospect of future sexual assaults now
ensured, that she decided to leave home.
When she 'hit the streets' she soon discovered that there were
no jobs available for unskilled and ill-educated sixteen-year-olds,
especially one that looked all of thirteen. But it only took a few days
before a 'friend turned (her) on to hooking.' Within two weeks of
leaving home Cindy was turning tricks on College Street in downtown
Toronto. "The first time I didn't know what to do but the guy was
okay. Pretty soon it got easy, and when I got into drugs it was easier."
On Hooker's Row Cindy dressed to find clientele and they certainly
found her; " I wear a really tight dress with high heels and a top with a
real low cut so that Johns can see my tits cause they're big. I'm kinda
fat but my tits are really good so that gets them in. Most of them think
62 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
I'm twelve or thirteen and I guess its kinda like being with their
daughter, isn't it?"
Cindy is eager in the interview to demonstrate her knowledge
of prostitution, "Well, most of the men you just do them in the car, a
straight blow job for $50 or more if you can get it. If they want you to
go to their house or hotel or something to fuck its $100.1 don't do any
of the kinky stuff like up the ass or anything like that, but most of
them ask."
3
 Cindy has been 'roughed up' by Johns but not seriously
physically hurt. Although she is afraid of the prospect of violent Johns
who might cause her serious damage she also finds a hooker's life to
have a very immediate form of attraction. "You're out on the street
with everybody at night. There's the lights and action, cars, kids all
over the place. You're out till 2 or 3 when business slows down.
There's a lot of freedom in that."
On the other side of a life in prostitution is the spectre of heavy
drug use. The predominant drug of street hookers is cocaine, which
keeps the kids awake, and detaches them from their immediate pain.
The price of cocaine is one of the factors that ensures, despite claims
of making large sums of money on a nightly basis, that hookers never
accumulate any savings. As Cindy explained, "Like you get blow
whenever you can. Do a trick, get some blow, and on and on." When
cocaine is not available or money is short, hookers will turn to
marijuana and alcohol. All of those interviewed for this book saw the
drugs as a way of dulling the chilling reality of degrading themselves,
in a sense repeating their own various victimizations while viewing
hooking as 'freedom.'
The freedom of the street, most are astute enough to realize, is
short-lived and largely illusory. Money made is soon spent on drugs,
short frenzies of spending on expensive hotel accommodation and
food, the need for new clothing almost constantly due to a lack of
laundry facilities, and the need to appear attractive to customers. As
Cindy had already concluded after a relatively short period of time,
"spending my nights in the front seat of a car with my mouth on the
dicks of all these married guys," that the freedom was bought at the
expense and the sacrifice of much of her remaining dignity and self-
respect. Her story, like increasing numbers of those who live on the
street often results in their early death as the victims of drug overdose,
murder, or exposure, or A.I.D.S.
4
Homelessness in Canada ... 63
11
 Boys Town"
Its hard to run when a coat hanger
beats you on the thighs,
Pedro dreams of being older and
killing the old man,
but that's a slim chance he's going
to the boulevard...
Pedro sits there dreaming,
He's found a book on magic in a
garbage can.
He looks at the pictures and stares
at the cracked ceiling.
"At the count of three " he says,
"I hope I can disappear.
And fly, flyaway "
L Reed, 1991.
In every major city in Canada there is a gathering place for
prostitutes that is less well known than the 'track' where female
hookers sell their bodies to an endless stream of slowly cruising cars. In
Toronto, it's 'Boys Town,' a cruel euphemism drawn from a home for
orphans known for its religious affiliations and for a popular movie of
the 1940s. Edmonton has 'the hill/ Vancouver 'the meat strip,' as do
all other cities where boys gather to sell sex. All of these human flesh
exchanges are the juncture at which hard reality closes in on rhetoric
in our society. These are places little talked about and less well
researched. The existence of male prostitution elicits a strong negative
response in our society ranging from public ignorance, through
academic inattention, to political apathy. Homosexuality, in general,
is not a subject with which society feels comfortable; in fact, violence
against gay men has been a source of considerable protest and action
within the gay communities of large urban centres in Canada.
Symptomatic of this unrealistic and unfounded fear of gay persons or
'homophobia,' are gaybashings or queerbashings perpetrated by
groups of young males as a hollow expression of masculinity.
For a large proportion of homeless youth and men, prostitution
is the only avenue for financial survival open to them. Newcomers to
the street find their meagre savings, if they have any at all, last only a
few days before they are broke. Most kids on the street bring little in
the way of social or educational skills with them. They are escaping a
world of adult control or mayhem in which they have not fared well.
...
64 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
Most teens interviewed for this study had little or no awareness of
their eligibility for social assistance payments or of the shelters for
their first few weeks as a homeless drifter. One young man
commented about this lack of knowledge, "I was like livin' in the
doorways up and down the street. I slept on the fire escapes, up on
the roof or in the gutter. Shit, you can't get any sleep like that. The
cops roust me all the time. So finally, a friend clued me in; he said,
'Why don't you check out the hostel brother?' I said, 'What you talkin'
about?' So he told me about it. I never heard the word before. There's
no one to tell you about this stuff."
For a large number of young people contact with social services
or other social control agencies such as the police, welfare, or
Children's Aid is avoided religiously. Their attitude towards adult
caregivers has been formed from the violence, neglect and pain of
dysfunctional and abusing families. Their flight to the street is born of
anger and desperation largely attributable to adults. Therefore, few
seek to embroil themselves in a social control interlude with any
official agents of the state. Those who are alone on the street under
the age of 16 must seek more drastic means to escape discovery by
agents of the state. The law requires that such individuals hold
underage runaways for the police so that they may be taken under
the care of the Children's Aid.
Young males who are without money are easy to spot for
seasoned veterans of the sexual trade. Just as violent criminals
develop an intuitive sense that guides their selection of potential
victims, so the veteran players become sensitized to the point at which
boys are malleable, 'open' to the option of selling sex. Professor Livy
Visano of York University has conducted the most thorough and
probing study of young male prostitutes in Canada. His research
involved following the daily round of activities of his subjects as a
witness to their lifestyles. From his extensive research emerges the
description of this process of conversion into a deviant career. Boys
without money appear at the periphery of the staging area where
hookers conduct their business, joining them in conversation over
endless coffees and cigarettes. Lounging in the fast food restaurants
that are their offices, hookers take needed breaks from sexual
exchanges. Here they spin tales of bravado and daring, aggrandizing
their interactions with Johns retrospectively. Whether they claim to
have received far more for the sex act performed than it was worth,
have robbed, beaten or verbally humiliated the client, they spin their
tales of excitement and adventure. Ultimately they emerge in a self-
portrait triumphant in the midst of their own tragedy. The Johns are
suckers and they are in charge.
Homelessness in Canada ... 65
Sociologist Walter Miller would argue they share at least four
of the five classic characteristics of working class culture that he
developed in his theory.
5
 The hookers value toughness, excitement,
autonomy, trouble and smartness in the street sense. Free to
improvise since the only witnesses to the tricks they turn are
themselves, degradation becomes reconstructed as power over the
John. For potential new recruits, the lifestyle becomes synonymous
with freedom, control of one's fate, and power over adults. The
moment-to-moment life of hooking, fraught with danger and
excitement in these accounts, becomes equated with that of rock stars
or celebrities. As one young man patiently explained to the
researcher, "Hey, I work when I want, sleep all day, up all night, just
like Jon Bon Jovi. Plenty of the three C's; cash, coke and chicks. How
many dudes live that life?"
Despite engaging in sex with several men on an almost nightly
basis most male prostitutes adamantly maintain that they are
heterosexuals. Their male-to-male exchanges are characterized as
'situational' sex like that experienced by prisoners subject to a same
sex environment who revert to heterosexuality upon release. Hookers
claim that when their street days are over they will resume
heterosexual liaisons, although the incidence of A.I.D.S. in prostitutes,
often cited as a crossover point for transmission of the deadly disease,
makes assertions about a future life of marital bliss seem highly
unrealistic. Surprisingly, many claim to have 'girlfriends.' While young
women do hang around with them in the all-night joints, few
confirmed that they accept this status. Any encountered by this
researcher were either hookers themselves or indicated they were
simply platonic friends who enjoyed being near to the seamy side of
life. None confirmed the assertions of the male hustlers. Similarly,
there was no indication the boys were interested in any kind of sexual
liaison . "Joey gets blown or screwed all night by his Johns. He's got no
time for sex with anyone else." "Besides," she added, "I don't need
A.I.D.S. from those queers (Johns)." In fact, we know very little about
the post deviant lives of former hookers who leave the trade.
As young males soon discover prostitution represents a bleak
and desperate form of bare survival despite its seeming promise of
excitement and freedom. Mike, a 17-year-old with two years of street
experience described the dark side of hooking as we talked in a men's
shelter, "No one gives a shit when you're hustlin' your ass, no one
really watches your back, you're on your own. You go with some guy
in a car, he blows you, you suck him, maybe, and you're out. But you
never know when a trick will go bad, get violent. You use drugs or
booze to get high, eat garbage, feel sick a lot...If the cops aren't
66 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
hasslin' your butt, then some other guy is on your case." Despite two
years of prostituting Johnny is living in a homeless youth shelter with
no money. He dreams of going to the country and escaping the street.
Still he is aware that his behaviour may bring disaster; "I get tested for
A.I.D.S. every three months. I figure one time my number will be up
cause sometimes you don't make the guy wear a "safe," either cause
you're too high to give a shit or he's paying for the privilege." His
situation reflects the contradictions inherent in one form of homeless
life where despite earning a substantial amount of non-taxable
income prostitutes still remain trapped in a cycle of transient
homelessnessand personal degradation.
Tracks and Trannies
Another group of homeless persons who reside in the sexual
periphery of Canadian city life are the transvestites and transsexuals
who are familiar figures on late night downtown streets. They form a
colourful part of what author John Rechy has termed 'the city of
night/ a world which the average citizen is not aware of, or has only
glimpsed the periphery of. Transvestites are males who derive sexual
gratification from dressing in women's attire. Transsexuals are
distinguished from this former group as men who are 'trapped' within
the wrong gender body according to Canadian sociologist Robert
Stebbins.
6
 Significant numbers of transsexuals undergo a series of
surgical interventions that result in their conversion to 'females,' that
is, surgically constructed women. This involves the removal of the
penis and the construction of a vagina, as well as breast implantation
and numerous forms of plastic surgeries to develop a female
presentation of physical self. While in the 1960s the first of these
transformations was considered experimental and bizarre, such
surgery is now commonplace.
7
 In order to qualify for surgery
perspective patients must live as women for a two-year period before
the difficult and painful procedure can be performed. It is during this
time, while living as pre-operative transsexuals in a state of temporary
transvestism, that most fall prey to the problems of homelessness.
In downtown streets wedged between the 'gay ghetto' and the
local cruises, transvestites and transsexuals join in a nightly parade
starting roughly at eleven o'clock. Obviously their appearance at late
hours in locations off but close to main drags is neither random nor
frivolous. During the 'parade' several dozen "T and Ts" strut in full
female dress on designated streets. To the undiscerning they may
appear to simply be prostitutes, yet further observation quickly
reveals that they exhibit as Stebbins has pointed out, overly feminine
attributes accentuating their movements, wearing heavy makeup,
Homelessness in Canada ... 67
and speaking inappropriately loudly ( a common practice among most
street groupings). The veil of night provides cover for the deviant
behaviours they will feel free to engage in unconstrained by incessant
interruptions by uninformed 'day trippers.' Both of these groups
survive by offering sexual services since their choice to 'live the life'
means that their chances of obtaining and holding most jobs are quite
low.
The need to 'cross-dress' in the clothes of the opposite gender
also creates substantial problems in terms of their housing choices.
Few landlords are tolerant of sexual diversity when it is transparently
visible, and the financial and employment problems of both groups
make them poor risks as tenants. They form part of the economically
underprivileged and socially marginal subculture that often band
together for a temporary escape from homelessness. A common
practice of 'trannies' is to rent an apartment, and immediately move
four or five other 'girls' in to share costs. Apartments act as a
convenient location to entertain customers for quick sex. This practice
is akin to that of welfare recipients who piggyback numerous others
into their subsidized housing.
Small enclaves of "T and Ts" can be found living in the larger
parkland areas of Canadian cities. In Toronto's High Park I observed,
and was able to later interview, several who camp out in secluded
areas, living rough in the undergrowth. Barry Snodden, a teacher and
former streetworker who volunteers much of his spare time to finding
runaway kids, was a knowledgeable guide to the hiding places of the
homeless. "I knew one young kid who was 17. His father kicked him
out of the house after he came out and told him he was a transvestite.
The father wouldn't have anymore to do with him, cut him off
completely, and told him he never wanted to see his face again. I
found him cold and shivering in the rain down here under the bushes
with a little dog huddled up against him, the two of them shivering
together. He was dressed in womens' clothes and hadn't eaten in
three or four days."
Many who live in the forested valleys of city parklands create
small cubby holes made of twigs, papers and discarded plastic under
the shelter of bushes or trees. One usually has to crawl in under bushes
through a entrance only big enough to accommodate the body into
an inner sanctuary. Abandoned living areas display the trappings of
homeless life; remnants of fires to ward off the chill of the night, old
food containers, bottles, and discarded pieces of womens' clothing.
The number of these scattered throughout the park when Barry and I
investigated and the presence of several homeless 'campers' indicated
that several groups were regularly bedding down in the park. A
68 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
regular figure in the park for many years, Barry led me through the
world of those who are marginal even in the world of the homeless.
For many of the transvestites and transexuals the world of
homelessness persists throughout the transformation process, and
after. Trapped in a body that is neither male nor female they are
denied access to full legitimate status within our society rendering
them outsiders who have little hope of acceptance in wider society.
They share a marginality with other homeless subcultures that
effectively stigmatizes their behaviour, leaving them outsiders in our
culture.
Street Families
For city dwellers the sight of small groups of street kids hanging
out in the city centre in parkettes, on benches, in fact in any
convenient resting place, is a familiar motif. Homeless youth, as we
have already learned, almost universally share a background
characterized by some form of familial abuse. Fleeing neglect and
abuse they are in the initial stages of their adaptations to street life,
solitary and guarded, avoiding much human contact except that
which is necessary to survival. For many, the family is a symbol of
violence and maltreatment, a maelstrom of hurt, anger and
depression that they are relieved to have escaped. For most, this has
been a long process of decision-making as they struggle to come to
terms with the fact that in a society that continually makes reference
to the family unit as the pillar of our society they have been caught
within the seeming abnormality of a severely dysfunctional family.
Having extricated themselves from the restrictions of adult
interventions, their first experiences of the street often are
exhilarating and washed with the colours of freedom. The suffocation
they have felt within the ruptured family is replaced with a sense of
rebirth. Jody described it in this way: "It was so good not to have
anyone telling me what to do for once. My first couple of nights out I
was just high, super high on the street, no drugs, just the feeling of
being away from all that control."
Before their entry into homelessness young homeless people
knew little of what the life would entail. Most had no idea of the
harshness, violence and brutality that awaited them. For many escape
from their home environment and entrance into a homeless existence
represented the only alternative that was open to them. Wayne, a
sixteen-year-old put it this way: "My old man got a new wife. So they
said, 'Hey there's no room for you here now' and I had to pack my
things and get out." Others flee sexual abuse that can only stop when
Homelessness in Canada ... 69
they leave the home of their assailant and seek freedom from
violence.
The street dwellers they meet validate their feelings of hostility
towards traditional families as they are quickly socialized into a new
way of viewing society. Here, abusive families are the norm and they
quickly find kindred spirits in the late night coffee bars of the
downtown who share stories of their own troubled backgrounds.
Soon they recognize that survival on the street is also linked to an
ability to gather useful information and to ward off serious trouble.
The predominant method of accomplishing these goals was
discovered during the course of my many interviews. There are a
significant though inestimable number of homeless who do not seek
the company of other street dwellers. Essentially these individuals fall
into three groups. First, there are the chronically or sporadically
mentally ill who avoid interaction with other homeless as well as the
rest of society out of a sense of mistrust, paranoia, or inability to
communicate. Their mistrust may be a natural consequence of
numerous unhappy hospital experiences and the realization that
those who often seek to help may actually inflict suffering on the
recipients of their ministrations. One such individual, a man in his 40s,
wandered through a park late one evening as I interviewed a
homeless woman. His voice was raised in a high pitched wail, an
obvious reflection of deep inner turmoil akin to that of someone in
mourning. Wendy, my interview subject, called out to him, "Norman,
Norman, what's wrong?" But he continued walking past us and
continued to wail. Wendy was moved to comment, "He's a victim of
the mental hospitals. Its all the suffering they put him through so
some nights he walks around like this."
Aside from the walking wounded there are those homeless
who simply are independent, whose lifestyle is one that does not
include socializing with others except in the most limited of terms. At
a men's shelter the director pointed out a man sitting in the corner
during free meal time. "That's old Harry. He comes in here everyday
for lunch and dinner. Never says anything to anyone, although he has
spoken with me the odd time. He won't tell us where he lives, and no
one has been able to find out. Some of the guys say he sleeps under a
bridge somewhere but your guess is as good as mine." Many of the
elderly homeless are afraid of involving themselves with others and
for good reason. Many, if not most, have fallen prey to street people
who have befriended them only to rob, beat, assault or threaten
them. The elderly homeless have little recourse to the law. They do
not have the resources to call for assistance, and often their physical
appearance is one that dissuades passersby from viewing them as
70 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
worthy of attention. As Grant put it, "I got robbed by this young fella
and I'm lying on the street beggin' people to help me. You know what
they said, 'Get up old man. You stinkin' drunk.' That's what they think,
if you're old, you're a bum, a skid row type."
Physically infirm and perceived of as dependent and helpless by
most social service and social control agencies, the elderly often fear
that contact will bring attempts at institutionalization. Like the
mentally ill they have come in many instances to fear the 'helpers' that
our society has invested with the task of dealing with its errant
members. Although being homeless is not a crime there are many in
society who view the condition of the homeless as being not only self-
selected but also indicative of a deviant character. The condition of
homelessness in itself seems to give many a licence to degrade, insult
and ridicule those who are already suffering personal hardship. This
process, referred to as victim blaming ties a present social condition to
a presumed pathology within the individual, i.e., this person is
homeless because there is something wrong with them, something
that they can do something about, if they wanted to. It is of course
the very presumption that the homeless are able to simply walk away
from their life condition that ensures that they will often seek ties
amongst those whom they view as trustworthy, that is, other
homeless souls.
Finally, there are those individuals who do not wish to be a part
of society as they are either escaping some past they do not wish
uncovered or because they are simply solitary people who seek a life
unencumbered by responsibility. It is however a misconception to
view the homeless as those who shirk responsibility, as the choice of
this lifestyle really means a change simply to a different set of
priorities and responsibilities. Many of these are much more
immediate and direct. The need for food and shelter predominates in
the lives of the homeless, a theme reflected earlier in the work of
writer Henry Miller.
8
A Bed for the Night
When I'm back on my feet again,
I'll walk proud down this street again,
And they'll all look at me again,
And they'll see that I'm strong...
And I'm not gonna crawl again,
I will learn to stand tall again,
No I'm not gonna fall again,
Cos I'll learn to be strong.
D. Warren^
Homelessness in Canada ... 71
The problems of the homeless are, in a very practical sense,
immediate. The pressing needs for food and shelter make
considerations of getting out of homelessness seem distant and
meaningless. The longer people remain on the street the further
escape from homelessness seems to retreat into an unreachable
horizon. Soon dreams of a 'normal' life disappear for many. The
taken-for-granted reality that we assume everyone shares fades. As
Colin, a shelter resident for several years, explained, it is a
transformative experience. "People on the street aren't really
refugees of society; they're just themselves. . . . they're moving
through the world but they're just not attached to it." As time frames
begin to distort and become largely irrelevant in a life dominated by
enforced idleness, the homeless drift away from the concerns which
preoccupy what one street person calls 'joe citizen.' So as much as the
homeless are 'invisible' for us whether they are indistinguishable
through appearance or we simply choose to ignore them, the rest of
society is just as phantom-like for many homeless Canadians.
In this state basic necessities begin to predominate thought and
actions, and primary amongst these is the acquisition of daily shelter.
Failure to secure lodging for the night means that the homeless must
face a night on the streets, a dangerous and foolhardy exercise. As
most shelter stays are short term, i.e., two or three weeks or less, the
homeless must constantly plan ahead for the next shelter that they
will approach. This constant eviction of shelter residents is intended to
reinforce in a very meaningful and cruel way the dependency of the
homeless person, and to attempt to reinforce the notion that this is
simply a temporary state. It is meant to function as a catalyst for the
homeless person to get their lives on course. Welfare, they must be
constantly reminded, requires that persons demonstrate at least some
intention of rehabilitating themselves.
There are a variety of shelter types in Canadian cities, some set
within a traditional framework of large institutions that deal with
indigent males, and others that provide more innovative forms of
shelter. First, consider the variety of shelters that are available in
Canadian cities, although not on a universal basis, and which fall into
two categories for the purposes of our discussion; traditional and
alternative types:
72 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
Traditional Shelter Types
1. Large institutions for the indigent generally built
following the Second World War and serving up to
700 plus men.
2. Shelters for men associated with religious groups.
3. Shelters and hostels for women age 16-24.
4. Co-operative shelters for teens aged 16-24.
5. Shelters and hostels for women (and in some cases
children) in a mixed environment.
Alternative Shelter Types
1. Shelters for battered or abused women and their
children.
2. Long stay residential apartments for homeless men.
3. Motel conversions for homeless families with
children.
4. Single-room motel accommodation for families with
children.
5. Shelters for native Canadians.
6. Warehouse conversion into divided living units.
Traditional shelters typically have a flexible system of entry and stay.
Persons may stay for a night to two weeks. Near the end of the two-
week period a person may be assessed as to their suitability for a
continued stay. Generally three rules predominate across shelters;
drunkenness that is disruptive, drug use leading to the necessity for
staff intervention, or assaults will result in the person's immediate
dismissal from the shelter. In some cases it may also result in a banning
period of roughly one month. There is considerable discretion given to
admitting staff in these matters. As one shelter supervisor
commented, "Look if its a freezing cold night out, wind howling and
twenty below we can let a guy in to sleep even if he has committed a
serious attack in the past on someone. We give him a bed in the corner
and say, 'Look you stay there and don't move.' If he does cause trouble
he has to go." There are also a large number of men who may move
into long-term residence in institutions making it their home for a
Homelessness in Canada ... 73
period of from many months to twenty years. These men may suffer
from drug/alcohol related problems of a chronic nature, may have
become dependent on the institution, or can have a disability,
whether mental or physical that makes them difficult to place in
accommodations that are more comfortable. The conditions which
these men live in are discussed later in this chapter.
Shelters for teens generally have a short-term stay policy
reflecting an approach that emphasizes the fact that teens are
somehow more salvageable, that is less embedded in the
shelter/hostel system. The fortnightly ejection of the teens appears to
have no other purpose than to shock them constantly, reminding
them of their homeless condition. The idea, reinforced by shelter
workers was not to let the kids get 'too comfortable.' However this
policy has the net result of ensuring that homeless teens have little
chance of securing long-term accommodation as they are constantly
concerning themselves with the two-week mark of their stay when
they will have to move. After only a few days into their stay they are
already on the telephone looking for their next bed. This approach
does nothing more but reinforce the dependency of the teens and
engender long-term dependency, the very state of affairs that it is
intended to short circuit.
Shelters and hostels for women and children in a mixed
environment are facilities where children may be exposed to a variety
of inappropriate or bizarre behaviours. Some of these shelters, which
are hopefully to disappear in the near future, mix women who have
minor to severe forms of mental illness, drug, alcohol and hygiene
problems with women who are quite 'normal.' Many of the women
interviewed for this book made comparisons between various shelters
in terms of the quality of the staff, accommodation, vfood and
assistance offered, but more centrally in terms of the clientele housed
within. While 'beggars' cannot often be choosers, they can be critics
despite the oft-expressed sentiment that they should be silent, and
above all else, grateful. Most had experienced shelter accommodation
that was unsuitable, considered 'dangerous' or that placed
troublesome clientele. They spoke of these problems expressing a
great deal of anger, "Why do they have to put us in with bag ladies
who haven't had a bath in ten years? 's hostel there were
women walking around stinking, yelling at the top of their lungs,
whatever, and you have to share space with them. Can't they figure
out that you need two kinds of shelters, one for ordinary women who
are just having a bit of trouble, and those other ones that really need
help of some kind?" In context, their experiences underscore the
necessity for the provision of various forms of shelter for women that
_____
74 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
can provide flexibility in response. Certainly forcing women who have
a temporary crisis in housing need into interaction with those who
compromise the walking wounded in our society, those with extreme
behavioural problems, seems unnecessary and detrimental to their
attempts to re-establish themselves in the mainstream.
There are several forms of alternative shelter that have
emerged in the 1980s as either responses to specific forms of social
problems, rehabilitative efforts which attempt to empower the
homeless, options that address long-term housing needs, or more
inclusive shelter that can look after families with children. Shelters for
battered women represent a response to increased interest by
womens' groups and the state in addressing the needs of women as
victims of violence. Recent work by sociologists Walter DeKeseredy
and Ron Hinch and others has underscored the centrality of
enlightened response in the form of shelters for dealing with the
aftermath of woman assault. Battered womens' shelters provide
shelter and accommodation centred around the provision of safe
haven for their clients, and are medium stay facilities that women can
use as a basis to reorganize their lives. They serve women and children
from all socio-economic classes as woman abuse is not restricted to
only those who are poor or ill-educated in Canada.
A second form of alternative shelter is that represented by the
mens' shelter in Oshawa, Ontario. Here, the second floor of a short-
stay hostel has been converted into a series of bachelor apartments
for long-term homeless men. This program has enjoyed considerable
success according to the director of the program, Terry Dunn. The
men who reside in the apartments had long histories of homelessness
and many suffered with alcohol problems. Having now found a place
of their own, they have also correspondingly developed lifeskills. They
shop, cook and clean for themselves and several have given up
drinking over a significant period. They are not only proud of their
'homes' but it appears that having been given an opportunity to
develop independence under more flexible support systems, most
have responded positively.
The use of public motels as a means of housing families has
recently assumed a significant role in our response to the homeless in
Canada. Although this trend has been been long entrenched in the
American welfare system where hotels are converted for the use of
the homeless the approach has only emerged during the 1980s in
Canada as the number of homeless families seeking assistance has
expanded substantially. Factors that have produced this increasing
number of homeless families include unemployment, spiralling
accommodation costs in urban centres, the influx of refugee and
Homelessness in Canada ... 75
immigrant families without accommodation, and the increasing
number of marriage dissolutions resulting in one-parent families in
Canada. These motel units were observed by the writer and do not
represent suitable accommodations for families, or families with
children. The motels are used frequently by prostitutes and those
using and selling drugs. On my first visit to one of these areas I had
barely emerged from my car before being accosted by a prostitute
who has just emerged from a nearby room.
This form of motel accommodation may be favoured by two
interest groups; motel owners and the government. For many motel
owners accommodating the homeless represents a significant portion
of the income on otherwise difficult-to-rent units. These subsidies are
guaranteed on a per diem basis. Prostitutes and their customers who
rent rooms in blocks of half an hour or less increase income
exponentially. But the placement of homeless persons in these units,
while arising out of a lack of proper accommodation, underscores the
lack of investment by the provincial and federal governments and
builders, in low cost housing. Surely, the cost of constructing low-cost
permanent housing which provides a greater chance at self-
sufficiency for residents must prove less costly than subsidizing the
motel industry through per diem grants, not to mention quality of
accommodation. Longer-term-stay residences for families with
children represent a much more humane and acceptable response.
Shelters for native Canadians are a new development that
reflects an increasing concern by native peoples for the welfare of
their fellows. In several metropolitan areas including Toronto,
Winnipeg, Saskatoon, and Regina there are short-term-stay shelters
exclusively for the use of native peoples. These facilities offer not only
a bed but counselling from a traditional native perspective, and
assistance in picking up the pieces.
Finally, one of the more innovative attempts to bolster the self-
esteem of the homeless and provide an innovative form of shelter is
that represented by 'Cityscape' in Toronto. In a leased former
warehouse homeless persons have renovated the interior of the
structure and built small living units partitioned by plywood. This
home structure is a subculture of homeless people who live in, and
supervise, the activities of residents.
In order to more fully appreciate the quality of life within
shelters in Canada the following section will provide an in-depth
sketch of life within three types of accommodation; the large
institution; the teen shelter, and long-term motel accommodations
for homeless families. This will provide coverage of three groups who
76 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
now figure significantly in the composition of those who seek shelter
in Canada.
Mammoth Institutions-Seaton House
Toronto's Seaton House is the largest mens' shelter in North
America. Situated on George Street in the central core of the city, it is
surrounded by dilapidated rooming houses, provincial court
buildings, and streets that provide tracks for hookers. Abandoned
houses awaiting demolition line the adjoining streets where drugs
and sex are openly trafficked. The main building of Seaton House is an
imposing grey concrete structure which is decades old. It has the
appearance of most of the other government buildings in the
immediate area. This facade is cracked when during the afternoon
dozens of homeless men, some dishevelled, some under the influence
of alcohol, many giving the impression of office workers out on a
break, begin to gather on the front lawn and steps. Some lie on the
grass attempting to sleep. They are engaged in waiting for the four
o'clock entry time at the shelter. When, in the summer, large numbers
of men lounge on the grass close to entry time a staff is posted outside
of the entrance to supervise activities. The individual doing this on my
first day at Seaton House presented himself in the manner of a police
officer and was hostile to the men, treating them in a demeaning
manner. He persisted in shouting at the men when he wanted their
attention, and despite three introductions to the writer kept referring
to me as "Hey you". In keeping with the spirit of the work ethic which
pervades the institutional approach to the homeless, men are not
permitted to stay in the facility during the day. At roughly seven
o'clock after two shifts of men have eaten breakfast and have taken
their bag lunch, they are ushered out onto the street both winter and
summer. As an intake worker at another facility observed, "They've
got to show some effort at helping themselves. That's the whole
principle of welfare. You can't just keep expecting a handout so we
want them to look for work."
It is a requirement of most shelters that clients actively look for
work. Residents for admission must fill out job search forms and
continue to do so during their stay, that list all of the job applications
and/or interviews they have completed. Although the intent of this
form is to ensure compliance with the transformation of the homeless
into productive citizens, its function is largely symbolic and frivolous
for many: "For a lot of guys who come through, they've got a problem
that they're not ready to deal with yet whether its alcohol, drugs or
something else, nothing much can be done."
Homelessness in Canada ... 77
Men enter Seaton House primarily by applying for a blue card
through the intake office during the week, while on the weekends
overnight pink slips are issued by staff. The waiting room is a familiar
site to many welfare applicants with a dozen vinyl chairs for clients.
On the several occasions I conducted interviews the room was always
filled with men waiting their turn to receive an intake interview. Men
sit or lie on the floor in a room which reeks of stale body odour,
waiting to be called into the office that can only be accessed through
a locked door, a precaution against hostile applicants. Initially they
experience a cursory interview through one of the two intake 'holes'
which resemble bank tellers' windows but only the top half of the
worker is visible to the homeless person. If they have been admitted
previously their file is retrieved and they are interviewed by a
caseworker after their file has been studied. Privacy is not a primary
concern of the workers or administration as many offices have been
created with the use of acoustic walls and conversations leak between
the 'offices.' Doors on offices were not normally shut during
interviews. As they accompanied the worker to an interview a
common side remark was "Can't get enough of this place eh?" The
implication was clear, the prospective resident had again failed to
improve his position in life and this was the occasion to reaffirm his
dependency and failure. The intake workers review the activities of
the client since his last visit with a particular emphasis on whether
steps have been taken to deal with what the worker perceives to be
their 'problem.' If, as in most cases, the client has done nothing or very
little the worker admonishes him, again reinforcing his condition as a
dependent person. He is literally reduced to a childlike state. One
worker prefaced this portion of the reprimand thusly, "When you
gonna WAKE UP...?" This analogy is particularly potent for it reflects
the disjuncture most homeless feel with the rest of the world. The
conditioning of our society has broken down. They are neither
connected nor 'awake' in terms of our ideas concerning the proper
use of time. One observer, Gerald Fisk, has commented that the
homeless subvert the meaning of time. After this process of status
reinforcement is completed and the client makes a token gesture of
agreeing to 'try harder' 'do better' or 'get (his) shit together' the
worker issues a blue card good for a two week stay.
Once admitted the man must now wait for the four o'clock
'cattle call.' Men interviewed early in the day after processing through
the admittance process were often asked what they intended to do
until four o'clock. The answer was always that they would wander
around the streets, and in the words of one man, "do nothing, kill
time. What the hell else can you do with no money?"
78 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
Sleeping arrangements in the shelter for the men consist of
bunk beds in large, bare rooms sleeping thirty to forty men. There is
considerable competition for upper bunks due to the erratic
behaviour of chronic drunks and the mentally ill, "The first time I came
here, to Seaton like, they let this old guy in at seven. He was a fuckin'
wino. The next thing I know he's pissin into a cup and then, can you
believe this, he drank it! The he pissed all over his bunk. That's why
you go for the top bunk."
Although overt violence appears to be a relatively rare
occurrence given that several hundred men share the shelter there is
considerable concern expressed around the subject of theft of
personal items. Reports of items being stolen were commonplace
amongst current and former clients. Younger men who had stayed at
Seaton House were most critical of it. Stories of intimidation for
money and personal items were commonplace in their accounts of the
shelter. It was common for many to express a strong dislike of the
shelter. Don, put it this way, "We all call it Satan House. It's a fuckin
nightmare. Shit, old guys shittin' in their pants, fuckin' psychos
screamin' at you. A lot of guys get fucked in their . . ., young guys
when they come in cause there's no one around at night. A lot of cons
go there when they hit the streets. Young kids shouldn't be in there. I
didn't sleep at all. I've never been back." While it is difficult to validate
the stories of the teens interviewed theirs was a consistent negative
reaction to the mention of the facility in comparison to positive
comments about shelters for teens which are typically housed in small
houses and where only six or eight people sleep in a room. The sheer
scale of Seaton House is intimidating. Many ex-residents compared it
to a prison or mental asylum, and certainly there are a fair number of
parallels.
As homeless men tend to own very little aside from the clothing
on their back, personal possessions have great significance. They
represent some form of status in the street world and are their last
symbol of material accumulation. In the tribal world of the street,
shoes, socks, warm outer clothing, hats, and mitts are the necessities
of life; without them dignity is again damaged as one has to beg for
more from staff or do without. Doing without can lead to physical
injury very quickly as body extremities become frostbitten, or one
develops blisters due to ill-fitting shoes. "Pretty well you have to tie
things down in here. Shit, they'll steal your shoes, socks, anything they
can get their hands on. You have to sleep with everything rolled up
under your pillow." Few of the men indicated that these conditions
allowed for restful sleep. At night the bunk rooms are a cacophony of
coughs, belches, moans, grunts, screams and noise. The drunks who
Homelessness in Canada ... 79
are not sufficiently inebriated to require staff medical interventions
are free to disturb the sleep of others. Those on drugs or suffering
from various mental disorders also contribute to an atmosphere that
provides fitful sleep. This is why it is common to see men lounging on
their beds from the time they enter the facility in order to gain as
much rest as possible. As Frank commented, "Life on the street is tiring
man, damn tiring."
Men are provided with breakfast and dinner at the shelter and
are given a bag lunch for the day. The food is of excellent quality. A
typical lunch included quiches, salad, yogurt, fruit and beverage.
Aside from ever-vigilant staff who watch for signs of trouble to
provide pre-emptive intervention, and the dishevelled presentation of
a few men, the scene might well be one from a staff cafeteria at any
Canadian factory. One significant difference was noted however.
None of the men engaged in discussion with their companions. There
was a sense throughout the building, echoed in the non-
communication of residents, of personal isolations reflecting perhaps
the felt isolation from society in general. Rather than comraderie
amongst the men there was in their faces and actions the
unmistakable mark of the beaten down, powerless to reject their own
rejection.
In many shelters of this type there is a common television room
in which a large screen TV is switched on constantly. The volume is
turned on low and the men sit, lounge and sleep on the cast off
furniture that typically adorns the room. There is a great deal of
symbolism in this form of decoration which the poor across Canada
are familiar with. The homeless exist as societal castoffs marooned in a
world of material possessions thrown away by society much in the way
we delegate the homeless to the position of a throwaway person.
Again, few men in any of the 'lounges' I visited spoke to one another.
There are few attempts to change the channel and men content
themselves with whatever program happens by chance to appear.
Seaton House also has a long-term residence for over three
hundred men. Here men who have developed what may be termed a
chronic dependency in the shelter system are housed. Men pay rents
that are linked to income, so that a person with no means of support
does not contribute to his upkeep, while those with a variety of
income (pensions, disability payments etc.) pay up to $600 per month.
In this residence men receive a bed and all meals. If a man has no
income then he receives $105 per month to cover his personal needs.
This is supplemented somewhat through a tuck shop that sells
toiletries and personal items at wholesale cost to residents. Tobacco is
a major item of expenditure for many residents.
80 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
The conditions in the residence are a source of some
contradiction. Much attention is paid to the cleanliness of halls and
living spaces, which are immaculately clean. The appearance is one
reminiscent of Canadian hospitals from my youth or many of the
mental institutions in contemporary Britain. The building is tired, the
walls painted alternatively institutional green or yellow. Long-term
residents live for the most part in rooms with six to eight men. There
they are provided with a stark bunk, locker and lock and a grey metal
night table. Conditions are far more crowded than in a hospital ward
and conditions far more stark. There are virtually no decorations in
any of the rooms. There is no sense that one is in a place that is
'homey' in any real way.
Men lounge on their beds in this facility as they are not
required to leave the premises during the day. Residents sit lining the
halls, lounge on their beds, or lay sleeping with the covers pulled over
their heads at mid-day. There is absolutely no privacy in the building
and all but a few doors are constantly open. Men linger in the doors
of the room like phantoms in some menacing human cuckoo clock.
Readers familiar with the movie Awakenings would not feel out of
place walking the halls of this museum of human alienation. Disabled
men share one large room with ten beds. Again, men lingered in their
wheelchairs, few, if any, conversing, many with absolutely nothing to
occupy their time.
What is more disturbing is the realization that many of the men
who are resident have been at Seaton House for many years. One
resident I encountered had lived there continuously for twenty years.
While it is obvious that many of the men have developed institutional
syndrome and would find it difficult if not impossible to function in
the outside world, a visit to the residence is a profoundly disturbing
experience even for a writer who has visited many such places
internationally. Men who reside at Seaton for long periods may
become staff trustees. They are then accorded a position of some
authority whether it is running welfare applications to the downtown
office or manning the resident's laundry facility. For these
contributions they are paid approximately $6(i every two weeks in
addition to the $105 they normally receive. The jobs bring a sense of
self-worth to men although little enumeration for what often
amounts to a full day's work.
There are real attempts made by the staff to make life more
tolerable for the men. There is a billiards room and a new recreation
room is being installed. There is a doctor who visits regularly, an on-
staff nurse, and a staff who co-ordinate recreational activities. Men
Homelessness in Canada ... 81
are encouraged to participate in the monthly field outing, and busing
is provided to get the men out into the community.
Although many of the residents are senior citizens they are not
transferred to seniors' residences. This reflects the stigma attached to
persons who have been admitted to Seaton House. "The seniors
homes don't want to look at our men. They want guys who've worked
for twenty years, lived in the suburbs, good citizens. The guys in here
have some kind of problem, some behaviours that can't be tolerated
in most of these places. So, once a man is brought to our door, that's
it, no other place will touch him."
Season House meets many of the immediate needs of homeless
men for food and shelter but its mandate stretches little beyond this
due to a lack of adequate funding. The lives of the men who come
through its doors are often filled with despair, personal failures and
rejection by society-at-large. Despite its imposing and impersonal
character, it has not been able to dull the essential worth of the
majority of its residents.
Teen Shelters
Teen shelters serve a specific age category of homeless young
people. Although the term teen shelter is one that is most commonly
applied by workers and clients, this type of shelter services adolescents
and young adults age 16 to 24 years. Children under the age of 16 are
the responsibility of the Children's Aid Societies. Legally in Canada
one becomes an adult at the age of 18 for the purposes of the
Criminal Code and voting. The age range covered in this mandate
reflects solely the funding criteria of social service departments that
will not fund on a per diem basis after the age of 24. One might argue
that this effectively extends the age of dependency by six years.
Throughout the research for this book I could find no reasonable
explanation for this cut-off point. How crucial an issue is this? For the
homeless it means the difference between accommodation in small
scale shelters with groups of six to eight people in one room (and in
the case of shelters for young women 2 or 3 persons) or a bed in a
large scale institution.
Teen shelters are for the most part located in downtown areas
of cities, which reflects their connection to the demands of street life.
Some shelters, such as Toronto's Youth Without Shelter have located
purposely in the suburbs of the city more than an hour's ride by public
transport away from the downtown area. It is argued that removal
from the core may offer an opportunity for asylum from the streets,
away from the influence and demands of street culture, a chance to
82 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
'break the cycle' of homelessness. Others such as Mercury House, Stop
86 and Covenant House are located in the heart of the city.
The quality of accommodation offered in teen shelters is
comfortable, and the majority of shelters also offer a wide variety of
counselling-life skills, employment advice, help in finding housing,
vocational and educational referrals, family reconciliation and
medical services in addition to a bed and food. However, like their
'adult' counterparts much of the day of those in the teen shelter is
spent for the most part out on the street in disconnected activities, or
when permitted, idly sitting and chatting with other residents. The
teen group is more active than their older male counterparts but
despite the show of energy very little seems to get accomplished on a
daily basis. As most co-operative shelters are two-week-stay residences
it means that teens are, once again, hardly settled before the task of
finding the next shelter lifeline occurs. The kinds of problems that this
population exhibits are hardly conducive to resolution in a matter of
days, and so staff, despite their best efforts, express an inground
apathy tempered by the day-to-day experience of attempting to
motivate their charges.
Their efforts are futile in the area of counselling; streetwise
kids of only a few months experience are far more skilled at
manipulation and gameplaying than their young staff counterparts.
At one of the shelters I visited there were severe rules regarding
physical contact between any residents. This however proved to be of
little impediment to the residents. As Polly commented, "When me
and Terry want to get it on we just sneak upstairs to the bedroom.
Someone looks out for the staff so we don't get into trouble." Despite
the rules prohibiting sexual relations or even touching, which would
result in immediate discharge, Polly and Terry had formed a
relationship, regularly engaged in sexual liaisons on the premises, and
were planning to move into a basement apartment together. Polly,
despite her street experience, had also been the victim of
manipulation by Terry. Another resident, well aware of their
relationship, pointed this out: "Terry, he's a pimp man. He's just
lookin' to turn that chick out and in a few weeks she'll be workin' the
street for him."
Most teen shelters reflect the rigid rules that parents impose on
their children despite the fact that their clientele are often well past
the age of majority, plus several that reflect the violence which can
pervade street interaction. Here are a list of infractions from one
shelter that result in the immediate removal of the individual:
Homelessness in Canada ... 83
1. Having alcohol or non-prescription drugs on the
person.
2. Use of drugs or alcohol in the building.
3. Being caught with a weapon on the premises.
4. Smoking in the shelter.
5. Sexual interaction.
6. Involvement in violence or threats.
7. Vandalism.
8. Involvement in behaviour that necessitates the
calling of police.
9. Noisy or disturbing behaviour in the neighbourhood.
These rules may be necessary. However, there is a list of a further
sixteen offences which are "warnable." Any person who accumulates
two warnings is subject to immediate discharge. These 'offences'
consist of:
1. Being late by 1/2 hour for curfew.
2. Being 1/2 hour late for supper.
3. Refusing to obey staff instructions.
4. Verbal abuse of staff or clients.
5. Being in someone's bedroom or standing in the
door of the bedroom.
6. Minor vandalism.
7. Entering unauthorized areas without staff
supervision (with malicious intent; i.e., reading a
file on a desk, using a phone).
8. Kissing, hand holding, hugging, massages, lap
sitting.
9. Behaving as a lookout for others.
10. Guilt by association.
11. Horseplay.
12. Leaving facility after curfew.
13. Excessive noise.
14. Absence from supper and curfew.
15. Absent overnight (which results in an immediate
discharge).
16. Obscene language.
84 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
Street kids find shelters of this type to be intolerable since
administration staff set up middle-class rules of behaviour that are
entirely foreign to the lifestyle they lead. It is as though, through the
construction of overly repressive rules, the shelter hopes to accomplish
the task of remaking the 'bent' homeless teen. While adult hostels
generally rely on only three rules; no drinking, drugs or violence,
teen shelters are often characterized by an attempt to overcontrol
their clients behaviour. This generally results in the teens rebelling
within a short period of time. "The rules in this place. All it is is fuckin'
rules. Who can remember it all? You can't have a smoke and I'd get
kicked out for what I just said to you. Even if someone's had a bad day
and you put your arm around them, you're warned and then booted.
You can't even be human." This approach is an attempt to imbue
habits of 'good' behaviour but is misplaced for it represents no more
than institutional management, which can do little to alter behaviour
for its effects are temporary. Residents stay only briefly and they
recognize that such rules are related only to a normalized existence
that has been conceived by the operators of the shelter. They are
cogniscent that within the space of a few days or hours they will once
again be on the street, or on their way to another shelter. Incidentally,
there are a further 25 behaviours in this shelter that can result in
'cautions' or 'final cautions.' These range from possession of a lighter
to not making one's bed, and three of these will result in eviction.
Most teens rate shelters with simple rules of behaviour much
more favourably than those that try to impose multiplicities of rules
that are often forgotten inadvertently and then lead to dismissal. The
location of one such shelter in the periphery of the city means that
eviction late in the evening literally strands the individual in the
middle of suburbia with no means of getting back downtown.
Families with Children in Converted-Use Motels
A new and highly innovative program is currently being
implemented for families with children in the Toronto area. This unit
is an attempt to provide families with a longer-term residence that
they can use to re-establish themselves in employment and eventually
in long-term housing. Located in a modern, well-equipped former
motel in the extreme east end of the city, the building is well situated
and impressive, much like any other low-rise office building in the
area. Commencing in the fall of 1991 families were admitted to the
motel unit and reside in rooms during their stay. Each room contains a
double bed, microwave, fridge, washroom, television, telephone, and
bunk beds for children. Although such arrangements are crowded the
Homelessness in Canada ... 85
units are clean and spacious and many look out onto a grassy area
that is being converted for use as a playground. There is a central
kitchen area with large freezers for those cooking chores that cannot
be accomplished in the rooms. A daycare centre was planned to open
in the spring of 1992 to provide assistance so that parents have a fair
chance of seeking, securing and retaining employment.
Unlike previous facilities food is not provided for the residents,
rather they are given a per diem related to family size. A family of
two parents and two children would be allotted thirty dollars per day
for food. Children attend local schools during their residence.
Caseworkers provide assistance with applications and counselling for
families having marital problems. There are simple rules of behavioUr
which centre on abuse of alcohol, drugs, or the perpetration of
violence. As it is a living unit, visitors are permitted in the rooms until a
reasonable hour given that children live in the building. The former
director took a flexible approach, reflecting his many years of
experience in the field of homelessness. The clientele are broken
down into several distinct groups generally; those who have a long
history of involvement with the welfare system; refugees; and those
who have become homeless as a result of marital dissolution. There
are several families waiting for placement in the residence's larger
suites that have eight or more children.
The type of program represented by this final type is in a sense
an ideal. The approach of the director is to provide a humane shelter
for those who have been battered by life. Families are accorded their
dignity and self-esteem in the process, a factor often missing from our
dealings with the homeless. Individuals are given the responsibility of
handling their own food shopping and preparation so they do not
become institutionalized. Children may receive daycare so that
parents can have time to sort out their lives and make a new start.
10
Despite community opposition to the establishment of shelters
for the homeless, the director was able to find a new way of looking
at the problem of homeless families. A crew of workmen installing
telephones, upon discovery that the motel was to house homeless
people, become angered and complained bitterly that it would lower
housing prices in the area. Bernie thought for a moment and said,
"This is a shelter for homeless children, some of whom have parents."
"Homeless kids," the workman smiled, "Well that's okay, what can I
do to help."
This page intentionally left blank 
CHAPTER FOUR
Life on the Streets
People on the street need a place to go,
People on the street need a place to go,
Walkin'through the night up and
down the avenue,
Lookin' for a place, a place to
go, a place to go,
There's a muffled scream from the
alley scene,
From the alley scene comes a
muff led scream,
And the siren wails while the
system fails,
In the steaming heat people
walk in the street,
People can't run and hide,
If you want to feel good then
you gotta feel good inside.
Neil Young
1
One of the central problems of our attempts to understand the
homeless resides in explaining why they have been cast off by the
mainstream of society. When I interviewed homeless people
throughout this country two questions were the focus of much of the
discussion that took place. First, why do people become trapped
within the cycles of homelessness for months or even years? Secondly,
88 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
what is it about the life course of this individual that has locked them
into a cycle of despair? The answers to both these questions were
neither simple nor easily explored with homeless people. In a sense
one is asking how a person constructs reality, and to reflect more
deeply upon the forces, both personal and structural, that have
brought them to this position as a social pariah. While it is not
possible in the constraints of a book such as this to record every life
story of homeless persons it is possible to provide accounts of lives that
reflect broader themes in the construction of a homeless identity in
Canadian society. From these accounts it has been possible to
construct images of the process of being homeless and the role played
by the homeless and various social service agencies in either
ameliorating and/or perpetuating the homeless condition.
While no single explanation of either the causes or the realities
of homeless existence would be fair to the variety of individual life
courses developed by homeless people, there are commonalities
which link their experiences. Further, this chapter will proceed first to
present the experience of homelessness from the viewpoint of various
homeless 'groups' and social service personnel and then move on to
an analysis of the core problems that predominate in relegating, and
keeping, homeless people in the position of societal misfits. Finally,
the lifeworks of the homeless will be put into perspective by a critical
examination of the various forms of legal control that regulate their
lives, from municipal by-laws through to welfare regulations.
Just Getting By
To the average observer Joe is a typical 24-year-old. He is well
groomed and dressed in neat blue jeans, a striped clean shirt, running
shoes and a pale blue windbreaker. He has a pleasant personality and
a direct manner of speaking. He talks in an animated style, is
intelligent and able to contemplate his life with insight and
directness. Joe is homeless. Joe has not always been homeless.
Neither is he a victim of a child welfare system that cannot cope with
its all too many charges. He does not have a problem with alcohol or
drugs, although he has used 'coke.' His behaviour is not pathological.
Joe's story is one that tells us much about the series of contingencies
that can move one from full status in our society to its farthest
margins. As we begin our interview I tell him what we will be
exploring. He immediately blurted out the following summary of his
life, "I left home at sixteen, got myself a job working for a cleaner,
pretty soon I had my own contacts and started a company. I got
married at eighteen, had two kids, and had a house and a mortgage.
My wife left me and after that I couldn't take it and started using
Life on the Streets ... 89
cocaine. Pretty soon I couldn't pay the bills and I didn't care anymore.
I lost everything and now I'm here."
Joe is used to telling his story to social workers and has
developed a one minute travelogue to guide them through his life. It
is a symptom that is prevalent amongst the homeless, tired of talking
about the same 'sad' story to worker after worker who is either
looking for the root cause of their homelessness or simply going
through the motions of filling out the forms. Front line workers and
those that do intakes with the homeless at shelters and hostels often
explain the behaviour of the homeless in terms of one overriding
problem. For teens this is most often abuse whether physical or
sexual; for men it is frequently a problem with booze or drugs; for
families the problem is one characterized by social dependency
handed down from generation to generation. The real dimensions of
the problems of the homeless like Joe may lay hidden in much more
complex contingencies that effect their life, but are less amenable to
quick diagnoses and quick fixes. In this workers fall prey to the process
of labelling people, an approach that sociologists have long explored.
Labels, while they may simplify the world, are often constructed at the
expense of some loss to those labelled. Howard Becker, a well known
sociologist, instructs us that," Deviance is behavior that is so labelled."
In other words, the labelling of a person as 'someone with a booze
problem' or 'the product of an abused home' has the effect of
transforming them into a deviant individual. In this characterization
their current position in society as a homeless person reflects some
personal failing, inadequacy or lack of effort.
2
 Persons in our society
who are so labelled are therefore seen as being the authors of their
own problems. Although on one level we may have some sympathy
for the homeless person, the refusal to look more deeply into the
roots of homelessness as a structural problem in society has had
immediate consequences for both the treatment of the homeless
person as a dependent in the social welfare network, and in their view
of themselves. One feature of labelling is that persons may, after
countless interactions in which this label is reaffirmed, begin to self-
label themselves as having a problem that is largely beyond their
control.
3
 At the same time they are constantly confronted with it by
social workers and other agency staff. The homeless person develops
what has been termed a master status, which means that once one
learns about their problem one knows all one needs to in order to
interact with the individual.
Joe is viewed as a young man with intelligence and potential by
the staff. In his own words, "I can do the job of the staff when you
come right down to it. They all know it. I had my own business for
90 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
several years, so this is nothing." Joe is also seen as a man whose
homelessness is related to his 'drug problem.' A further analysis of
Joe's story is instructive in terms of both the factors that lead to
homelessness and the reasons that persons often remain stuck in a
homeless situation for long periods of time.
During his marriage, relations with his wife were good
according to Joe. He and his wife were well off financially and enjoyed
each other's company. Joe enjoyed drinking occasionally at a local
bar, and there a young woman, a friend of his brother's, became
infatuated with him. She often joined him, his brother and his
brother's girlfriend for a drink. She asked Joe to have sex with her on
several occasions but he refused telling her he was happily married
with children. One evening Joe returned to his home to find that his
wife was extremely upset and was packing to leave with the children.
Apparently, the young woman who desired his sexual attention had
gone to his home and told his wife that she had been having an affair
with her husband, "and went into all of the details of having sex and
how I didn't love her anymore." His wife did not believe his story
regarding the other woman despite the support of others who had
seen him interact with her. His wife left him and soon after he
"slumped into a deep, deep depression." As Joe describes it, "Nothing
meant anything to me anymore. I loved my wife and children and it
just didn't make any sense. I hadn't done anything and here I was
being punished." Soon Joe was drinking constantly and began to take
cocaine to dull the pain of the loss of his family. "I just didn't care
about anything anymore, like if the world can be that cruel when
you're a good guy, work hard, give your family a good life, what's the
point?" In the end Joe lost his business, then his house, and within a
few months of his wife's departure he was homeless.
Now after almost a year in various homeless shelters in several
cities he is able to reflect on his fall from 'normalcy.' "A lot of the staff
think my problem is cocaine, but I haven't done any since I became
homeless. My problem is I get overwhelmed by thinking about
starting out again. I guess I've earned some time off to think and get a
new start. I don't want to get back into the mainstream of society
right away, I've got to get my head straight. I can do it again easily,
that's not the hard part (getting a job) it's knowing that I've found out
what I need, then I'll be outta here." So for Joe, homelessness
presents somewhat of a resting place from some of the pressures of
society. What he is as a person cannot be taken away from him; he is
one of the small number of homeless who can understand the label
accorded them, but has the personal resources to reject this label and
remain optimistic about the future. Joe observes, "Look, just because
Life on the Streets ... 91
a guy loses some money that doesn't mean he's stupid. Look at Donald
Trump. He lost millions. Do you hear anyone saying he's stupid, that
he won't climb back again. It's all relative to where you are in society
and how much you can afford to lose without sinking into a hole. I'll
be back, but when it's right for me." Far from being simple bragging,
Joe's comments are based in his belief in his own abilities and his
assessment of his current state of mind. Like many homeless
interviewed Joe had lost his connections or bonds to society when, as
a good citizen doing what he felt were the right things, his world was
wrongfully demolished. This was a world, then, that he could no
longer simply continue to invest in. His adaptations through alcohol
and cocaine resulted in his demise as a person with a stake in society,
but it was precisely because he did not want a stake in a society that
he saw as having betrayed him.
Going Down Slow
Jake is a native Canadian who is 26 years of age. Born on a
Saskatchewan farm he is currently living in a men's shelter in
Vancouver. He is immaculately dressed in clean deep blue jogging
shorts, running shoes and a crisp white shirt. He does not have a
dishevelled appearance traditionally, and mistakenly today, accorded
to the homeless. Jake has short neat black hair that is clean. He is well
groomed and could easily be mistaken for one of the social workers in
the local shelter. He is pleasant and his perceptions of his own
situation are clear and unwashed. Jake left the family farm when he
was sixteen years old. He had been adopted from the reserve into a
white farm family, and completed a high school education. "After
that I met my wife. I married her when she was sixteen; I was nineteen
at the time. That was the bad thing, at that time coming off of the
farm and and I guess the stress of a new child in the family. I guess if I
looked hard enough .. . it was wham, bam thank you ma'am and you
find yourself in a predicament that you totally don't need to." He
describes his adoptive parents as "the most supportive people I know.
See, in Saskatchewan they distinguish between the Indian and white
people whatever." Jake loved school and said in the interview, "I'd
loved to go back to school."
Jake finally got work just before birth of his first child. He feels
that his daughter, "changed his life quite a bit." He was employed as
a farm labourer, and had a natural knack with engines. "I could run
anything, I still can run any tractor and combine, you name it I can run
it. I know how to weld ... "
What happened in Jake's life to bring him to the margins of
existence? "Everything was going great..like before I came out here in
92 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
February of last year I was incarcerated for eighteen months. At that
time I was drinking and it was a violent crime you know. Took a
baseball bat, fought with a guy over a hundred dollars, took his knees
out, its just as simple as that, and obviously the courts didn't think too
much of it." Previously he had spent five years in prison in
Saskatchewan for committing an armed robbery. "I guess, I don't
know maybe I wanted to prove something. I don't know what it was. I
could see that upsetting the marriage, I mean, wouldn't you?"
Jake spent the time after prison working in a well-known
restaurant bar. "Its great. The thing that happened to me I got burnt
out, burn out syndrome. . like six days a week and when you're on a
management team and you're working on salary it doesn't matter
how many hours you put in." Jake made $500 a week at the job take
home pay and had an apartment that cost $460 a month. "I just don't
know what went wrong really."Jake had no savings when he quit his
job in July of 1991. "I don't know, I bought a lot of things. I don't
know, I'm a material person. I like to buy a t.v., everything, you see,
you know that you may want later. . . like I've still got all of this in
storage." Jake had worked for almost eighteen months full time six
days a week in a progressively more responsible position, finally
achieving the status of kitchen manager. He suddenly found one day
that his will to work had left him. For him, homelessness was an oasis
away from the responsibilities he was being asked to perform to
survive. "Its not that I'm lazy or anything. I just want to get my head
clear. I've only been off work for a couple of months." Although he is
entitled to unemployment he does not collect it, a view of welfare
support that is widely espoused by homeless people. Welfare of any
kind places a person in a position of perceived dependency. As
psychopaths I researched in a hospital in Britain put it, "Don't give me
a gift, then I'm in debt to you." The homeless do not want to
accumulate any more social debts than possible and often view
various forms of welfare above the minimum required to survive with
a jaundiced eye. As Jake put it, "Yes, I'm entitled to it but if I wanted
to abuse the system I could go ahead and abuse the system up and
down and left and centre and without paying anything but I don't
want to do it. That's not what I'm after. I just want to get my head
cleared."
The Loner
Dave is twenty-seven years old and comes from a foster parent
background. He left home at 16 and has been living in the shelter
system and on the street ever since. He displays the signs of complete
Life on the Streets ... 93
dependence on the system and has resigned himself to shelter life. He
rarely breaks the cycle of dependency:
I'll meet somebody like a friend or a girl. I may stay there
for a couple of weeks just for the hell of it depending on
the situation. I'm basically here though because I don't
like livin' with other people. ..its not right, I'm not used
to it. Well, its a matter of pride and dignity you know,
you feel weird you know like, I'm just not used to it. I
don't like the idea, I'm uh, like a loner.
Dave is indeed an outcast from society. He has no friends and his only
forms of social communication come with social workers and drinking
buddies in the parks. He lives hedonistically enjoying the moment
since the future is unreal for him:
Some people have their own style of living, my style just
happens to be have a good time .. . you're limited to the
amount of friends you have (in the shelter). The hostel's
full of all kinds of people, grubby people, ignorant
people, people who have no brains, ignorant people,
people who have no ambition, people who drink and
they can't do anything like they're idiots so I meet the
odd person I can get along with.
While he accepts his own limitations as a fully functioning human
being he does not place blame for the predicament which besets
homeless people on the system. He voices a common view that the
homeless are the source of their own problems:
Yah either drugs or they just screwed up ... (Is it the
system that screwed up?) No, no I don't believe that for
one minute. Well okay, it's hard to get work but there's a
lot of people here that complain about work but they
don't even try get up and look. They don't even know
how to comb their hair. They don't even know how to
present themselves so how are they gonna get a job?
They stay out all night drinkin, they wake up with a
hangover, it's just that they're abusing the system.
For Dave his current homeless condition is explained as a temporary
state of affairs though it has lasted over six months now:
94 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
I'm not rushin nothin. I'm just gonna reconstruct my life
slowly. I'm not gonna rush nothin cause I've got enough
gray hair. I'm just gonna do it, but do it slowly and
casually, and be happy that's all. I wanna take care of the
mind. No stress, no nothin.'
While Dave portrays his homelessness as being relatively free of stress,
in actual fact he is constantly under pressure by the front line workers
to seek employment, is constantly searching for a place to stay, and is
subject to the rigours of street life. While being interviewed he
sported deep healing cuts on his face, the result of a brawl in a local
bar. Such wounds are common in the sample interviewed for this
book, as violence in many forms is endemic to homeless life.
Dave in concert with many of his fellow homeless views his
current state of affairs as a form of relative freedom, having
exchanged the pressures of the workplace for the problems of the
street. He sees himself as having:
Lots of freedom .. . in respect of somebody telling me
where to go, how to do it, or you know, what to do.
Fighting Docility: Social Control Agencies
Versus the Homeless
For homeless Canadians, social service, welfare and helping
agencies are often viewed in a negative context as more likely to hurt
them than help them. Despite the best and worst intentions of each of
these types of agencies, homeless people have instinctively and
through numerous encounters with the therapeutic enterprise come
to realize that they are often better off with a minimum of recourse to
the state for assistance. Sociologists, like Stan Cohen, have described
the 'net' of control that extends throughout society.
4
 He argues that
all social service functions are either implicitly themselves, or are tied
to institutions that control the behaviour of those considered
'different' in society. Canadian civil rights activist Alan Borovoy has
written about our society's limited ability to tolerate behaviour of
others that we find even mildly irritating.
5
 Whether it is a group of
picketers trying to protest to protect their jobs, or a homeless person
asking for assistance, we often expect someone to remove them from
view, in essence, to control them.
The homeless do not have a single identity in the world of
helping agencies. As I argued earlier, homeless persons are often
assigned a master status that helps social service personnel to 'get a
Life on the Streets ... 95
fix' on them, and explain their present and previous behaviours.
Various agencies assign the homeless to differing categories to fit the
mandate of their organization. A homeless person may be an alcohol
abuser for one agency, an unemployable person for another group,
and a person with mental problems at another facility. Although
these may form either significant or minor facets of their personality
the point is that they face a constant stripping down of self and
categorization into multiple deviant selves as they move from agency
to agency. The homeless also become 'known' on their trek through
various shelters and hostels. Their thick accumulating files become less
of an aid to assisting them and more of a means of denigrating their
lack of success in altering their life circumstances, and of providing
material for cutting personal criticisms. At the same time, the
homeless represent fodder for the various agencies' struggle to assert
"ownership" over the homeless problem. The homeless, like other
marginalized groups, such as criminals, make possible the existence of
a wide variety of 'helping' agencies, who besides assisting the
homeless, 'help' themselves to substantial salaries.
The homeless sense, and are the victims of, this inter-
connectedness of agencies. The homeless are reduced to a state of
childlike dependency. Critics of the welfare system have long been
aware of the inadequacies of a system of assistance that is
characterized by over-bureaucratization, inhumanity and mistrust.
Ben Carniol, a professor and social worker at Ryerson Polytechnic, has
written scathingly of this system. He writes what we commonly
understand but is often disputed: "It has become commonplace for
people in need to desperately try to avoid getting into the welfare
system in the first place."
6
 Tied in with this concept of attempting to
remain above the dark and forbidding waters of the welfare ocean is
the recurring myth of capitalist culture, "the belief that each
individual has both the responsibility and the opportunity to 'make
it.'" Echoing the words of persons interviewed across Canada for this
book Carniol's sample of welfare recipients found that there was
"most often a debilitating sense of dehumanization in being on
welfare."
7
 In fact, most homeless persons, as with the overwhelming
majority of welfare recipients, go to great lengths to avoid being on
welfare. Being 'on the pogey' even for the homeless means that one
has hit bottom, has sunk to a state of total dependency with no
resources left to draw upon. Many contemplating the status of
welfare recipients will starve themselves, commit petty crimes, beg,
take the most menial of underpaid jobs or even prostitute themselves,
to stay off the dole.
96 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CAN ADA
The medicalization of the problems of the homeless is a
common approach taken by social agencies in Canada. Although all
homeless are subject to categorization as somehow being slightly less
than whole, women are far more commonly the brunt of such
approaches. While viewing the homeless problem as emanating most
centrally from some form of 'sickness' in the form of depression or
some other form of mental malady has a certain appeal in that ill
health may be attacked by medical intervention, a more sinister
interpretation is that the illness is chronic. Again, by shifting the
blame onto the victim, in this case often of family violence, oppressed
by a male partner, and in the wider realms of society, as well as by
asserting that the problem is largely psychological, the burden for
recovery lands once again in the lap of the downtrodden. These
strategic interventions put social workers in the position of
reinforcing and adding to the negative images of their supposed
clients. The woman is now not only homeless, but suffering from
some form of mental illness! How reassuring to be a single mother
thrust out from the security of one's home only to be declared
essentially insane by a helpful social worker! One woman interviewed
in Vancouver put it this way, "My husband left and it was a couple of
months until everything fell apart. No one could help me anymore or
they didn't want to, and so I had to go on welfare. Jesus, the first
thing they told me was that I was sick and needed help, as if I didn't
have enough worries. So I told the worker, 'Who the fuck wouldn't be
depressed, no husband, no money, no place to live, no job and now I
have to listen to this."
1
 Helen Levine wrote compellingly about the
impotency of women in modern social relations who are encouraged
to be the authors of their own destruction. Levine wrote it "is an
insidious tool used to contain women's rage and despair to invalidate
our experience of the world". Eventually, usually sooner than later, it
results in "guilt, anxiety and depression" keeping women "docile and
fearful, unable to act on our own behalf. "
8
 More destructive than this
process, Levine argues, and more damnable, is the collusion that is
exercised by the so-called helping professions who "in practice as in
theory, collude with and reinforce the self-destruct mechanism in
women."
9
Through twenty years of reports on welfare by federal and
provincial governments, two constant themes have emerged. One is
that of alienation of the recipients within the process who feel
lessened by the treatment they receive attempting to collect what is
essentially a social right. Secondly, those who look after the welfare
system, and its many manifestations through the shelters and hostels
of the country, are disenchanted with the system and its recipients.
Life on the Streets ... 97
Throughout the system of social services across this country humanity
is in short supply as recipients of any form of benefit are forced to act
as beggars in order to receive their due, supplicating at the altar of
the welfare agent. Doyle and Visano's report on social welfare services
underscores the constant barrage of intimidation and humiliation
that awaits those who must queue in the lengthening welfare lines in
this country, the longest now in history. 10 The very position that the
homeless find themselves in, asking for assistance, provides
reinforcement that these are people who are not part of the
'deserving poor,' that is, those who are not personally responsible for
their own sorrows. The systematic inferiorization of the homeless, the
constant reminding of this status, and its continual reaffirmation in
consultations between agents and agencies informs the homeless
person that they are branded and stigmatized wherever they turn.
Little wonder that in a few months the homeless person has
often slid into a state of dependency unable to see any means of
altering their station in life. Workers that are in a position to assist
them are also in an equal position to withhold services, finances,
shelter, and advice. My overwhelming impression of the interviews
between social workers and the homeless during some four years of
research was that the worker has certain ideas about the character
and problems of the individual. The worker ideally is supposed to
work with the client on strategies for achieving certain goals, most
generally, obtaining employment. However, the worker generally
winds up lecturing the client on his/her inadequacies and lack of
personal effort. The exchange is not one of equals working to solve a
problem but is more accurately characterized as an exercise in control
on the part of the worker. Workers often do not consciously realize
that they are engaged in this process. Many genuinely wish to help
their clients. A greater number, however, have grown tired of "the
whining" and "laziness" of their charges. With staggering caseloads
and the demand for shelter space constant, and growing, they are
faced with a unending stream of anxious would-be shelter residents
throughout the day. As a young female worker at one shelter put it," I
see fifteen or more every day here wanting to get in. They've usually
got files several inches thick and they're hopeless. You go through the
same routine you did last time and they still don't do a thing to help
themselves. I'm leaving this job in two months and going to... . After
two years in welfare and two years here I've had it. You tell these
people, 'Yes there's welfare, but you've got to do something for
yourself.' They have no idea, no idea at all." The homeless person is
not in a position to seek other alternatives if they don't like the service
they are receiving. The immediate concerns of getting a place to stay
98 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
are paramount and realistically they understand that they are without
the power to complain. Who would listen to a complaint by a
homeless person? The homeless made their complaints over and over
again to the writer in the course of interviews and conversations, but
they remain secret and whispered for fear of losing even the little they
have managed to wrangle from the welfare system.
Few homeless people will admit to ever being physically ill, ill
enough that is to require medical treatment. Few of the homeless
trust doctors or hospitals to treat them without some other obligation
on their part being involved. Many fear that seeking treatment for an
illness or injury will result in them being institutionalized as mentally
ill. As one 25-year-old put it," If you go to an emergency room looking
this bad they'll think you've lost your marbles and try to lock you up as
crazy." Medical personnel are also viewed as having links to the police
and other social agencies, which they certainly do. Many of the
homeless do not want any involvement with the police and so avoid
doctors. Going to a physician also requires that a person give their
name, address if available, and a health insurance number. There are
many homeless who do not want to make this kind of information
available to others, whether they are inmates on parole seeking to
avoid possible trouble, persons who do not want to be found for a
variety of reasons, or simply those who harbour unfounded fears.
Some shelters have developed a relationship with a local doctor
and/or nurse to provide on-site treatment on a weekly basis without
the necessity of patients divulging information they would not be
comfortable giving. In Toronto, two nurses run a drop-in clinic where
homeless men and women can have their afflictions tended to
without giving any information on themselves. Most commonly they
are treated for ailments related to their feet or hands—exposure,
hypothermia and breathing disorders. Their clinic has been operating
successfully for over two years and has been able to avoid the
intrusion of the medical establishment and the paraphernalia of
paranoia that over-formalization seems to bring in the minds of the
homeless.
"Laws are for Rich People"
Laws have particular functions in our society. The homeless
being both without accommodation and hence visible on the street
are subject to an inordinate amount of attention on the part of the
police and other agents of control in our society. Previously in this
chapter it was argued that society organizes its control institutions
into a form of network. The social analyst Michel Foucault referred to
the ability of these institutions to exert power over the lives of
Life on the Streets ... 99
individuals in society, to make them into docile citizens, as the
'micropolitics of control.'
11
 Of any group in Canada, the homeless are
most subject to the ministrations of these control measures and their
lives are largely circumscribed by both formal and informal regulation
by welfare rules, by-laws and criminal laws. In this section the impact
of these various legal sanctions on the lives of homeless people will be
explored.
Welfare Regulation: The Politics of Exclusion
While social assistance is intended as a safety net for those who
become most vulnerable in society, the rules surrounding the
acquisition of entitlement to welfare are questionable at best.
12
 It
may reasonably be argued that the current welfare system does much
to perpetuate the problems of the homeless by short-circuiting their
attempts to re-establish themselves in the mainstream of society. The
first and most significant problem with the welfare system is the
ridiculous requirement that persons must have a place of residence in
order to receive a welfare cheque. Without a place to stay that has an
identifiable address, a homeless person is not permitted any form of
assistance. Many of the homeless do not, and will perhaps never, have
any address other than an abandoned car, a neglected dumpster, or a
park bench. Are they any less deserving of help? Obviously, it is these
individuals who are most in need of sustenance, but are rendered
ineligible because they do not have a place to stay. It is the great
Catch-22 of homelessness; in order to get welfare you have to have a
home, if you don't have a home you can't collect welfare. Although
some jurisdictions, most notably in Montreal, have developed
innovative schemes to counter this inequity in our welfare system, few
homeless people in this country can collect assistance without first
getting enmeshed in the social control system. In other words, most
homeless have to seek residence at a shelter or hostel, which then
becomes their address for the purposes of welfare.
In many provinces persons are entitled to 'emergency' welfare
cheques when they first present themselves to a shelter. In Ontario,
they may collect slightly more than $300 under this scheme. However,
one of the further problems with the residence requirements is the
transient nature of the homeless population. There are, again, a not
insignificant number of homeless persons who leave the shelter
before a cheque can arrive. While this behaviour strikes the
uninformed as incredible, one must put it in the context of life in
degrading, threatening, and sometimes violent lodgings. Whether
one is threatened, gets fed up with being treated badly or simply
wanders off because of a lack of investment in life, cheques are often
100 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
undeliverable because the intended recipient has left the address
given.
While there are many critics of public assistance for the needy,
few would want to change places with the homeless despite their
criticisms of them as lazy and shiftless. This attitude was expressed by
Mike Harris the leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservative party.
Harris argued before a business luncheon at The Canadian Club that
welfare recipients abuse the system. He stated, "I'm suggesting that
we should not be paying out all that money to stay home and do
nothing."
13
 While Harris argues that the majority on welfare can be
trained or educated for jobs, and suggests tim ing welfare payments to
compliance with these initiatives he demonstrated a complete
ignorance of the plight of homeless Canadians. If one considers a
single mother of one child as a homeless person who will collect social
assistance then how will she accomplish retraining? If she has a pre-
school child it is expected that somehow she will arrange for the care
of the child during her retraining. While this may seem a practical idea
any cursory examination of child care in this country leads one to the
simple conclusion that it is in short supply and high demand. Even if
the mother were to be able to secure a place in a childcare setting for
her child it is unlikely she will be able to afford it while retraining
herself for employment that is going to yield a wage insufficient to
meet her childcare expenses. The alternative is to leave her child in
suspect care, spending her working days worrying constantly about
her child's welfare. Women with children suffer more greatly than any
other group amongst our homeless population for there is little
societal comprehension of the impossibilities associated with trying to
provide a decent life on a meagre allowance while juggling several
disparate roles. Welfare remains for the most part as a form of
indentured pauperism.
City By-Laws: Sweeping the Streets Clean of Refuse
In many cities across Canada there is a building problem with
regard to attempts to control the homeless in public places. The sheer
numbers of homeless in Canada's largest population centres, Toronto,
Montreal and Vancouver mean that they are a growing source of
'trouble' in urban centres. The majority of the problems remain
confined in the downtown cores of these cities where the homeless
cluster around shelters, soup kitchens and the entertainment, business
and shopping districts where passersby are more likely to have money
to spare. In practical terms the homeless must remain in areas where
they have some reasonable expectation of walking to and from
various services. But this clustering of the homeless is seen by some as
Life on the Streets ... 101
an eyesore in the community, as frightening, or as simply "bad for
business". In Oshawa, a small city located 30-minutes-drive from
Toronto, local businessmen complained of the homeless using the
local park and walking on the main shopping street of the city. The
attitude was that the homeless should be "rounded up" and
prohibited by by-law from lounging in the park.
14
Many city dwellers find the homeless frightening, particularly
those who are dishevelled. "They're a nuisance" said one young
woman I interviewed on the street in Vancouver. "They stink and they
get on your nerves, always asking for money." The homeless remind
us of the potential for failure in our own lives. Their pleas for money
are generally left unanswered by most who walk by them. This is the
case even when the homeless person begging is a woman with a baby.
In one instance, this writer observed a young woman begging with a
baby in her arms. She held out a card which said, "Ladies and
gentlemen please help me. I have three children, no job and no money
for food." As I observed her for over an hour begging, pleading with
passing students entering a college, professors and business people
who almost without exception not only ignored her, but refused to
make any form of contact with her, I realized the depth of our
intolerance of the weak and helpless in our society. I approached the
woman and gave her some money and she showed me a Tylenol
bottle. "The baby is sick. Can you help me anymore?" As a refugee she
was afraid to go to the authorities for help. In her country, authorities
torture and imprison you. She pleaded with me to help her with more
money and continued to beg for several more hours in the cold of the
Vancouver streets.
Public begging is a crime in Canada. It is referred to as
panhandling. The term originated with the process of panning for
gold in the goldrushes of the last century in North America. But the
homeless are rarely able to make much money on the streets.
Canadians are not as generous as many might like to think. On an
average day begging for four hours a homeless person would be
happy to walk away with $10, the price of a meal in a cheap
restaurant with something left over for a coffee and a chocolate bar
to ward off the cold. Myths swirl about in terms of the money to be
made begging from strangers. One popular one, often repeated to
the researcher over the past three years, concerns beggars who are
picked up each evening by chauffeur-driven limousines to be taken to
their mansions. Common sense tells us that the rewards of begging
are rarely sufficient to satisfy even the most meagre of appetites.
When one considers that most people will not even as much as look at
a homeless woman in distress, the likelihood they will voluntarily give
102 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
them money is far more remote. More inventive homeless beggars are
able to use humour as a tool for opening the pocketbooks of their
audience. One homeless man uses the following lines to elicit money
from the street: "Help a hopeless drunk?"; "Can you help me to buy a
coffin for my mother?" or "Make your day and mine, give me a
looney." This man was the most successful beggar interviewed for the
book. He often made $20 an hour, but just as quickly used it for food
and alcohol.
While the homeless may be perceived of as beggars, few of
those interviewed by this author resorted to begging as a constant
source of income. Most interviewees were candid in admitting that
they may have begged on occasion, particularly during the holiday
season, when they could play on the conscience of city dwellers, but
few viewed it as a regular source of income. It was much more likely
that they would resort to situational crime, that is crime that they
would not commit were they not destitute, to live. Many readers will
no doubt be surprised to learn that begging is illegal.
We have already learned that begging is not a lucrative
pastime. One should also be cogniscent that it carries with it a penalty
which far outweighs its potential benefit to the beggar. Panhandling
under many municipal by-law codes is an offence which carries a fine
of $50 or more. The homeless are therefore harassed and ticketed, for
the crime of having no money. They are not likely to be able to pay
any fine that may be imposed at court, and are just as unlikely to show
up at court for their hearing. This generally results, in cases where
charges are laid, of a warrant being sworn for their arrest. Most who
are finally apprehended serve a short jail term to atone for their
transgression. The police also enforce loitering and vagrancy statutes
against the homeless as a means of moving them from disputed public
areas. When businesses complain the police approach is to simply shift
the problem of homelessness to a less visible area. This is a tactic often
employed with prostitutes. It does not eliminate the problem just
simply temporarily moves it out of the view of those who are
offended, those who have more political and economic clout and
respectability in the eyes of the police and thus are entitled to
protection of their sensibilities. In several U.S. jurisdictions the 'war'
between the homeless and business has escalated and resulted in the
passage of by-laws forbidding loitering, begging, and the pitching of
tents by the homeless. While we have, in Canada, to the present been
largely spared the spectacle of tent cities (although the use of
campgrounds by the homeless is frequent) American cities like Detroit
have been faced with overwhelming problems of homelessness. When
in October of 1991 the state cut general welfare assistance to tens of
Life on the Streets ... 103
thousands of Michigan residents, the effect was immediate and
dramatic. Thousands of homeless began to overflow the available
shelter space and filled church basements and community halls. On
December 1, a symbolic tent for the homeless pitched on private
church land was torn down by the Detroit police, (then re-erected the
next day) in a symbolic gesture that underscored our intolerance of
the homeless. The voice of the homeless is difficult to raise as one. The
crisis in Detroit provided a rallying point that was viewed as a
potential threat to social order. What if the tens of thousands of
homeless in Detroit had had enough and organized on mass to protest
their maltreatment by the state? When enough docile bodies are
enraged by their oppression the potential for social insurrection and
cries for accountability may be quickly raised.
15
Loitering is another form of social regulation that directly
effects the lives of the homeless. Let us consider some of the places in
which edicts against resting idly for more than an ambiguous period
of time are enforced. The Toronto Transit Commission has a by-law
which strictly prohibits loitering on or in T.T.C. property. This is
intended to be used to prevent homeless persons from riding the
subway, bus or streetcar system over a lengthy period of time solely in
the interests of keeping warm. Shopping malls, contrary to the beliefs
of many, are not public places but rather private property. Large scale
malls like Edmonton's West Edmonton Mall or Toronto's Eaton's
Centre are virtually small contained cities. They also employ large
private security forces who patrol the mall ostensibly to guard against
theft but also to prevent 'trouble.' Homeless people often reported
discriminatory treatment by mall security personnel. "Okay, so you go
in to get warm, you're hangin' out not botherin' anyone and suddenly
this security guards on your ass. 'Get movin.' Get the hell out of here
before we charge you with trespass.
1
" The homeless sense they are the
victims of a double standard based on visible signs of money, class and
status. On a tour of The Eaton Centre, Paul pointed out the
discrepancy in the actions of mall staff, "Look at those people over
there! Do you think they're gonna go up to them and tell them to
move? No way! They pick on us because we haven't got much. That
isn't fair." Malls also eject persons who appear to be disruptive in any
way. The case of a resident of London, Ontario who has a heavily
tattooed face bears witness to this. He was unsuccessful in a legal
attempt to force mall owners to lift a ban on his entrance to the mall
because they argued that he was constantly ejected because of his
failure to buy anything within a certain set period of time. One
wonders how many 'window shoppers' who are not obviously without
104 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
means or do not display a physical anomaly are asked to leave malls
because of their failure to buy something?
The Homeless as Criminals:
Criminalization of the Homeless
In May of 1990 a thirty-six-year-old man described in news
reports as a 'drifter' dragged a young woman to a secluded location
near a railway spur where he savagely beat her to death. Her face had
been beaten and identification proved difficult due to the intensity of
the assault on her face with a piece of wood used as a blunt
instrument. The murderer spit and urinated on the body before
leaving the scene. When he returned home to a converted warehouse
owned by Metropolitan Toronto, and used as an innovative shelter for
homeless people, he told fellow residents the blood that covered his
jeans resulted from his having to beat a girl. The homeless man was
apprehended when an acquaintance saw a composite picture in the
paper and reported it to police.
16
 While homicide remains an atypical
event according to Elliott Leyton and other Canadian homicide
researchers, violence and crime are hardly strangers to the homeless
who roam our cities.
17
 The homeless are vulnerable, more likely to be
victimized than any of us who enjoy the comforts of a home. While
the home has become, according to researchers, a stage for violent
scenes played out by males and enacted on females, the constant
barrage of violence which creeps into the lives of the homeless is
worthy of closer attention. Criminological studies of policing have
demonstrated consistently in Canada, Britain and the United States
that socially and economically marginal persons are the lowest priority
on policing initiatives. The attitude of many of the public, which
places the blame for the homeless condition of our street citizens
squarely in their own laps, can be expected to have little sympathy
when the homeless are victims of criminal acts. I suspect that, like
prostitutes, the homeless are viewed as having to expect some
measure of violence and victimization in their lives by the general
public even though they are not voluntary recruits, in the main, to the
life of the drifter.
Homeless people live with daily fears of being the victims of
crime. Most are forced to carry some form of weapon, not by choice
but simply because they must be in a position to protect themselves
should trouble arise. Trouble in the form of threats, intimidating
gestures, requests for money or cigarettes from threatening
characters, and attacks by the deranged, stoned or drunk confront
people who must not only walk but sleep on the streets. A park bench
makes neither a comfortable nor a peaceful substitute for a bed,
Life on the Streets ... 105
particularly when the temperatures start to drop in cold weather.
Sleep is an impossibility when the stranger lurking in the shadows may
be waiting for you to sleep only to steal your shoes, socks, coat or
other belongings. Women, who experience victimization in the home
and workplace in our society at epidemic rates, continue their
vulnerability in a more exaggerated form as homeless castoffs. The
horrors of the street are many, and few of us can even begin to
imagine what a night sleeping in the doorway of an office building
must be like. Young women who predominate as hookers are doubly
prey to violence from men. The majority of young women on the
street, as we learned earlier in this book, have experienced either
physical or sexual abuse in the home. The street holds the promise of
being beaten by a dissatisfied or 'sicko' John, being pumelled by an
unhappy pimp, or being victimized by those who are sworn to protect
women. When you consider that the number of homeless Canadians
at any one time numbers in the tens of thousands, then this is certainly
an unacceptable state of affairs. Put another way, we might wish to
consider a rethinking of the problem of homelessness and crime. Since
only about 25% of homeless people engage in any form of criminal
behaviour according to research conducted across North America,
18
we might wish to consider the crimes committed against the homeless
by virtue of their very condition. What structures in society have
forced tens of thousands of its citizens—men, women, children,
families—to be abandoned to a life on the streets or in the shelters of
Canada? Does not the real issue of crime reside in the very existence of
homelessness on such a grand scale, the failure of society to provide
'justice for all'?
A constantly recurring theme of critics of the homeless who do
not want to face the severity of the problem or attempt to deny it
altogether, is that the homeless number far less than their advocates
would claim. While accurate counts are difficult as I discussed in
Chapter One, it is interesting to note that government counts
conducted through census collections invariably arrive at far lower
numbers than do the agencies and groups that work with the
homeless on a daily basis, year in and year out. Governments of
course, at both the federal, provincial and municipal levels, adopt
grossly conservative estimates of the numbers of homeless because
they do not wish the true depth of the problem to be ingrained within
the public conscience. The failure of governments to provide for the
homeless, to prevent their even being amongst the multitude who
arrive at the doors of hostels, churches, social services and shelters is
an indictment of their lack of commitment to attacking the wider
structural problems in the economy, housing sector, family unit and in
106 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
the broader spectrum of public attitudes. Herein lies the true
criminality associated with homelessness. It requires we turn our ideas
around to move from blaming the victim to placing the blame
squarely in the lap of governmental programs that pursue policies
that impact most harshly upon certain segments of society—the poor
and lower classes—and bolster the fortunes of the already fortunate.
The true violence of homelessness may be traced to the
fundamental failure to provide for the needs of people who wind up
homeless. While academic studies of the psychological states of the
homeless, the problems of counting their numbers or their life
chances may serve some higher academic function, they ignore the
gravity of the problem. The essential kernel of the numbers debate
concerning homelessness is this: it is rather like trying to count the
drops of water while the dam is bursting, an interesting problem, but
irrelevant and unlikely to prevent the flood. Academics have
remained largely trapped in the role of apologists for government
policies because of their inattention to the wider picture. In reviewing
literally hundreds of studies conducted in America and Britain, while
preparing this book, it was noted that a constant focus was not upon
the victimization of the homeless by state policies but rather time and
again (with some notable exceptions) that the situational and
symptomatic problems of homelessness have been the focus of
attention. The issue of failure to address needs is rarely analysed so
that homelessness remains portrayed to us rather as a stage play in
which we see the homeless as actors, but do not view the larger
mechanisms that make the play possible. While the homeless suffer
innumerable forms of violence in the forms of psychological suffering,
emotional abuse, physical assaults, medical traumas and blows to
personal dignity, their suffering is not placed within the larger context
of societal failures but rather within situational contingencies.
In the next section, we shall explore in detail the roots of crimes
against the homeless as well as the crime of homelessness itself. Both
of these broader themes can be traced to roots within the political
economy of our nation during the past decade, and more surely
during the past several years. Homelessness, crime and crimes by the
homeless, and against the homeless, must be placed within the
broader framework of their interconnectedness with both public and
private policies within the developing Canadian free trade state, the
economic policies of government, housing policy, and the
development of welfare systems in this country.
Life on the Streets ... 107
Rethinking Crimes Against and By the Homeless
We currently live in a country where from 'sea to shining sea'
the glow of a Canada that remains immune from the influence of
broader criminal forces is fading rapidly in the wake of increasing
violence on our streets and in our homes. The number of murders in
Toronto by October of 1992 had surpassed all of those counted in the
previous year. In 1991, the Chief of Detectives reported that police
were called to incidents involving handguns at a rate of one per hour.
In 1991, by November, over 500 convenience stores had been robbed
in Toronto with the offender using a weapon to effect the robbery.
The introduction of crack as a cheap, available, and deadly drug has
intensified the level of street violence in our cities from coast to coast,
as some individuals fight to control the trade, while others resort to
crime to feed their addiction. While violence escalates at an
unprecedented rate we are also aware of a growing research
literature and political awareness of the violence that is perpetrated
against women and children in homes of our nation on a daily basis.
Violence against women has been recognized as a problem of
national significance with significant spending on research initiatives,
the building of shelters for battered women and their children, and
public education campaigns. It is important for readers to recognize
that the violence of homelessness is both immediate for those who are
on the receiving end, but also is constant and unending twenty-four
hours a day. There is no place of rest for the homeless simply because,
as we discovered in Chapter One, they are without homes.
Survival on the streets often means resorting to petty crimes in
order to get by on a day-to-day basis. While various forms of social
assistance are offered to the homeless, these are inadequate to meet
the basic needs of most people. More to the point, how many of us
would want to live simply having our basic needs satisfied? While food
and shelter are basic to survival they are not sufficient to feed the soul
of people. We have all heard the phrase, "Man does not live by bread
alone." So it is that the homeless of both genders often come into
conflict with the law because of the very fact that they are homeless.
Recent research by McCarthy and Hagan, two Canadian sociologists
with homeless street youth in Toronto, found that homelessness was
criminogenic, that is, it was a direct cause of the crimes committed by
the 130 youths that McCarthy studied.
19
 Previous episodes of
homelessness had no significant effect on the current criminality of
the young people that were surveyed. This conforms with the
information reported by the persons interviewed for this book.
Criminal activities are reported almost exclusively by young
men who fall within the 16 to 25-year age range. None of the women
108 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
interviewed for this book reported engaging in criminal pursuits for
survival other than those who had been arrested under solicitation
laws that govern the behaviour of prostitutes. Some had begged or
shoplifted but this was reported infrequently. While it would be a
mistake to infer that a large percentage of the young homeless are
engaged in crime on an ongoing basis, it is true to assert that many
commit either of two forms of crime. First, simple crimes of survival
are often resorted to by the homeless either in order to eat or put
warm clothing on their back or to attain some small luxury that is
constantly denied them. For young men the crime of break and enter
predominates as the means of acquiring stolen items, which can then
be sold for cash. Studies of youthful offending in Canada have
consistently found that such crime is the most common form of
offending amongst young men. For impoverished adolescents and
young men, homeless or not, their marginalization in economic terms
often means that the only way of acquiring funds is through this
straightforward criminal activity.
20
 Break and entry or shoplifting
does not require a great deal of skill on the part of the perpetrator,
and yields a sufficient reward by the fencing of the goods to raise
funds for a desired purpose . Since homeless youths have few means
of storing items, other than occasionally in 'party houses' (abandoned
buildings where drug and alcohol parties are held), they almost
immediately fence the item(s). While there are established fences who
will handle stolen goods, it is much more likely that the thief will sell
his goods to a person walking on the street. Stolen items generally
fetch only about one-fifth to one-third of their normal value.
Therefore a $100 radio is likely to fetch only twenty or so dollars on
thestreet.21
The overwhelming majority of crimes of the homeless are petty
offences such as theft of a wallet or purse, stealing of small items from
unlocked parked cars, and shoplifting. These petty larcenies, along
with gambling to pass the time and begging, are the main crimes or
'vices' engaged in by the homeless. All of these activities have no
greater purpose than to secure the necessities of survival. But the
homeless reside in a world where drug deals are an everyday part of
existence and no one on the street can avoid walking into trouble
occasionally. Assaults are frequent on the street where homeless
persons argue over food, alcohol, clothes, drugs or some perceived
slight of character. In one incident witnessed by the researcher, a
homeless woman downed a homeless man by breaking a bottle over
his head and opening up a gaping wound. She continued to kick at
him until police arrived to pull her off. The argument had started as a
dispute over whether one person had taken more than their share of
Life on the Streets .. . 109
the contents of the bottle. On numerous occasions the researcher
witnessed assaults of one homeless person by another in the late
evening and night as finances began to wane while the need for
alcohol, drugs, or food remained. Homeless persons 'stoned' on crack
or cocaine, or a combination of alcohol and drugs, are a regular
occurrence in the 'city of night' just as in the non-homeless
population. On several occasions I watched as police tried to
apprehend crack users who were hopelessly high. A man in his 30s
who was 'up' on crack lay down in the middle of a downtown street
and refused to move. Police spent some 15 minutes trying to get him
to voluntarily walk to their cruiser before he had to be carried, while
the sidewalk was filled with curious onlookers.
Most of the crimes of violence committed by and against the
homeless are carried out by other homeless or street people. This
lowers the interest that police demonstrate towards such crimes since
research by Canadian criminologists has graphically demonstrated
that the police place citizens into two groups: (1) solid citizens, i.e.,
those who work at regular jobs, keep regular hours, stay out of
trouble, and who are at home most of the time, and (2) 'assholes,' a
broad grouping that includes (although not exhaustively) drug users,
ex-cons, prostitutes, sexual deviants, gays, and the homeless.
22
 Police
have little use for street people aside from their intrinsic value as
informants in cases of crimes that the police are having difficulty
solving. Livy Visano has documented the police practice of making
informants out of the most innocuous of street people by implied
threats to charge them with offences. This 'bending' of the rules in a
variety of contexts by both uniformed officers and detectives has been
documented by several Canadian researchers, including the highly
regarded work of Richard Ericson of the Centre of Criminology
23
 who
conducted the most extensive study of police work ever undertaken in
this country. If the police are willing to engage in illegal practices to
'get' persons with some social standing, what would prevent them
from harassing the homeless at will. In Visano's research, for example,
he reported that the police routinely hassled street youth. When he
was present the police demanded his identification, questioned him
about his 'real' intent (his assertion that he was a researcher was
rejected) and searched his pockets illegally browsing through their
contents.
24
 This appears to be a regular feature of homeless
encounters with the police as the interviews conducted for this book
underscored. The most frequently reported problems reported with
the police included:
110 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
• being told to move from a resting place, or 'move
along' when simply standing on the street
• requests for identification from police when they
were doing nothing
• being treated with discourtesy by the police
• being searched, having pocket contents turned out
for inspection
• search of belongings for no apparent reason
• being assaulted
While the homeless are in constant threat of violence against their
person they are also forced to deal with constant harassment by the
police for no good reason other than they are visible and vulnerable.
In Canada, the crimes of both vagrancy and loitering still form
part of our Criminal Code. Vagrancy is an offence under Section 179
(1) (a) and is intended to punish anyone "who supports himself in
whole or in part by gaming or crime and has no lawful profession or
calling by which to maintain himself." This is an offence which carries
a summary conviction where the penalties are less than that accorded
for serious 'indictable' offences. A person may receive a six-month
sentence and up to $500 fine for vagrancy, although penalties are
likely to be much lighter. It is not hard to imagine how such a law can
easily be applied either as a threat, or to punish homeless people who
would be hard pressed in a court of law to prove that they were law-
abiding citizens against the word of a police officer. Under Section
175 (c) anyone who " loiters in a public place and in any way obstructs
persons who are in that place" is guilty of a summary offence. Of
course, the life style of the homeless being not chosen, but imposed,
means that they are always in jeopardy while this law is part of our
way of defining wrongdoing. The definition of 'obstruction' is one
that is constructed out of a simple paradigm: the homeless person is
not a person with wherewithal, so therefore their presence will be
easily interpreted as loitering by a magistrate. Under the same section,
persons who 'cause a disturbance in or near a public place' are also
subject to being charged. This disturbance can take the form of
'fighting, screaming, shouting, swearing, singing or using insulting or
obscene language." Those who are drunk or impede or otherwise
molest other persons are also liable to be charged with this summary
offence. These are all behaviours which are common to areas where
the homeless congregate and are behaviours that are often engaged
Life on the Streets ... 111
in by the homeless who are deprived of a private space in which to get
drunk, sing, swear or shout.
Another little known Canadian law also criminalizes the
survival actions of the homeless. This section of the Criminal Code
covers the crime of 'Trespassing at night.' This law states that, "Every
one who, without lawful excuse, the proof of which lies on him, loiters
or prowls at night on the property of another person near a dwelling-
house situated on that property is guilty of an offence . . . ." The
downtown terrain of the homeless is not only a collection of office
buildings, but many streets are lined with aging housing or the newly
gentrified houses, many of which were formerly rooming houses.
Obviously, while this law is intended to dissuade prowlers from
striking fear into the hearts of home-dwellers it also unintentionally
impacts upon the homeless who often wander in just such a way as
described in the law, searching for a place to sleep for the night.
On the roofs of abandoned or closed buildings, in secluded
stairwells that offer shelter from passersby, but at the same time make
the homeless vulnerable to attack, the homeless try to ease their
weariness. The stench of urine, unwashed bodies and clothes, and the
litter of old cigarette butts, food containers, worn blankets and
clothes, discarded needles and other trappings of street people make
it a grim place to recuperate. Most bedding places are soon discovered
by the owners of the building or the police and are closed down. In
downtown Vancouver, accompanied by my guide Sharon O'Leary, I
saw a building once used by the homeless as a sleeping refuge that
has been securely boarded up by the owners to prevent people from
taking shelter from the elements. The boards are posted with
prominent 'No Trespassing' signs, and the words "NO HOMELESS" and
"HOMELESS DIE" have been spraypainted across the plywood barriers.
The homeless have found that new technologies have their advantage
and often cluster in the most severe forms of winter weather in bank
lobbies where instant money machines are located. It is a grim irony
that they huddle against the cold without resources in an anteroom
designed to conveniently distribute money. Their intent is not criminal
but merely survival, but their presence is soon noted and they are
moved out by the police to seek another resting place. Homeless
persons reported time and again that the police routinely woke them
on cold winter nights when they were sleeping on a heat grating to
tell them to move on. The homeless were cogniscent that there is a
larger political agenda involved in their forced marching from one
point to another in the city. When the homeless cluster in groups for
warmth in a prominent area of the city, i.e., beside city hall or embassy
buildings they are the target of police harassment. They are literally
112 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
an 'eyesore' that has to be removed much like the Miami police
remove homeless persons pursuant to their annual football classic.
The governments of cities want the homeless to remain invisible, lost
in the crush of city street crowds. The sight of homeless people
sleeping on grates gives the wrong message about the city.
The second form of crime that often brings homeless youth
particularly into conflict with the law is offences surrounding the use
and abuse of alcohol and drugs. In the case of alcohol, the public
nature of drinking engaged in by many homeless youth to escape the
harshness of street life leaves them open to continuing police
observation, harassment and possible arrest. There are a number of
regulations that prohibit the drinking of alcohol in public parks, the
'living room
1
 of the homeless. Although as a society we struck down
laws which made it a criminal offence to be drunk in public almost a
decade ago, we still harass the homeless who drink in parks. While we
would not want the homeless to take over public parks and intimidate
other users while they engage in drinking behaviours, this is an
unlikely scenario. The homeless congregate only in central downtown
parks that, while during the day provide a multi-use park for all
citizens, often in the evening become a human jungle. They provide a
place for drinking, drug sales and consumption, sexual liaisons
between gay men who cruise the park looking for partners, hookers
who seek customers, the deranged who have been cast off by our
society and the homeless sleeping on benches.
Similarly there are many homeless young people who try to
escape reality through the use of a variety of illegal non-prescription
and illegally obtained prescription drugs. The most common form of
street drug is cocaine either in powder form or in the cheaper, and
more deadly form of crack. Cocaine in Canada's major cities retails on
the street for $20 a matchhead. An enterprising homeless youth can
purchase this 'hit' for $20 and split it in half, selling both halves for $20
to an interloping suburban youth out for a good time, and not likely
to ask questions about price or quantity. This sales transaction
generally takes only 15 minutes at which time the homeless youth can
now buy two matchheads, split them into four, take one, and sell the
other three for sixty dollars.
The criminal enterprise they are engaged in is both transitory in
nature, and does not produce any long-term benefit for them. They
do it because they lack the money of the 'suburban' kids to pay up
front for their drugs, and therefore must resort to sales in order to
attain the desired effect from their comforting chemicals. They do not
accumulate money from the transactions as most simply get 'high' and
wander into the parks or some other area to enjoy their drug induced
Life on the Streets ... 113
euphoria 'trip' up and down the main street of the city, or try to find a
party house where there are more drugs and alcohol available.
Their behaviour, aside from the necessity of having to sell
drugs, is no different from a great number of young Canadians who
want to 'party' on weekend nights. The major difference is that their
party generally takes place in a public place, both winter and summer,
and so is more amenable to police actions. In terms of their dreams,
ambitions, and ideas about the future in fact, homeless youth are very
little different from the average teenager once the hard veneer of
their street persona is broached in an interview situation. However, as
the incidence of violence and homicide continues its upward spiral in
our major urban cores, the lives of homeless people become
increasingly more difficult. The dreams of young and older homeless
of escaping the street become increasingly less realistic as predatory
violence and the necessity of illegal behaviours surround them.
Street people also engage in the use of illegally obtained
prescription drugs. The predominant drug of choice is talwin, a
medication that has often been associated with hyperactive children.
The drug is sold in hits for roughly $10 and then is prepared in a
solution, heated and injected. It produces a 'rush' effect and a high
that street youth call 'poor man's heroin.' Qualudes or 'ludes' are less
frequently used but are mixed with alcohol to produce a deepened
state of relaxation for the user.
Few of the homeless escape interaction with the police. Their
presence in public areas at odd times of the day arouses police
suspicion, and will often result in a questioning of the homeless
person in terms of what they are doing. While Canadian citizens are
not required to answer questions directed by police officers unless
they are formally arrested, homeless people are co-operative with the
police. It was unusual for the homeless to be severely critical of the
police other than to comment on their habit of moving them on from
sleeping places when they were simply trying to keep warm and get
some rest. Joan, a woman in her forties, put it this way, "What harm
are you doing? You're just trying to sleep, bothering no one and all of
a sudden they're nudging you with their stick, 'Move along.' Why do
they do that? You think they'd know how much we suffer." Others
reported that the police are sympathetic to their plight although this
was far more common amongst homeless persons over the age of
thirty. Sam, a forty-one-year-old homeless man with a severe drinking
problem commented on the humane face of policing: "One night I
was down in the park drinking, and I passed out from too much
booze. Two cops came to arrest me and hauled me off to jail. It was
lucky they did because it was a really cold winter night, snowing and
114 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
ice. I would've froze to death. I fought like hell with them because I
didn't want to go but that was the booze talkin.' They really saved my
life I guess." However some homeless people did report that the
police had on occasion, 'shoved/ 'pushed/ or 'punched' them for no
apparent reason. This has been a consistent finding of a number of
studies of police-homeless interactions in North America.
25
 A few of
the young homeless women who were prostituting to survive
mentioned that the police had initially made some effort to talk to
them when they joined the ranks of the ladies of the night, but their
intervention was viewed with hostility. "They want to know your
name and are you legal (sixteen or older). They tell you to get off the
street, its dangerous and all that shit, just like they're your father.
Who needs it?"
Another group of persons that is beginning to swell the ranks
of the homeless are persons with AIDS and AIDS-related syndromes.
AIDs sufferers already experience extremes of stigmatization, social
ostracism and abuse in their lives as they learn to cope with an
ofttimes debilitating and rapidly terminal illness. Some leading
American spokespersons have forecast that by the middle of the 1990s
our health care system will not be able to cope with the substantial
costs involved in treating and housing AIDS patients in Canadian
hospitals and ancillary institutions. In several Canadian gay
communities private funds raised through the activities of concerned
citizens have underwritten hospices or retreats for AIDS victims who
often need asylum from a hostile world as well as assistance in daily
living. With increasing movement politically towards the concept of
user fees and the current crisis being felt in Canadian hospitals, it is
arguable that soon AIDS patients may follow mental patients into the
streets, victims of deinstitutionalization policies cloaked as community
benevolence. Those familiar with the deinstitutionalization literature
will remember that the movement to the community was heralded as
a positive step towards the creation of the Gemeinschaft village,
wherein the community would care for the mentally ill. One expects
that soon similar arguments will be made on behalf of, but not by,
AIDS sufferers. Meanwhile AIDS sufferers find it increasingly difficult
to keep a home as they face discrimination in the workplace often
resulting in job loss. Soon they find themselves without the financial
resources to keep a roof above their head, and few places willing to
rent to them. Residents of homeless shelters are not welcoming of
AIDS sufferers, and often share a common intolerance of those with
the disease. Like many among us their ignorance of the disease leads
them to conclude they will catch it if they are merely in the proximity
of AIDS victims while this is scientifically impossible.
26
Life on the Streets ... 115
Our failure as a society to act in the face of these human
tragedies that are compounding daily is a telling indictment of the
limits of our own humanity. We are aware that brutalized young
people leave home to sell their bodies for a few dollars while risking
contracting catastrophic illness; that old men and women like Drina
Joubert freeze to death in the cities we call our homes; that street
people are subjected to untold harassments and violence, and yet we
have done very little to try to either understand the depths of their
dilemma or to rectify the conditions that cause and perpetuate this
deplorable condition. We are content to let children live in one room
of a converted motel, who have become so immune to the process of
displacement that it superficially does not seem to effect them. Under
this exterior of toughness and indifference, a sure hallmark of
constant degradation by society, are individuals with dignity and
worth who we ignore at peril to ourselves, our own humanity, and at
risk to our society. Who will be the next young person to join the ranks
of those selling sex? Which of our fellow workers or classmates will
suddenly find themselves without a job or means of support and will
be forced into a shelter existence? How many people have to freeze to
death, or be beaten to death, before we will act to do something
about it?
Making the Homeless into Criminals
Our society does not provide an equal opportunity for all to
succeed, despite the political rhetoric to this effect that is the constant
chatter spread by politicians and societal apologists. Here is one
figure to mull over. In Canada there are at least one million poor
children according to The Canadian Council on Social Development.
27
Sixty percent of these children live with both parents, 36 per cent live
with lone-parent mothers while the remaining 4 per cent live in other
forms of unique relationships. While poor families constitute 13 per-
cent of all families with children "they account for 23 percent of 16
and 17-year-old drop-outs."
28
 These children according to the CCSD
report, and common sensically, experience "many unmet needs and
alienation from their classmates." For them, school is not a haven for
the development of the mind but rather a demeaning experience that
reinforces their isolation. "Instead of a learning environment, school
becomes a place where poor children are forced to confront life's
inequalities first hand." Additionally, poverty means that one does
not have access to good sources of nutrition, warm clothes for cold
weather, or toys and books that develop skills. Poverty, in other
words, "contributes to poor mental and physical health which in turn
make learning difficult." In response across Canada, many schools
116 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
have begun breakfast programs to feed impoverished children. One
final figure gives us a first hand impression of what poverty means in
terms of life choices and chances. The average poor family with two
children after paying for all of the essentials of life, shelter and food is
left with $1.33 per person a day to cover all other expenses.
29
 This
would include "telephone, reading materials, transportation, dental
care, drugs and fire insurance." Anyone with school-age children will
recognize that this means that these children will not be part of many
school activities that require the input of personal finances. The poor
in large numbers are held in a net suspended on the edge of
homelessness. As economic times worsen in our society and education
becomes an increasingly central requirement for continuing
employment, it is the children of the poor who will continue to
become in growing numbers the homeless of tomorrow.
The behaviour of the homeless in public places is a source of
true discomfort for many people. When the homeless engage in
aggressive begging for money, or commit a crime or block access to
public buildings they become a target for public anger. Similarly, in a
growing number of public protests at the national level, the homeless
have attempted to publicize the depth of their poverty. On February
18 some 100 protestors dumped hundreds of old shoes outside the
office of Dan Mazankowski, the Minister of Finance. They pointed out
that while 360,000 Quebeckers require social housing, the federal
government had cut assistance for such housing by 67%. There is
currently a debate which is ongoing in many American cities about the
ways in which homelessness should be handled. Should we extend
more charity to the homeless, or should we attempt to remove them
from view through tough policing of their activities? One
contemporary governmental response is to claim that enough is
already being done, a claim made for example by Brian Mulroney with
regard to public assistance. Large dollar numbers are quoted in terms
of what is being done but no attempt is made to address the issue of
how that money is being spent, and neither are the homeless
consulted about its use. The homeless remain in this country without a
voice, largely unorganized in being able to lobby for control over their
lives. Empowerment remains a distant concept as the homeless drift
through our social welfare streams. Jim Ward, a former homeless
person and homeless organizer in Canada, found that, "Many among
us view the homeless as lazy and undeserving, and despite some
interest in their plight there is a general malaise which clouds our view
of their predicament."
30
 Few successes in helping people move from
the street are readily apparent, and front line workers in the area
interviewed for this book could only point to a handful of cases in
Life on the Streets .. . 117
which they had personally overseen a personal transformation into
the mainstream for their charges. This itself is a testament to the
harshness of the street and the way in which homelessness creates
either anger or dependency. In the former case, homeless persons
recognize their predicament and also the reluctance of society to
provide other than band-aid measures to keep them poised on the
edges of society, never moving to its core. Dependency, the
relinquishing of hope, soon overtakes many homeless who allow
themselves to give up the fight to retake their independence and
autonomy, feeling that the great amount of effort required will only
result in failure, or at most a brief respite from their condition.
There is obviously a need to revamp some of the existing laws
that circumscribe the lives of the homeless. Laws which invoke
sanctions against begging or loitering need to be reviewed in terms of
their unneeded and unnecessary intrusion into the lives of the
homeless. While at present we have not witnessed the kinds of
animosity and violence that have characterized exchanges between
the police and homeless persons in the U.S., this is surely a function of
the deepening of the crisis that is growing perhaps more slowly, but
just as surely, as that which has arisen to the south of us. The
deepening recession in our own country, growing unemployment,
worsening poverty, continue to swell the ranks of the homeless and
create the ever present potential for an escalation of the problems of
how to deal with the homeless, whether as deserving poor or
potential criminals in our cities. These issues are dealt with in detail in
the chapter which follows.
For many whose lives do not follow regular paths, periodic or
sustained homelessness is a continuing way of life. The
institutionalization of the homelessness into a state of dependency is
part of a process of transformation from a person with a temporary
accommodation problem or life crisis into chronic reliance on state
assistance and subjegatation to the many laws, rules and regulations
both formal and informal that circumscribe the lives of homeless
persons. The pressures and victimization experienced by homeless
people result in the development of highly negative self-attitudes and
feelings of personal unworthiness, deep embarrassment and disgrace,
which can have the effect of immobilizing the homeless individual.
We know that even mild depression can produce profound
psychological and physical effects in persons who are fully employed
and housed. For the homeless, there is no respite from the onslaught
of life lived on a moment-to-moment basis. Many become immune to
the demands of the world that surrounds them as the meaning of life
constructed previous to their becoming homeless begins to make no
118 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
sense to them. Henry Miller described this state of consciousness in his
book Tropic of Cancer as the effect of society robbing a person of their
essential dignity and hope for a brighter future:
Somehow the realization that nothing was to be hoped
for had a salutary effect on me I decided to let myself
drift with the tide, to make not the least resistance to
fate,... I would hold on to nothing, that I would expect
nothing, that henceforth I would live as an animal.
32
Some homeless people respond to their victimization by
retreating into self, viewing themselves as pitted against a world that
has abandoned them. George Orwell, who spent a not inconsiderable
time as a homeless person sleeping on the Victoria embankment in
London, and in the streets of Paris, described this process of shielding
oneself against further assaults on the self. "Under siege, the self
contracts to a defensive core, armed against adversity."
33
 Existence
becomes provisional as the homeless person cannot live for a future
that looks certain not to arrive. Drug and alcohol use can thus be
better understood as a form of situational hedonism, that is, that one
has to enjoy some pleasure in a life filled with pain, as the next day is
likely to bring more and ofttimes deeper anguish and suffering.
Other homeless people become resigned to their fate, such as
those who have spent long years living in shelters. They suffer from
the classic symptoms of institutionalization associated with the
behaviours of mental patients and prisoners who spend long periods
incarcerated. Lesley Harman's research in Canada with homeless
women reflects this problem: for to many women as well as men their
hostel becomes their home.
34
 The shelter may represent a kind of
safety from the worst violence the street has to offer; it has routines
which though repugnant, dehumanizing and stifling to most of us,
assume a character of acceptability to the long-term resident. Even
the jail-like environment and bunk-style sleeping arrangements are
no longer criticized as the person sinks ever more deeply into a state
of docility. When in interviews at various shelters the residents talked
about obviously poor conditions in positive terms I was at first puzzled
about their attitudes? Could this place really be better than it
appeared? Perhaps I was judging it by some obscure middle-class
standard. It took some considerable amount of close questioning to
come to the realization that a transformative process had been
effected in these people. Their standards of what they might like in
terms of accommodation no longer mattered since they had accepted
that they would always be in this form of intolerable living condition.
Like prisoners of war they had chosen the only route of survival open
Life on the Streets ... 119
to them, which was to give up all their dreams in order to be able to
cope with their present and future reality. There is no use dreaming of
steak dinners when you have accepted that all you will ever eat is a
steady diet of macaroni. To do so only brings constant
disappointment, anger and heartbreak at your own failures.
Very few homeless are in a position to criticize the
arrangements that are made for them, but never with them. Seeing
themselves as beggars, they are reluctant to criticize the facilities and
services which are offered them in case they are simply abandoned.
35
Again, this is another form of victimization as the homeless are made
to understand that they no longer have any rights as a human being
and that they cannot express dissatisfaction except at the cost of peril
to their survival. The absence of an organized homeless response to
the inadequacies and inhumanities of the social welfare system is not
surprising given the control exerted by these institutions over their
lives. Few employees of a corporation volunteer to criticize their work
conditions at the risk of losing their jobs.
In conclusion, it is time that our society began to move away
from policing policies that criminalize the survival activities of the
homeless, or that repress their normal way of living whether it be
loitering in a public place or begging to buy food. The homeless
should be viewed properly as victims of a variety of societal pressures
and failures rather than as criminals who choose their way of life and
are solely responsible for their conditions of life. Whether the
homeless are engaging in mere crimes of survival or those strange
behaviours that are so often associated with street people—yelling
into the wind, cursing society, urinating in public (when they are
denied access to so many public places), or actively begging for some
spare change—their acts have to be re-evaluated by lawmakers,
enforcers and policymakers. Each of these forms of behaviour carries
with it a heightened chance of the homeless becoming criminalized or
otherwise subject to the ministrations of the state control apparatus.
The homeless are thus victimized by (1) their acts of survival, (2) by
other homeless and non-homeless persons, (3) the police, and (4) by
the exploitation of their forced immiseration and criminality. Forced
to survive in a harsh environment by government policies that exclude
them from the mainstream initially, and then further reinforce this
through the dehumanizing and debilitating effects of welfare
dependence, many homeless people are forced into the desperate
situation of having to commit criminal acts to survive or find some
momentary pleasures in an otherwise intolerable existence.
120 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
Snapshots of Homeless Life
We end this chapter with six vignettes of life as a homeless
person drawn from my interviews. They are from both women and
men and provide snapshots of the realities of street life. Hopefully,
they illustrate the kinds of struggles that permeate the lives of
homeless people in Canada and their attempts to deal with them as
they live a day-to-day existence. The interviews reinforce many of the
themes that I have explored in the last two chapters: the bleakness of
a homeless existence, the degradation associated with shelter life, the
struggles required to receive assistance and the conditions that are
attached to it, the abuse that can lead to homelessness, the positive
views of the homeless despite their condition.
Sherri
Sherri is a thirty-year-old woman who lives on the streets. She
has been down and out for over five years. She spends most of her
days sitting in the parks of the downtown core, watching the people
who come to use the park, smoking, and talking with her friends. She
has a normal appearance and could be an office worker on her lunch
hour; the only difference is that her period of inactivity is 24 hours
long. Various individuals donate food to her and visit with her
throughout the day and early evening. I interviewed her on the eve of
her birthday on a warm summer night. Sherri grew up in the city
where she is now homeless. She has had some involvement with the
mental health system after she suffered a breakdown. This central
event in her life, this epiphany, signalled her rapid fall into the ranks
of the homeless. Sleeping on the street is not the life that Sherri would
choose but it reflects her 'unwelcome' status at several womens'
shelters:
The street hostels resist me turning up there because
when they are abusive I make complaints about rapes
that go on in these places, indecent assault and various
forms of abuse and blaming people for crimes they did
not commit, and when I make myself unpopular I am
kicked out. But sometimes I am not kicked out, I am
simply so sick by the abuse that I would rather sit and
look at the flowers . . . then be in the opium dens of
Charles Dickens.
Like most homeless persons time has lost its meaning for Sherri:
Life on the Streets ... 121
Of course, time seems very strange to me now because
there's no schedule in my day. It seems to me that there is
no schedule in my life. It is hard to have a time sense.
Sherri receives governmental support but it is insufficient to
assist her in moving out of a homeless status:
I am on family benefit, but I'm given just enough to find
that I don't have first and last month's rent and I cannot
support myself. They give me $580 a month. It costs $600
for first and last month's rent alone, plus I have to have
food and new clothing each month. My clothing gets
stolen, some of it gets soiled. I have to have shampoo, I
have to have soap, I have to have carfare, toothpaste,
etc.
There have been few employment opportunities for Sherri in
Toronto, so a few months ago she left the city looking for a job:
I travelled Ontario because I was hoping to settle in a
place if I could find a place that would hire me. Actually if
I'd had the money I would have been to as there were
farms that were interested and things. I was hoping to
settle in a smaller community where my skills would be
appreciated, where I was not known as well, where I
would be able to use skills such as crocheting, maybe
contribute to a gift shop or work on a farm or something.
So I travelled Ontario looking for work because there
were no jobs in Toronto, but I didn't make it, I had to
come back here. I didn't have enough money to travel
with.
Sherri feels that social workers and street people alike view
street women in a jaundiced way, encouraging them to form liaisons
with casual acquaintances and strangers so that they will have a place
to stay:
... I wouldn't just take anybody and no one understood
it. They all understood that if I was out here in the street,
they'd invite me for one cup of coffee and I should take
the man. I wouldn't do this.
This young woman on the edge of our society feels that one
form of solution to homelessness may lie in government's investing in
the homeless to provide solid employment coupled with
122 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
accommodation. Sherri felt that one solution would be a
restaurant/gift shop run and owned by homeless people
... opening up a cafe, a business where we would take in
street people and make an investment in them in terms
of business. We would listen to the people and support
them until they were rested and help the person to find
out what their skill was and then help train them ... and
then as they became a success business-wise they would
make contributions back. As you made money for the
place you would support people to go into business and
courses. If they were successful in their businesses they
would pay so much money back to your centre, help new
people out.
This form of movement towards independence and autonomy
would have the effect of short-circuiting the control exercised by
social services over the lives of the homeless:
To me, you would abort the attempt of social services to
lay down restrictions on how you can treat people
because it's not a social services situation. It's purely
voluntary and it would be a business. My personal
opinion is that I've never met anyone, who wanted life,
that was alive that lacked something to offer people
even if all they can do was listen .. . There would not be a
single person that I had ever met that would not be
profitable to somebody. It's an investment to give a
return investment.
The park is home for Sherri throughout even the winter
months:
I sleep on the park bench. A friend of mine is staying in a
hostel near by. She keeps sort of edging me to go into a
hostel but I don't want to. There are people who will buy
me coffees. I sit on the park bench in the freezing cold, I
have no money.
When Sherri exhausts her money each month there are periods
of days when she has no funds for food:
People bring me charity. I also give charity. Like when I
get money my friends and we will all go 'out on the
Life on the Streets .. . 123
town' and have coffees and sandwiches and anybody
who's hungry has something.
Sherri is proud of her appearance but finds it difficult to
maintain her appearance. She shops in 'bargain' stores for her clothes:
I have found skirts, tops, pants and things . . . they are
very inexpensive . . . sometimes they are in style and
sometimes they are not. When I am able to dress nicely
it's better for looking for work. When I go to a job
interview and I'm dressed up they're more likely to hire
me if I'm in a skirt as opposed to jeans. But there is a lot
of trouble with keeping clean. There is a place in this
area, the womens showers, you can go in there and take
a shower. They serve dinners, if you're hungry you can
have a meal. But the trouble is keeping clean, like if I
don't have pocket money at night I have to rely on
someone to take me out for coffee in a restaurant
because there's no washrooms available. They keep the
park buildings all locked up.
Bill
Bill is thirty-seven years old. He is divorced from his wife of four
years and has two children. He is a skilled worker, a machinist who
worked steadily for sixteen to eighteen years until the effects of the
recession hit some four years ago. Bill became homeless because of his
use of drugs:
I used drugs on weekends. It just got to the point where I
couldn't pay bills or anything. I used to blow my whole
cheque on it (cocaine), six or seven hundred bucks. It
went on for years. I got kicked out, had no money.
Bill has been a regular in the shelter since he lost his job four
years ago. He has been able to get away from shelter life now and
again when he gets short-term employment in the construction
industry:
Well I was doin' the route; Seaton House, Good
Sheppard, Sally Ann. You're only allowed two weeks
here, two weeks at the Sheppard.
His first experience of a homeless shelter was both shocking and
degrading:
124 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
It was terrible. I got lice from the place the first time I was
here.The people, you gotta hide things and people steal
your shoes, jacket, whatever. People are always watchin'
ya. There's some really weird people in this place.
Bill refuses to seek psychiatric or therapeutic help for his drug
use. He served prison time in his late teens for selling speed but has
not been arrested since. He currently lives on welfare, but jobs are few
and far between. He receives $361 a month on welfare.
Bill spends his days at various drop-ins for the homeless:
There's a church right down here it's open from eight to
four every day. You can buy food there, it's very cheap.
Fifty cents for an egg sandwich, a meat sandwich.
When I was working it seemed like I was working with
family and it seemed like you just got up and went to
work long hours for ten dollars an hour so it seemed like
you were going nowhere.
Bill sees himself as being somewhat institutionalized to a life of
dependency at this point:
What are you doin
1
 this for goin' to work and
everything? You come here get a meal free, get lodging
free and not have the same kind of headaches. It's wrong
way to think but I'm sure a lot of people think that way.
It's hard to get away.
Bill finds that without a telephone number it is difficult to look
for a job, since there is no means by which prospective employers can
get in touch with him:
It's hard to get a job. How do you put down a phone
number for to get ahold of you? It's pretty well
impossible. There are some places where they will take
messages but its really for older men.
Bill doesn't panhandle but does work at 'cash corner' for money
doing casual labour for ten dollars an hour when he needs 'smokes.'
Two years ago I got a job and it was on a rotating shift
and I was staying here okay. Big hang-up was that I
couldn't get my sleep when the shift changed right? Like
I'd go to this agency so they let me sleep in the
Life on the Streets ... 125
hallway there, but there was no way I could sleep cause
people are walking in the hallway there going back and
forth. I even tried here to get them to let me sleep here
in the day, like I tried to explain it but they wouldn't
listen.
Scott
Scott is thirty-three years old. He was born and raised in
Toronto's east end. He left home at eighteen and has a grade nine
education. He soon found a job:
I was just labouring for a construction company. And
then mostly moving companies, some of the best known
in the business.
Scott has a drinking problem that is severe. He drinks about
twenty-four bottles of beer every day. He makes his money by:
. . . panhandling on the corner of the streets, walkin'
around the streets and stuff. You'd be amazed some of
the stuff you find, and I sell it. I find stuff and take it to
the second hand store and sell it. I make ten to twenty
bucks in a day panhandling, but it takes all day. I drink
beer and stomach bitters, they're forty percent alcohol.
I had a room over at the Skidders Motel but I had a fight
with the owner. He tried to move me from one room to
the other. I was half drunk, we started arguin,' he
pushed me and then we were fightin.' See under the
hotel/motel act he don't have to give you your rent
money back. You're out on the street. I was payin' $360
a month for one room with a bed, single dresser. You go
down the hall to use the can. It's a tavern with rooms
above.
The shelters for Scott are "fine, if you're homeless". In the
shelter:
You sleep with one eye open. Like the other night there
was a guy pacin' up and down, up and down. You
couldn't sleep cause you don't know if he's waitin' for
you to go to sleep and take your stuff or whatever. Some
of the men just walk around screamin' and yellin.' Like
some of them talk away and you can't understand what
126 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
they're talkin' about. They're talkin' jibberish. You just
get fed up with them.
Yah, I've been arrested for assault, vagrancy. You can't
sleep on the street. It against the law. The cops pick up
you and take you . . . they give you a fine. Sleepin' in the
park. They pick you up, take you in, arrest you for four
hours. They give you a ticket, and you appear in court,
either that or you pay the fine. Well, you can't appear in
court or pay the fine. Eventually they'll catch up with you
and throw you in jail anyway. I spent seven days in jail for
vagrancy for sleepin' in a park.
The thrust of the law is unclear to those who break it:
Well, you're not harmin' nobody other than yourself. But
I guess what it is too, they don't want to see you out
there in mid-December, lyin' in a snowstorm or
something like that. I guess they figure, "Either we'll pick
you up now, or we'll come and pick you up later for the
coroner." They figure you'll freeze to death.
Dennis
Dennis is twenty-eight years old. He was a foster child from the
age of four and lived in six different foster homes separated from his
siblings:
I was adopted at ten, left at thirteen and then I lived in a
shack for awhile. I got a job working midnights in a
doughnut shop. I was working illegally and got paid
cash. I slept in an abandoned building two doors down
from the doughnut shop. The police knew I was there,
but they didn't do anything about it since I was a good
kid. I worked there four years.
Like many of the homeless Dennis found that his skills were not
in demand:
I hit Toronto and I looked for work. But there was no
work for bakers. So I went to Georgian College and I
tried to get a degree in culinary sciences but I only went
two years and didn't graduate. Then I met a girl and she
had our son. We lived together four and a half years. I
Life on the Streets ... 127
left her. We had been living in a basement apartment. It
was a mutual agreement.
Shelters only provide a temporary respite and there are
limitations placed upon individuals that make it difficult to get
established. Men like Dennis are subject to Catch-22; those who
collect welfare cheques are supposed to rent rooms, but the amount
given for welfare is insufficient to rent a room:
I've been in Toronto five years. I'm trying to stay in the
shelters. But they won't let you stay here if you're
collectin' a welfare cheque. They say go pay for a room
with your welfare cheque, but even the rooms around
here, there's not that many rooms. You pay eighty,
ninety and hundred a week for a room. The most that
welfare will give you is $600, but I get $361.
So, when they are ejected from the shelter men roam the
streets or try to impose on street acquaintances:
Since I got kicked out of here last Monday I've been
stayin' with friends, stayin' awake in all night doughnut
shops.
The shelters are difficult to sleep in and most men get little rest:
There are seventy-five beds in each room. It's like
sleeping with a pack of bears, thirty-five out of seventy
snoring. Other people want to stay awake all night and
talk.
Guy
Guy is 26 and has been living in the shelters off and on for three
years. He is from Canada's east coast and has travelled to several cities
looking for work:
There was no work back home and it's hard to get a place
here to get started. They just don't give you enough
money really. Everywhere you go they want first and last
and you have to buy some stuff. You have to get a place
downtown so you can travel to work. They want you to
get a place first before you can get some work, and you
can't get work without a permanent address cause they
128 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
wanna be able to phone you to verify that's where you
live so... .
Infrequently, Guy is able to get seasonal or part-time work, but
the offers are few and far between:
I worked at Calgary for the Stampede last summer, then I
came back here. Usually I just walk the streets and stay
awake at night. I've slept a few times under park
benches. I do some odd labour work here and there
when it's around.
Street life is punctuated by violence and Guy gets depressed
about why he is homeless:
I just mind my own business on the street and keep my
nose out of other peoples' business. Other people get
jumped, they get beat up. This is the worst
neighbourhood in the city.
A lot of times I say to myself, "How did I get here? What
did I do wrong?" Nothing you can do.
The shelters seem to have little interest in men doing better and
getting on in life. Guy believes that men who are genuinely interested
in getting out of the homeless life should be given the chance in
shelters where they are not surrounded by those who have become
accustomed to street and shelter life and have no desire to leave it:
They really screw you around at the shelters. See, like I
was booked in here last week. I told them I was going to
visit my uncle. I'm back after three days and they say I'm
booked out. So I won't know if I have a bed till tonight. It
stinks in the shelters. If they notice a guys trying to keep
himself, to look for some work they should at least try to
treat him a little bit better. They shouldn't mix the bums
who don't want to look for work in with us.
and when I woke up in the morning my jacket was gone,
and my sandals and my t-shirt.
Some of the staff here are pretty cruel but no worse than
the people on the streets. Like I said they treat you like
you're nobody. You're here, you're a bum, you need us,
_____ _______  
________
I spent five dollars a night for a room at hostel
Life on the Streets ... 129
we don't need you. Insensitive attitude, but then again
there are some here that are okay.
I wouldn't be here if I didn't have to be. Hopefully, I 'II
get off the cycle of shelters but like I said, it's hard. You
try to get yourself ahead but you just can't get yourself
ahead. To live here you'd have to have at least a
thousand dollars in your pocket.
Guy finds that the homeless have to overcome a double stigma,
that of being homeless and of being dependent on welfare. Although
welfare does provide for limited housing assistance, unfortunately
landlords do not view recipients as ideal tenants and so feel free to
discriminate against them:
If you're on welfare they'll give you this sheet of paper
saying they'll guarantee the person pays but a lot of
people won't even look at you. "You're on welfare we
don't even want you living here."
I hate going to welfare. I hate asking for money. If
there's a soup kitchen I'll go to a soup kitchen. Last time I
went, I went home cause my dad had died and came back
here and had to get started over again. I said to this
woman is there any way I can get an emergency cheque
so I can get started over? She looks at me and says, "You
don't deserve one. If you don't leave here I'll call the
police cause you're tryin' to rip us off." I said, "I was
away, my dad had died and I need to get started again."
She said, "Well we need to see a death certificate." I said,
"The hell with you, I don't need this shit," and I walked
out.
The few jobs that are available at the employment centre are
ones that pay so little that they will not move the individual out of a
homeless condition, being neither enough to live or eat on:
There's jobs that pay $5 a hour but you can't live on that,
it's not enough. You want a good job and people want a
place where they can get ahold of you.
How does Guy now think of the concept of home?
130 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
My mom and dad are both dead so there's no home for
me. I just try to get by day to day. You don't trust
anybody on the street. It's just too dangerous.
Nicki
Nicki is 23 years old. He has been living on the street since he
was thirteen years old. Like many street children he was the subject of
abuse in his parental home. Like many abused children he was not
believed when he complained, and his mother did nothing to prevent
the abuse being inflicted:
I came from an abusive family. My stepfather beat me
cause I wasn't his real son and my mother let it happen.
He came into my life when I was six and left when I was
eleven. He went to jail.
After enduring five years of abuse Nicki tried to commit suicide
in a desperate bid to draw attention to his condition:
I went to a psychiatric hospital when I left home at
eleven. My step-father had stabbed me, and no one
would believe I was being abused till he stabbed me. I
then tried to kill myself to get some attention. I was in
hospital for thirty days. I was then accepted into a group
home and I was there four and a half years.
Finally, after seven years Nicki moved out and became a
prostitute to support himself:
I moved out in 1984. I quit school and I came to
Vancouver and became a prostitute. I've been doing it
now for seven years.
Nicki shows little concern about the threat of A.I.D.S. and of
both the ways in which it is transmitted and its prognosis:
I'm personally not concerned about AIDS. I know about
precautions, I know what to take, I know how to get it.
I'm homosexual so I have to be very, very safe. I needed
money for my drugs, I needed money for my booze, I
needed money for a place to stay.
Like most street hookers Nicki took drugs to dull the pain of
reality but recently stopped:
Life on the Streets ... 131
I quit drinking and drugs over seven months ago. I was a
heavy liquor drinker so I used to spend a lot on liquor. I
always manage to sabotage things, money burns a hole
in my pocket. I used to make $10,000 a month. My
boyfriend also lives here. We're going to move to the
country. I'm willing to give it a try.
Street life is viewed as both frightening and dangerous,
underscoring the remarks made by all homeless people:
Life on the streets is scary. The lights are glamorous and
it's an all night party place but it's addictive, it's like
doing drugs and alcohol. But finally you don't want
anything that you wanted before and it brings you
down.
Young and underage boys work the street according to Nicki.
He sees himself as straddling two worlds, that of streetlife and that of
the professionals who constantly attempt to help him. Nicki feels that
the workers assigned to him are not qualified to help him as they have
little or no knowledge of street life. His current worker is a mother of
two whom he describes as "ignorant of my life". He would like to see
workers in place who have lived through street experiences and thus
can speak with knowledge and experience and relate to kids:
I know a couple of thirteen-year-olds that work the
street, but its' really sixteen and up. Customers are
judges, lawyers, I've even had undercover policemen.
They drive big fancy cars.
Well, it's there. I know I'm street smart and I'm also
professional smart. I've got the best of worlds. I have
friends out there if I need money I know I can go there.
Nicki sees the downtown areas of cities as both exciting for
young children but fraught with danger. His own life experience is a
testimony to this and the decline that street violence can precipitate in
one's life:
I was eleven and I used to be downtown walking the
streets and I was raped when I was eleven and my mom
turned around and said I deserved everything I got. They
didn't care. I went through six months of surgery.
132 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
Nicki sees more and more children on the street and feels that
the government and the public are not responding appropriately to
the problems of homeless children, preferring to fund agencies rather
than direct intervention services:
I think we have all the agencies we need. But there's no
funding for more street workers, for more of what we
need, more hostels for youth, needle exchanges. We
need more Winnebagos driving around feeding the
hungry that are out there prostituting, that are out there
sleeping on park benches. We need the money, we don't
need any more agencies.
While he is not entirely negative on efforts being made on behalf of,
rather than with, the homeless, Nicki views the problem as one that is
growing rapidly and little is being done in terms of short-circuiting
children into more rewarding lives at the point of entry:
We're getting somewhere but it's going at such a pace
that there's more and more kids coming on the streets
nowadays and for sure they're not getting it in time
enough. When's it gonna end? Most of it's because
they've got no one to love them, no one to take care of
them, no one to say, " I care."
In the next Chapter we explore the deeper structural roots of
homelessness in the Canadian family, the economy and various
political and social policies that have contributed to the manufacture
of the human misery that is homelessness. The argument being
followed, in concert with the ideas expressed here, is that a critical
rethinking of the problem of homelessness is long overdue in our
society. There is a real sense that there is a lack of political willpower
on the part of all levels of government to address the problems of
suffering Canadians. If we are to achieve a just society then it is
incumbent upon us to consider the ways and means to address this
serious and worsening social problem.
CHAPTER FIVE
Another Night in Paradise
They used to tell me I was building a dream,
And so I followed the mob,
Where there was earth to plough or guns to bear,
I was always there, right there,
on the job.
They used to tell me, I was building a dream
with peace and glory ahead,
Why should I be standing in line,
Just waiting for bread?
Once I built a railroad, made it run,
Made it race against time,
Once I built a railroad, now it's done,
Brother, can you spare a dime?
The Political Economy of Homelessness
Poverty is the handmaiden of homelessness. In the 1960s and
1970s Canadians enjoyed relative prosperity, while by the 1980s the
cycle of prosperity had moved on. Throughout the 1980s conditions
worsened on a variety of economic fronts as unemployment figures
began a gradual climb that had avalanched by 1991 to the point
where 15,000 jobs a month were being lost in Canada.
1
 The value of
134 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
real wages has also sunk correspondingly.? Quite commonly social
analysts compare the current economic climate in our nation with the
Great Depression of the 1930s, which left tens of thousands of
Canadians out of work. One significant difference between the 'new'
homelessness of the 1990s, and that of the 1930s is that men no longer
are the sole, visible victims of homelessness. Increasingly, as we
learned earlier in this book, women, children and families make up a
significant and growing number of the homeless in our society. In fact,
it is a telling sign that during the 1980s our modern version of the
food kitchen and the food lines, so often associated with the 1930s,
appeared as food banks, which grew at an alarming rate throughout
the last decade.
3
 Hostels and shelters also enjoyed a significant
growth during this period as governments scrambled to put together
piecemeal emergency solutions to the large number of
disenfranchised citizens that came forward for aid.
4
By 1993, there are many significant signs that lead us to the
conclusion that the grip of the recession has hit extremely deep in
Canadian society. In fact, it is by analysing both the symptoms and the
causes of the failures within our political and economic system that we
can develop a more informed analysis of the structural causes of
homelessness. While it may be comforting to presume that homeless
persons are somehow solely responsible for their own misfortunes,
this approach gives us only a distorted idea of why persons lose their
'homes.' A political economy approach allows us to integrate the
understandings we have developed concerning the more
personalized factors that can contribute to or sustain someone in
homelessness (family disintegration, personal troubles, alcohol
problems, etc.), within the larger framework of the societal conditions
that contribute to the production of homelessness. By moving from
the personal to the societal we are expanding our understanding,
stepping back, as it were, from the lives of the homeless to the life of
the nation.5 If you consider the feelings of powerlessness which are
common to all of us with regard to larger political and economic
forces (free trade, government policies, etc.), it seems obvious that this
larger dimension is crucial to analysing the wider roots of
homelessness.
To fully understand homelessness one cannot separate the
condition from the political processes that shape our capitalist
economy. Several analysts have suggested that we are entering a
period of de-industrialization in our economy. Our federal
government has propagated private sector profiteering over the past
decade, an approach that takes as its model the policies of the
Reagan/Bush administration and the Thatcher/Major emphasis on
Another Night in Paradise ... 135
privatization at the cost of social programs in the United Kingdom.
This is a strategy that has decimated the economic health of our
country, the U.S.A., and Britain. Bill Clinton's campaign for the
presidency (and that of Ross Perot) took as its main thrust the 'gutting'
of the domestic economy, social programs, and education under
Bush/Reagan 'trickle down' or 'voodoo' economics. Bush's demise was
also reflected in Britain by October 1992 as plans by John Major's
Tories to put 90,000 miners and ancillary workers out of work gave
clear signs of the collapse of this approach, which increased the
wealth of the wealthiest at the expense of those on the lower end of
the economic scale. Similarly, the effects of Mulroney's approach are
explored throughout this chapter.
6
 The central assertion of this
approach is that government acquiescence to private entrepreneurs
will lead to increased jobs as part of the benefits of free enterprise.
Not surprisingly, the thrust of private enterprise is not towards social
programming but emphasizes the opposite tack, that is, the
elimination of welfare programs that are portrayed as 'subsidies'.
Welfare, unemployment and universal medicare schemes are viewed
as unfair advantages under the Canada-U.S. free trade agreement, to
be eliminated in the interest of lower production costs. Workers are
viewed as so much 'surplus labour' to be exploited at the minimum
wage possible. This process of de-industrialization has proceeded at
an ever more rapid pace in the free trade era in Canada, as numerous
manufacturers head to locations in the southern U.S.A. and Mexico to
avoid workers' rights, unions, benefit schemes, taxes, stringent
environmental standards, and higher labour costs.
7
 The increasing
decline in real wage levels in Canada, and the increasing
impoverishment of working people through both declining
employment opportunities, the disappearance of well paid
employment (across the unskilled, semi-skilled, and professional
classes), and escalating taxation rates demarcates an ever-widening
gap between the well-to-do and those who are struggling to survive
in our country. This includes both the erosion of the middle-class and
the creation of forced dependency amongst the ranks of the ever
increasing army of labour that is kept in abeyance.
8
Economic developments in Canada, as in the United States,
reflect a diversity of problems of competition within the new global
economy as well as the internal contradictions of conservative
economic policies. Underlying these developments have been a series
of ongoing class struggles, ideological debates over the nature of
welfare provision, and a proliferation of factors that have impacted
upon the production of homelessness. However, traditional forms of
explanation of homelessness have not proven up to the task of
136 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
providing understandings but rather have served to obfuscate this
social problem in a manner that both assuages our public conscience
(or lack of it) or trivializes the suffering of the homeless.
9
 Conservative
accounts do little more than follow the approach of 'blaming the
victim/ that is, ascribing homelessness to one or more social failings of
the individual, holding them personally and morally responsible for
their condition. In the United States, this approach was typified by
Ronald Reagan's famous speech in which he fantasized that there
were "10,000 points of light" for the poor to gravitate toJO
Unfortunately, someone has normally turned off the lights before the
homeless person has arrived, or even begun their journey.
While this attitude in its most inane form shows a callous
disregard for the plight of the poor and homeless, in its more insidious
forms it holds severe consequences for the homeless. The darker side
of this concept is one that paints the homeless as 'dangerous',
'unpredictable' or 'disordered', in other words as persons to be feared,
or as I argued in the last chapter, fitting as subjects of
criminalization.
11
 This idea separates the homeless person from full
civil status, and much like the ideas of an earlier age in criminological
inquiry, provides comforting reassurance for the affluent classes in our
society. Lombroso, an Italian criminologist, became famous for his
idea that some individuals were 'born criminal,' that is, that they were
somehow biologically less advanced than the law abiding in any
society.
12
 The conservative viewpoint on the homeless is no less
foreboding for in its false reassurance of the difference of the
homeless it lulls us into believing that homelessness has no chance of
becoming our plight, when this is not only far from the truth, but as
all of us realize in the deepening grips of the current recession, is a
possibility that we see like some vague nightmare that we hope does
not become a waking reality.
Following Hopper I wish to argue that current views on the
homeless produce four distinct typologies that are all equally as
ridiculous in the pictures they paint.
13
 All of them help to illustrate
quite graphically the 'knowledge gap' that exists between the reality
of street behaviour and our experience of it.
14
 In the absence of good
information, the natural human tendency is to invent, and in this
process of invention our fantasies are given free flight.
15
 First, there is
the homeless person who is the crazed, psychotic street vagabond
either mentally ill, or, alternatively, has a mind soaked in illicit drugs
or is addicted to alcohol. Secondly, there are those individuals who
are descendent from long lines of the chronic poor in our society, a
group of ne'er-do-wells who have sprung from the ranks of those
ungrateful welfare recipients who take great pleasure in spending
their cheques on beer which they retrieve from the store in taxicabs.
Thirdly, there are many on the street who are the outcasts of our
society, the product of broken homes, unwanted children or who have
been manufactured by our inadequate welfare strategies. Finally,
there are a small group of free-wheeling soldiers of street fortune
who see in homelessness a way to get something for nothing. As
Barak has argued these explanations have one commonality in an
approach that "locates the cause of homelessness within the
individual."
16
Like many social problems before it, the study of homelessness
has been the subject of attempts at what Rock termed, 'ownership of
the problem,' that is, to define homeless people in terms of a
particular model of human behaviour.
17
 The few attempts in Canada
in this field have largely arisen from the psychiatric and social work
fields.
18
 Both take an approach that prefers to 'medicalize' the
behaviour of the homeless, as reflecting mental illness, or some other
form of personality defect. While the medical model arguably has had
some positive effects in the field of alcohol dependency it will,
without doubt, produce dire consequences for the homeless. While it
may be useful to think of some of the homeless in terms of personal
pathologies, it is unwarranted to assign the majority of them to the
ranks of the walking wounded. According to a variety of large scale
studies in the United States, under 20% of the homeless suffer from,
or have received treatment for, mental illness, including drug and
alcohol abuse.
19
 While the medical model does not have a utility for
understanding the homeless, it certainly does have considerable
advantages as a tool of social control. When someone is deemed to be
suffering from a medical disease, particularly one which involves a
psychiatric condition, or drug or alcohol dependency, we adopt an
attitude that they are more childlike and less responsible for their
actions, at least in terms of their entitlement to assistance from the
state. They are therefore likely candidates for control. They require
discipline to be imposed.
20
No Sweet Home
The Canadian family, as we have already discovered, is
undergoing a rapid transformation from the 'ideal' of the nuclear
family that predominated our vision of domestic bliss following the
Second World War. Now, blended families, a union of previously
married partners form a significant and growing part of our family
structures. Single-parent families led predominantly by women also
account for a large percentage of families in Canada.
21
 Not only are
Canadian women and men marrying at a later age (27.2 and 28.2 years
Another Night in Paradise ... 137
138 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
respectively) but they are also choosing to have far fewer children, a
reflection of the harsh economic realities of a society that in most
major urban centres requires two working adults to carry a
mortgage.
22
 Families are under increasing pressures not just in terms
of the economic struggle to survive with a reasonable standard of
living, but to withstand a variety of societal pressures which seem,
from a plethora of sociological and other sources, to be mounting a
relentless attack on the fabric of modern living.
Family violence has become, since the mid-1970s, the subject of
both academic research and much later, public and political attention.
Before this period, women were seen to be the property of men who
had exclusive rights to them sexually as well as the right to 'discipline'
them.
23
 In a 1975 study I conducted of wife assault in Oshawa the
remarks of one offender underscored this attitude. Asked why he had
shot at his wife with a shotgun while she was lying in bed he replied,
"She's my wife and I'll shoot her if I want to."
24
 Under Canadian law,
in concert with most Western nations, a man could not be found
guilty of sexually assaulting his wife until the 1980s. Wife abuse is
certainly not a new phenomenon as sociologists like Walter
DeKeseredy and Ronald Hinch have informed us, in fact, "violence
against wives has existed for centuries."
25
 The home, rather than
being a sanctuary is the most probable site for a woman to suffer an
assault. Contrary to public beliefs, woman abuse is a phenomenon
which cuts across all social and economic barriers. It has been
suggested that the over-representation of lower socio/economic
families in reported cases reflects several factors including styles of
conflict resolution, willingness to call police, willingness to proceed
with a charge, and the higher 'stakes' involved as one proceeds up the
social ladder.
A major problem of woman assault is that often those who are
victims do not wish to have their assailant charged. There are several
reasons why this occurs including fear of reprisal from the
perpetrator, lack of belief in the effectiveness of the criminal justice
system, and embarrassment that authorities and others will become
aware of the crime.
26
 The most overwhelming reason for non-
reporting though is related to the feminization of poverty in
Canadian society. Women in our society have long been in a position
of economic inferiority.
27
 Not only are they likely to receive less pay
for a job of equal responsibility when compared to a man, but they
are more likely to have a lower paying, part-time, or underemployed
position.
28
 This explains that while the majority of women with
children work outside the home, few are in an economic position to
provide themselves and their children with anything approaching
Another Night in Paradise ... 139
their normal living conditions if their husband or partner's income is
lost. Thus while their own safety, physical and psychological well-
being may often be threatened, it is quite common for women to
endure abuse in order to provide what they consider to be an
acceptable environment for their children.
Women may have little information about the alternatives to
suffering abuse in their own homes. The contemplation of a future in
a shelter for battered women, followed by possible dependency on
welfare, is for many women too much of a sacrifice to ask their
children to make. In this protective role, women sacrifice their own
selves in order to mistakenly preserve a 'home' environment for their
children.29
While woman abuse is a problem that has received a great deal
of academic, governmental and interest group attention, child abuse
is another social problem which is having a significant impact upon
the life of the Canadian family. Child abuse is reported in increasing
numbers in every province of the country.
3
*) Since the dark figure of
crime in the case of child abuse, that is, the number of unreported
crimes, is estimated to be substantially higher than all reported cases,
reported statistics represent only a fraction of all abuse committed
against children. Child abuse may consist of negligence, physical
and/or verbal abuse, psychological abuse, or sexual assault taking a
variety of forms. In 1981, The Badgley Report on Sexual Offences
Against Children and Youth found that amongst the children they
interviewed that one in three boys and one in two girls had at some
time in their lives been sexually victimized.
3
i Males are responsible for
70 to 85% of all abuse against children committed in Canada.
32
Beyond this, one must also consider the overall system of patriarchy
and male domination that has left women and children to
predominate overwhelmingly as victims in every sphere of criminal
activity. But the more significant crimes, it has been argued by critical
criminologists, lie within the manipulation of economic and legal
structures by males who thus ensure the continuance of female
subjugation.
33
Economic pressures have also been a major force in the
production not only of discord within the Canadian family, but in the
direct creation of homelessness. Throughout the 1990s economic
conditions have deteriorated rapidly under the conservative federal
government's approach to fiscal management. Let us consider some of
the indicators that provide a reflection of the economic state of our
nation. Incomes fell 1.6% for the average Canadian family in 1990 as
compared to 1989 according to Statistics Canada figures.
34
 Average
family incomes ranged from a low of $39,701 in P.E.I, to a high of
140 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
$57,027 in Ontario.
35
 More disturbingly, the number of Canadians
who had to subsist on low incomes, that is, in which food, shelter and
clothing accounted for more than 56% of their income, was the
position that 3.8 million Canadians found themselves in.
36
 More than
1,000,000 of the poor of this nation in 1990 were children !
3
? Between
1989 and 1990 the number of children living in poverty jumped 15
percent in Canada.
38
 According to Ken Battle of the National Council
on Welfare, this trend is a direct result of rising unemployment. He
suggested that, "there's been no progress in reducing poverty. "
3
9
Financially, it simply does not make sense to relegate so many of our
children to a future that will simply increase the probability that they
will be dependent upon welfare services. All of the things that
Canadians desire for their children are routinely denied to these
young people, and there are a number of other problems that spring
naturally from poverty. Children in poverty are a growing burden on
our provincial and national purse. In 1991-92 Ontario and its umbrella
municipalities spent $5.45 billion dollars on welfare, an amount that
puts it almost on a par with education as a mainstay of expenditure.
40
A House of Commons Subcommittee on Poverty reported in December
of 1991 that the costs of child poverty are astronomical.
41
 Early school
leaving amongst poverty-stricken children will cost us $1.3 billion over
the next twenty years in unemployment benefits, $23 billion in
income that they will be unable to earn, and $7.2 billion in taxes that
will not be collected from them since they will be sentenced to
unproductive lives.
42
A closer examination of the trends underlying these figures also
reveals that it is becoming increasingly difficult for family heads to
find full-time employment as only 58.4% of family heads were able to
work full-time.
43
 The average number of earners per family also
dropped to 1.75 in 1990 which was a fall from a figure of 1.8 in 1989.
44
These figures also reveal that women, particularly as single parents,
suffered the greatest decline in income during this fall. "More than 60
percent of female lone-parent families were low income, a jump from
53% in 1989. The average income for such families was $21,961, 7.3%
less than in 1989."
46
 There were a variety of other family groupings
that suffered declines in income level ranging from 7 to 10 percent
including single-parent families headed by females, two-parent
families with no income, and families headed by males under the age
of 25. Many millions of families remain below the artificial low-
income ceiling devised by Statistics Canada which is $28,081 for a
family of four living in a city with over 500,000 residents.
47
Unemployment has grown substantially in the 1990s so much so
that by April 1992 more Canadians were out of work than at any time
Another Night in Paradise ... 141
in the nation's history according to Statistics Canada. Their numbers
continue to rise at a rate of 500 per month.48 But this is not a new
trend; in fact, a report by The Economic Council of Canada concluded
that, "Unemployment in Canada has shown a steadily rising trend in
the three decades since 1960, with the average for each decade
surpassing the average for the previous decade. "
49
 An examination of
the unadjusted jobless rate for March 1992 reveals that 1,695,000
Canadians were out of work.
50
 This figure does not reveal the true
extent of unemployment in Canada for hidden within it are several
other additions to unemployment figures that are conveniently not
taken into account in government calculations: the number of
persons who have simply given up looking for work, who in other
words is now without hope of finding a job. The number of these
individuals are impossible to estimate accurately but it is certain they
number in the hundreds of thousands, comprised of a variety of
workers. Consider for a moment the plight of thousands of workers
who are losing their jobs in Canada each month as factories close and
employers relocate to the U.S.A. or Mexico. A worker in his fifties may
find that he/she has become redundant, and is considered too old to
be suitable for retraining. Young workers with limited education and
skills find that there are jobs for which there are fewer and fewer
retraining schemes.
51
 The new catchphrase of conservative economics
in this regard is termed 'restructuring,' a word that is synonymous
with eliminating not only legal impediments to profit making and the
international transfer of capital, but the elimination of workers and
their rights.
52
 Unions, unemployment benefits, and social security
schemes are viewed as expendable. So it is that each month more
Canadians are out of work despite rhetoric from the Federal
government that the 'recession' is over, a declaration they made three
times during 1991 alone!
53
 The economic reality is that the recession is
over for the wealthy and factory owners as many have fled from
Canada in anticipation of a North American/Mexico duty-free zone.
This dismantling of the Canadian economy was presaged by
sociologist Gordon Laxer, as I have already argued in his brilliant book
Open for Business that documented the selling off of not only our
national resources, but the ability of the average Canadian to make a
reasonable living.
54
 Several major economic analysts have publicly
declared the obvious: "Canada is certainly in a protracted
recession."
55
In smaller cities across Canada, particularly those which have
been dependent upon manufacturing for the employment of their
populace, the situation is extremely grave. In Windsor, the downtown
area became a virtual ghostown during 1991-95 as stores closed
142 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
weekly, succumbing to the pressures of unemployment as well as
cross-border shopping as cash-strapped and overtaxed Ontarians tried
to stretch their dollars. The Mayor, Mike Hurst, commented that the
number of people who are unemployed or on welfare was
"horrifying".
56
 The most disturbing part of this scenario in Windsor,
which is repeated across Canada, is the depth to which the current
unemployment has cut. Like the homeless they may become, the
unemployed are increasingly, " middle-class, people-next-door types
who have exhausted their unemployment benefits, are in hock to
their families and have nowhere else to turn."57 Welfare assistance by
January 1992 in Windsor had hit record levels as in a city of 191,000,
with a workforce determined by the Canada Employment Centre to
be 137,000, roughly 10,000 were unemployed, a rate which is
approximately 25%.
58
 This figure does not account for the number of
children who are dependent upon these individuals. The Economic
Council of Canada's conclusions on this issue are informative for our
discussion, for it clearly demonstrates that "there are already a
number of disturbing signs that unemployment will remain a serious
problem for some time to come."
59
 Their research, which looked at
three decades of rising unemployment in Canada, found that "rising
and persistent unemployment" were constant factors in the nation's
ill health. In other words, Canadians workers can expect little relief
from the problems of unemployment. Further, the report found that
increasing long-term unemployment has become a mainstay of the
Canadian economic picture. There also have been substantial
increases in the number of older workers who find themselves
permanently unemployed as employers attempt to sidestep payment
of long-term benefits to workers approaching retirement age.
Encouragement to both permanent and semi-permanent retirement
has been a leading economic strategy in the 1980s and now continues
at an accelerated pace in the 1990s as both industry and government
attempt to trim budgets. This has also been accompanied in 1993 by
suggestions that the age of eligibility for government pension
schemes should be raised beyond the current 65-years floor. This is
important in any consideration of homelessness for Canada has an
aging population that will fall within the scope of this problem within
this decade, and the first decade of the new century.
Another central indicator of the financial health of the nation is
the number of businesses that run into trouble and have to declare
bankruptcy. For the latest year of available figures, 1991, the figures
reveal that bankruptcies are occurring at record numbers that amount
to no less than a crisis. In the first eleven months of 1991 there were
69,947 bankruptcies in Canada, a 42% increase over the same period
Another Night in Paradise ... 143
in 1990.
6
0 During the first ten months of 1990 the Canadian
government paid out a record $15 billion in unemployment benefits
or 37% more than the same period in the previous year.
61
 The
government's fears over a possible inability to cover the costs of
unemployment accounted for a 24% increase in premiums during the
first half of 1991 and a further 7% increase that came into effect on
January 1, 1992.62 Tightened rules and decreased benefit periods are
also impacting, like all of the above factors, in the production of
homelessness. More than this, the current crisis has been softened by
many of the unemployed drawing upon assets and family resource
networks to remain solvent. However, these alternative resources are
scarcely unlimited, and it often means that seniors are further
subsidizing the current economic downturn.
Throughout 1991, 1992, and 1993 Canadians have been
watching as large retail chains fold up shop and retreat into
bankruptcy. Among the list of casualties has been the Cotton Ginny
clothing chain, Birks, Peoples' Credit Jewellers, Dalmys for Children,
Bata Shoes, Bargain Harolds, Foot Locker, Tip Top Tailors, Dofasco,
and a variety of manufacturing firms including the well known Sklar-
Pepplar furniture makers. The Canadian Manufacturers' Association
feels that, contrary to government pronouncements that these firms
are simply victims of economic restructuring, industry may soon
tailspin into "triple-dip" recession (if it has not already), predicting
that it is possible that more than 1,000 manufacturers will close their
doors during 1992.
63
 While interest rates have fallen substantially over
the past year, this has not brought the necessary relief to provide
business owners with choices regarding their futures. As
unemployment soars there are few customers buying big ticket items,
and despite the fall in interest rates, mortgage rates remain relatively
unaffected with five-year terms still pegged at 9 172% when the prime
has been set at record lows for the past two decades. Interest rates on
most credit cards still remain at 18 to 21% (and in some cases more).
Dependence on welfare is another indicator of the economic
well-being or ill health of a nation. Welfare is for many the net
between homefulness and homelessness. In Ontario, Canada's largest
and wealthiest province, 13.9% of its citizens were dependent on
welfare by June of 1991. Comparatively, during the 1981-82 recession
the rate for those on welfare was only 5%. In June of 1989, that rate
was only 6.8%.
64
 In fact, in Canada only New Brunswick has a higher
proportion of its population on welfare, some 10.1 % ,
65
 By February of
1992 1,151,000 people in Ontario received welfare assistance
compared to 644,100 only two years previously.
66
 Again, if any trend
is consistent with economic developments in the 1990s it is the
144 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
slipping of greater numbers of low- and middle-income families into
the ranks of the poor and impoverished across the country. Another
disturbing trend is the manner in which the rich in Canada have fared
increasingly better during this period while increasing numbers of
Canadians form lines at food banks in order to eat each month.
Across the country those who are on social assistance make up
an increasing percentage of the population. In June of 1991 the
following figures were released from Statistics Canada that show this
trend. As a percentage of the total population the rates were:
Newfoundland (9.1%); P.E.I. (8%); Nova Scotia (9.4%); New
Brunswick (10.1%); Quebec (8.9%); Ontario (9.7%); Manitoba (6.5%);
Saskatchewan (5.5%); Alberta (6.4%); British Columbia (7.0%); The
Yukon (4.5%); and The Northwest Territories (18.5%).67
Municipal governments are faced with declining revenues as
unemployment rapidly rises, businesses fold, and lower interest rates
bring them a lower margin of return on investment. Budget cuts
coupled with tax increases that outstrip wage rises are now beginning
to target massive welfare programs at the federal, provincial and
municipal levels as governments struggle with growing deficits. The
federal government chopped its budget to provide adequate housing
by $150 million over the last four years at precisely the time when the
mayors of Canada's sixteen major cities called for a renewed
commitment at the federal level to subsidized housing.
68
 The
response of the Federal Minister of Housing was to suggest that the
mayors devise "solutions which don't involve money. We can't just
throw money at a problem like this and hope it will go away. "69 That,
in the case of all levels of government, has not become a problem to
date! In December of 1991 the province of Ontario cut a variety of
services to welfare recipients that particularly affected single mothers
and the disabled, the two most vulnerable groups amongst welfare
recipients.^ Wheelchairs, colostomy bags, artificial limbs, oxygen
tanks and children's summer camps were cut from the welfare budget.
In fact the Metropolitan Toronto City Council voted in April 1992 to
cut a variety of 'non-emergency' items from its general welfare
budget.
71
 The items cut included: Christmas allowance, non-
emergency dental care, beds, bedding, and last month rent deposits.
Without the latter allowance it is impossible to rent accommodation
in the Toronto area and so more are added to the list of the homeless
by this type of policy. The conclusion of scientific studies on the effects
of welfare on children is clear: childrens' life chances are severely
diminished when their families become dependent on welfare. They
suffer from increased risks to health (both physical and mental),
achieve lower educational standards, and develop behavioural
Another Night in Paradise ... 145
problems at a rate far greater than that amongst children of non-
welfare-dependent parents. To this must be added the dangers of
living in areas that are more crime intensive, where drugs are dealt
and used in the neighbourhood, where violence is seen as an
acceptable means of conflict resolution and where there are few
avenues to success that open to the future. As one homeless mother I
interviewed lamented, the temptations of a life of crime are often
difficult to resist for teens subsisting on welfare: "My son was
fourteen and they caught him dealing crack. He was making $400 a
night. I told him, 'You've got to get an education and get out of this
crime.' He turned to me and said, 'What job am I ever gonna get that
pays $400 a night?"
1
Finally, an old phenomenon renewed provides a window on the
depth of the economic woes of the country, foodbanks. While
Canadians who lived throughout the Great Depression of the 1930s
are familiar with the sight of line-ups for soup kitchens, the foodbank,
as a social institution, has reached a level of usage that disturbs those
who manage their resources. While food banks began as a stopgap
measure in the early 1980s, by the end of the decade they had become
a needed source of sustenance for hundreds of thousands of
Canadians each month.
72
 Foodbanks exist in every major city in the
country with the total number at some 1,100 institutions. In
Metropolitan Toronto, 120,000 people of which 51,000 are children
depend upon the foodbank each month to eat. Foodbank usage is
estimated to have jumped some 50% over 1991 levels across the
country, as more join the ranks of the unemployed and exhaust their
financial and familial resources.
73
 Even on university campuses
throughout Canada foodbanks have become common as students
attempt to make fewer dollars stretch across their school year.
74
There are clear signs though that the ability and will of the community
to provide the necessary food to keep the banks operational is
waning. In 1992 foodbank drives continue to fall short of their
expected goals by ever-increasing margins.
In the remainder of this chapter I present the life histories of
three women and their children to illustrate several predominate
themes in the process of becoming and being homeless.
Women, Children and Homelessness
Sally is a 29-year-old woman who is living with her eight-year-
old son Sean in the Toronto motels program. She is extremely
overweight, the result not of a generous diet but rather of poor
nutrition. Her childhood was not a happy one, "Well, my mom and
dad separated but it was for the best. They fought too much and my
146 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
Dad raised myself and all my brothers." Sally and her four brothers did
not do well in school. Sally received a grade 10 education before
dropping out and was married at 19 to another high school dropout.
She was married for five years in a relationship she describes as "good,
real good." Eventually the relationship began to fall apart when she
moved up to a home they purchased in a rural area while her husband
stayed behind in Toronto commuting up on the weekends. "My
husband was a very good provider... he made $600 a week and our
mortgage was only $300." Sally did not work during the marriage,
"My husband never wanted me to work; he wanted me to stay home
and raise our son because he, uh, he didn't have a good childhood
himself, and his mom was never home, too busy runnin' around and
his parents were split up so he said, 'I want our son to have a good
home life.' He worked for a construction company and was a boss, a
foreman."
By the time I interviewed Sally she had been separated from her
husband for five years. She describes the events leading up to her
"kicking him out" in the following way, "Well we decided to move up
north so he was stayin' down here with my mom; she never charged
him nothin' and then it got to the point that he wasn't comin' home
on weekends at all. It got to the point where Sean and I would be up
north alone but he'd wire the money up. He wouldn't be home for
three months at a time. Then I found out he was running around with
my cousin so...my best cousin... my favourite cousin. Oh we were close,
real close. We more or less treated her as our own sister. I just asked
him one night he came home and I said to him, I says, 'Are you, is it
true you're foolin' around with my cousin?' He says, 'Sally' he says, 'It is
true.' So I just says, I threw his dinner in the garbage and I said, 'Get
out.' But he didn't think that I was really serious until I threw most of
his clothes in the yard there. On our marriage day I told him, I said to
him right before I said 'I do' I said, 'If you ever fool around I'll leave
you even if it's once... I did.'"
Sally was not without resources. She sold her home and had
$65,000 profit to her credit. However, by this time she was living with
another man, a native Canadian who promised to build her and her
son a home on his reserve in the country that she and her son liked
living in. "I didn't want no guy but then he stopped his support
payments ($300 a month) because he met another girl. Then I met this
native guy and it was.. . that was the nightmare. I lost my home. Well,
uh, he promised me he said, Sally lets move up north to his reserve. He
was good to me. But my friends and family were tellin' me Sally he's
no good, he's an alcoholic and I wouldn't, I don't know, I was just so
stupid I wouldn't believe it. Yet I would see him drinkin' eh, every day.
He could drink, uhm, a twenty-sixer and then some. It didn't matter to
him. He'd pick up a two-four (of beer) drink it then pass out or
whatever but then he told me to sell the home, this was in the middle
of winter. He said, We'll go further up north to his reserve. So I sold
the home.
Sally moved to an apartment in Toronto with her son and her
boyfriend where she began to pay $1,150 a month for an apartment,
living on the profits from her house. She describes in a few words how
she lost her money, "I gave it all to him." Sally continued, "I bought
myself and Sean a few things, not expensive. He wanted a pool table,
a $4,000 pool table. I said, 'I need this to buy a house up north.' He
said, 'Don't worry, don't worry. I'm getting you a house.' His demands
for money accelerated, 'Sally go the bank and get me two grand out.
Buy me a car.' I just spent the money on him. It went down, down,
down. Then when I came to the last twenty thousand, I said to him,
'Phil, when are we going to get this house?' 'Don't worry about it' he
said. I told him, 'This has got to stop, I'm goin' down hill.' Eventually
Phil got an application for a home site from his reserve but didn't
bother to send it back. Sally confronted him, I said to him, 'Phil you
always told me you were gonna pay me back. You don't pay me back a
dime.' I lost everything and I blame myself. It was my own fault. I was
blind. Within four months all of her savings were gone. Then I was
broke. I got in touch with welfare. Welfare would just cover the rent,
that's because it was expensive rent and I think I only had like $50 left
over. So I lost the place.' Sally was able to find a home to rent in the
suburbs. The effects on her were profound but were even more
pronounced on her child. 'Sean, my son, suffered a lot through this,
like his grades have gone way down.' I said to Sean, 'I'll get you
another house.' He's not used to this. So I got another house, but I
couldn't again afford the rent. I'd only have $125 left over, and for a
job, it was so hard to get job. I don't know how many applications I
filled out and then here I am. I said to the landlord, 'I'm not gonna see
my son starve, my son comes first, even before me.'"
Sally and her son moved in with her mother. "But my mom's got
boarders, too many actually, she's overcrowded, and then also she's
getting put into a one bedroom. See she's not supposed to have
anyone living with her where she is so I had to come here. It's a public
housing apartment."
Life in the motel is hard for both Sally and her son. "He just
hates it. He's not used to living like this. My son always had the best of
everything, now from the best of everything he's got nothing, he's
got nothing." Living in a crowded motel room has had more serious
effects on Sean's behaviour. "My son was so well behaved before. I'd
Another Night in Paradise ... 147
148 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
just tell him to do something and he'd do it. Now if I ask Sean to do
something he gets mad, upset, or 'Why do I have to do it? Why don't
you do it?' or stuff like that and he'd never been like that and my
friends even said to me they noticed a change in Sean since all this
happened. Sean feels the sense of difference from his classmates,
"Like he says to me, 'Mom, all my friends go to a home, like they go
home. I have to come back to this motel every night.' He hates it."
Sally describes the living conditions in the motel room as "very
cramped" partially because she has entered a survival relationship
with another native man who lives with her and her son in the room.
The room is a 12 by 12 typical motel room with an extra single bed for
her son. Sean is also exposed to various forms of deviant behaviour in
the motel concourse including wife abuse, violence and the two most
commonly reported problems, prostitution and drug abuse. "Sean
sees it too and that's why I'm really upset. Sean said to me, 'Mom,
that's a hooker.' He sees it all the time. I mean you go out here on the
street and you see all kinds of girls and that you know, and he sees
that." Sean has friends at the motel, "but then they come and go,"
explains Sally.
Sally has only one friend left that she sees on occasion. Her
friend upset her with her observations on her decline into
homelessness, "Sally you know at one time you were young and you
had all this, you were young. You had more than all of us, all of our
friends put together. Now look at you. Now you got nothin!"
Sally gets $17.50 a day for food. "We manage. I always make
sure Sean has, like I just won't go out and buy . . . like I'll even do
without. There's like two slices of luncheon meat left I'm gonna give it
to my son before I give it to myself. I always make sure Sean has his
supper regardless. Like daily I have to go shoppin' daily." Sally often
goes without food during the day so her son will have enough to eat.
Even the food she can buy is of questionable nutritional value. Few
homeless families can afford to buy fruit or vegetables and so survive
on the staples of most poor families in Canada: pasta, canned foods,
sandwiches, hot dogs, powdered milk and hamburger. Local
supermarkets do not help matters for as Theodore Caplovitz pointed
out many years ago, the poor pay more. Take a sign posted in 1991 on
a Windsor A&P store. It stated that persons cashing social assistance
cheques to pay for goods must take 10% as 'gift certificates.' Local
merchants are aware that poor people do not have any choice in
where they shop. They do not have the means to transport themselves
and their children, and so are forced to shop close to their motel
rooms. Like 'convenience' stores these merchants artificially inflate
Another Night in Paradise ... 149
the price of their goods so further limiting the choice that the
homeless have in terms of food varieties.
Sally is concerned about their life in the motel. "This is no place
for a child at all," she told me. "There's prostitutes. I hear a lot of
fights." Sean is frightened by the constant fighting of the neighbours.
"Sometimes he says, 'Mom, he says, one of these days like his fist is
gonna come through our wall because when he gets mad he always
hits our wall at two in the morning."
1
 Sally 'lost everything' and the
only possessions that she and her son retain are their clothes and
"things of my son's that are sentimental like you know stuff that he
had when he was in kindergarten. I keep everything of Sean's
everything, baby pictures and stuff like that. I sold everything."
Sally suffers from periodic depressions but tries to put on a
brave face for her son, "Everytime I look at Sean I think no, I can't let
myself get down or this kid's even gonna suffer more. This kid's seen
more in his eight years. At his age I'd never seen half of this. I look at
myself and Sean and I think at eight years old I'd had no worries."
Sally maintains that her mother's leaving the family when she was five
had no effect on her although this is unlikely, "My mother it didn't
bother me that she left." Sally feels sorry for her son. She and her son
depend on Goodwill stores for secondhand clothes. "You only get
$17.50 and if Sean needs a pair of shoes or boots, well I got him a pair
of boots for $4 over there and a jacket." These purchases even further
deplete their food budget as Sally explained, "I had to say, 'Well Sean
you need your winter coat, your winter boots so like no I can't buy this
kind of meat or no I can't buy jam 'cause we need that for your winter
boots."
1
 When Sally bought the coat her son complained, "He said
'Mommy this smells,' and it did. It smelt like puke and it did. So I really
had to wash it three times." Sally has only used a food bank once but
it was not a pleasant experience for her. " It was my fault, but I had to
bring Sean down there. I couldn't leave him in the motel alone. I
brought him down there and Sean just looked at me like he was
disgusted in me, for the first time I really saw disgust in that kid's face.
I didn't say anything to him 'cause I knew exactly how he was feeling."
Sally spends her day cleaning the room, or looking through the
paper for jobs. In the evening she and her son go for walks, when the
weather is good, to pass the time. As the reader has discovered, in
common with many other women who fall into the cycle of poverty
and homelessness, Sally has accepted the attitude of social workers,
friends and others that it is her failings that have made her homeless.
Like battered women who blame themselves for their own
victimization, Sally is herself a victim of society's labelling of the out-
of-role behaviour of women as "deviant."
150 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
Battered But Not Beaten
Family violence according to a variety of sociological
researchers in Canada is pervasive, cutting across socioeconomic
boundaries. Violence against women takes many forms from child
abuse through spouse abuse through to sexual assault. In all of these
forms of violence the relationship of women to men, and particularly
our patriarchal society, provides a framework for the subjugation and
victimization of women. Battered women are forming an ever-
increasing number of our homeless population. Some use shelters as a
temporary means of escaping violence and regrouping for self-
sufficency.
75
 Programs for these women are often seen as transitional
from a status of financial dependency towards independent self-
hood. A significant number of these women however have neither the
educational skills or history to enter the workforce easily. Many
require lifeskills training, education in languages, or skills upgrading
in order to find and keep employment. Though the majority of
women desire employment in terms of the self-sufficiency, status, and
independence from welfare dependency it brings when children are
with the woman, this generally proves to be an impossible goal to
attain. When a woman has more than one child to provide for, and
they are not of school age, the difficulties become insurmountable.
Daycare arrangements often are so expensive that they would
effectively reduce the family income of women to a point below social
assistance payments that are, in themselves, insufficient to cover living
expenses. So women become caught in the Catch-22 of homelessness.
Their unwillingness to consider work options is seen as a sign of
laziness while they are criticized at the same time for remaining
dependent on various forms of assistance.
Martha exemplifies the problems that confront battered
mothers who must seek refuge from the men in their lives. A thirty-
three-year-old woman, she has resided in Canada for nineteen years.
She was married for ten years and has two children, a five-year-old
boy and a seven-year-old girl. Martha and her husband had enjoyed a
marriage that was relatively free from either arguments or problems.
They had their 'ups and downs' but nothing out of the ordinary. A
year previously her husband, who had worked steadily as a carpenter,
had suddenly stopped working and spent long days doing nothing. Six
months before she became homeless another significant event in their
lives changed the nature of their relationship. "My husband's sister
passed away earlier this year and he became very depressed. There
was no ... everything was blamed on me. We couldn't even enjoy a
good day because his sister was dead. If I didn't go to the cemetery
Another Night in Paradise ... 151
disgrace, a bad wife and no respect for his family and everything
became so tangled up with the death he wasn't livin' a real life he was
just relating everything to his brother and then he became abusive. He
hurt me physically and mentally and it came to the point that he was
threatening me, and giving my death into detail. Like I had three ways
that I was gonna die."
Martha endured beatings from her husband for over half a
year. Her husband's sister had not been close to her husband before
her death, but after the funeral her husband's behaviour became even
more bizarre. "We had to have a big picture of his sister blown up to
have in our house with flowers next to it. He would talk to his sister to
the picture and he wanted the children to kiss the picture every day. I
thought that was abnormal. He would go out to our balcony windows
and scream for his sister 'Please come and help me, come and help me
I can't live anymore.' Previous to the death they hated each other,
they fought constantly. He was never close to her."
The behaviour that finally forced Martha to flee with her
children to shelter was a threat against her life. "I left on the
Wednesday. On the Monday he picked them up from school and told
them I was dead and I wasn't aware of that. The whole night he kept
telling them he was going to go to Florida with them. On Tuesday he
did the same thing but into more detail with them." Martha took his
threats seriously: "I guess I could only figure out that I was trying my
best to pretend that everything was going to be okay and that I could
manage on my own saying that I could put up with this, you don't give
up. I have very strong religious beliefs and I didn't want to leave my
home. But then when I drove the children to school and they cried and
hung onto my neck and said they don't wanna go 'cause I wouldn't be
there after school for them 'cause I'll be dead, and that really put the
knife through my heart. My son even asked me if I'll remember them
after I was dead. He couldn't come to my funeral because they'll be
going to Florida."
Martha had sought counselling after the death of her
husband's sister but her husband refused, a common theme with most
women in crisis as men see counselling as an admission of weakness. " I
tried to persuade him to go for counselling together for so long and
he would always put it off. He said only crazy people go to that. So I
went on my own, and I never told him because I was afraid too 'cause I
knew he would stop that 'cause he had told me that once he knew I
would go for counselling and tell them all sorts of lies that we would
be through." Her husband began to control all aspects of her
interaction with the outside world attempting to isolate her further in
the home: "I couldn't phone anybody 'cause he would get on the
152 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
other side of the phone and wanted to know what was going on and
then he would finish the conversations without telling me. He says,
'Okay fine, I'll take it from here.' He used to call me names all the time.
The worst things on earth. He always said that I was a bad mother."
Martha had held a job for ten years at a hospital before the
birth of her children and had worked herself up through increasingly
responsible jobs. "I worked very hard to get to that position. I knew
everybody in the hospital including doctors. He hated the attention
that I was getting at the hospital. So when I had the two children I
finally had to quit because it was too expensive to go back to work. All
of a sudden you're just like bang-bang with these two children at
home twenty-four hours, gettin' up in the middle of the nights. You
know everything was all mixed up all of sudden but I was still doing it.
And if I got upset at night and said you wanna go out or do
something, 'lets go for a drive/ he'd get very upset because he was
tired from work and I wasaskin' too much of him." He also 'didn't like
the idea' of her escaping from the house to mothers and tots or
volunteering at the local school.
Soon her husband began a pattern of physical abuse. "He
choked me and he loved to grab me by my shoulders and my neck and
throw me against walls. He would do this in front of the kids too and
my daughter would be in between us." Her husband did not want her
to seek employment as a teacher's aide despite job offers from friends
in the schools. "I just love being with the kids. My husband hated that
because he said, 'You have to get dressed up. You're gonna be talkin'
to all the male teachers and the principals and you're gonna be flirting
with them.' He hated that." When Martha tried to earn an income to
prevent having to collect welfare her husband objected, "I was going
for interviews just before I left because my husband was just sitting at
home, sleeping, watchin' Oprah and Donahue and everything. He
would just lie on the couch all day long and just wait for me to come
home and start arguing with me." Her husband at the same time
refused to look for work, "Why should I work, he would say, just to
give you money?"
Her husband refused to look for work. When she arrived at the
shelter her parents tried to help but were victims of the economic
recession themselves. "On the weekends they bring me canned goods
and things like that. My father worked nineteen years in the same
company, now they closed the doors. He's out of work. He's fifty-six.
There's nothing. He's just waiting around."
The children mirrored the father's behaviour during the first
few weeks in the shelter. "They were very agitated. They would be
hitting each other. They'd be doing things that my husband and I
Another Night in Paradise ... 153
were doing. Talking to each other exactly. My daughter was using the
same words and that used to make me cry inside."
Martha still lives in fear of her husband. She has only let her
parents know where she is staying. "He might really hurt me," she
explained.
Giving up Your Children
For some homeless women the escape from male violence does
not end with their impoverishment in the limbo of shelter life. Jan and
Jim are both twenty years of age. When I interviewed them they
brought Jan's five-year-old daughter to the interview, a seemingly
happy, bright child. Jan looks much younger than her 20 years and has
the physical appearance of a teenager. Her interactions are
punctuated by expressions common to adolescent culture. She was
dressed in a white shirt and jeans and had long black hair. Her
'boyfriend' was similarly dressed but looked drawn and tired.
Underneath his eyes large black marks, signs of fatigue and
malnourishment, punctuated his face. His posture in the chair was one
of someone who was extremely tired and his speech was slow as
though it required some effort to speak. Jan on the other hand was
very eager to be interviewed and smiled throughout.
Jan left home at the age of fifteen because of her pregnancy
and began to live common-law with a male friend. Her daughter Kate
was born early in this relationship and the girl's father left soon
thereafter. Jan then entered into another common-law relationship
which produced identical twin boys who are two years old. Jan and
Jim have lived together for two years. Both have Grade 10 educations.
Jan has never worked since leaving home and has survived exclusively
on social welfare support. They became homeless in the fall of 1991,
the first time either of them had been without shelter in their lives.
They had been living in a basement apartment in the home where
Jim's mother rented the first floor until she asked them to leave
following a 'big argument'. "We got into an argument, a heated
argument and we just left. The police were involved and they told us,
for the benefit of the kids, because especially for her, they've been
around some major violence. So when my mom started freakin' out,
she's addicted to prescription drugs, so she got a little haywire and she
called the police and the police came. The police said we could have
stayed, but it wasn't safe for us to do. Like I paid my own rent, me and
her, like we have our own rent receipts and everything. We were
entitled to stay." They paid a rent of $600 a month and both were
receiving social assistance, Jan's family benefits and Jim's welfare.
They received $17 a day for food.
154 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
When they first moved out of their basement apartment they
were not aware of the motels program, but found themselves in one
of the motels used to house the homeless along with regular paying
customers. "Originally in the beginning of October we went to the
Lido. We had a little bit of money. We pawned our T.V. off to a friend
of ours and we stayed as long as could around in motels because we
didn't know of any place we could go. Then we found out about this
place and then we phoned them. We were stranded in a restaurant
for like four hours tryin' to find a place to stay and uhm we phoned
them and they said we'd have to get the police that came to the
incident at the house to phone them and all this stuff. Finally we were
able to come. We j ust showed up here and they sent us to a motel over
here."
For the past year Jan and Jim have been involved in a
complicated battle with Jan's "ex" over custody of the children. This
resulted in a series of kidnappings of various of the children several
times by Jan's "ex" and by Jim to retrieve them. The expulsion of Jan
and Jim from their apartment was also related to this ongoing battle.
"There was an ongoing court case for around a year-and-a-half or so.
He had the twins. The only time he's ever let the twins out of his sight
is just before we came to the Lido. He phoned her up and said that he
had a bad headache. He thought he was gonna hurt the kids 'cause he
couldn't get an aspirin and he has no money and this and that, the
whiney sort. So we went and picked up one of the twins and the other
one had already been sent to his ex-girlfriend's and he told us to pick
him up the next day. The night we picked up the one twin was the
night my mother freaked out."
Jan's "ex" wanted custody of the twins according to Jan so that
he could collect increased welfare benefits. "He got another girlfriend
after we split up. She got pregnant and had his child and then she was
looking after the twins. He just had the income 'cause in Ontario the
welfare comes in the man's name so he just collected the cheques and
she just lived there with my kids and then she had her baby and she
took her baby and she left him. So now he's there by himself with the
twins." Jan's "ex" showed up at the motel in the early morning hours
to retrieve the boy. It was the third occasion on which he had
kidnapped the child. The police did not respond to her call for almost
an hour: "One cruiser showed up and they didn't do nothing. So I said,
How come he can come here and kick in the door and take the
children from a sleeping bed at quarter to midnight and you guys
aren't going to do nothing?'" Jan was told that because she did not
have a custody order there was nothing that could be done. Assuming
that this was also true of her husband, Jan, Jim and some other
Another Night in Paradise ... 155
members of the motel community went to Jan's "ex's" house to
retrieve the children the next day. The police told Jim he could not be
charged. "I went down the next day with a couple of friends, he
opened the door, I pushed the door open, I grabbed the kid, handed
one to her, she walked to the car, I had the other kid in my arms. I
started walkin' off the porch, the guy tackles me and wipes me out on
the cement. The two-year-old kid smashes his head on the concrete. I
got the other kid in the car, he grabs the other kid and runs into a
neighbour's house. We got in the car and started driving back. We
were three doors away from here and we got surrounded by about 25
police cars and they held me for a month on an assault charge. They
gave me $2,000 bail the day after they charged me, and I don't have
any family except my mom so I ended up doing thirty days in the
detention centre and they dropped the charges."
While Jim was in detention Jan's "ex" showed up once again at
the motel, this time with the police to serve an interim custody order
without notice. "He went to court and got custody of Kate and I was
even't notified. The police are there. They're ready to arrest me but
there's no way I'm gonna hand her over. She's sobbing, she's clinging
to me and he's standing out front smirking away, thinking 'ha ha ha, I
got ya.' But then I phoned him later on that night to make sure she's
arrived there and he gets on the phone and tells me how he's doing
this to hurt me." After 11 days she was able to go court: "As soon as
the judge found out this was a government program and I wasn't
staying in 'a Lido motel' he awarded me interim custody of Kate."
Although she was also awarded visiting rights for the twins her
husband did not comply with the court order. Soon tired of battling
her "ex" she gave up custody of the twins to her husband. Survival as a
homeless family has meant that two of her children have been lost to
Jan.
You Can't Afford to Live Here Anymore
Another factor that has made a significant contribution to the
increasing number of homeless in our society is the spiralling cost of
housing in Canada. One of the primary causes of homelessness is the
economic development trends that have surfaced within our urban
centres. Research has clearly demonstrated that the number of
households in Canada that pay over 30% of their income in rent has
increased dramatically in the 1980s and 1990s.
76
 In fact, government
statistics show that between 1976 and 1981, 23% of households wer e
in this category, while by 1985 this number had risen to 27.8% of all
households. In large cities, welfare recipients find that the situation is
intolerable and that the thirty percent figure is often grossly
156 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
exceeded.
77
 Some, according to research, pay 64% of their allowances
on housing each month. One homeless man I met who was begging
for food on a street corner in Vancouver typified this unacceptable
state of affairs. "After paying for my rent I've got about $50 a month
for food, so I have to use the food banks or beg here each day to eat."
A study conducted in 1984 that examined women renters found that
some 38% of female renters exceeded the 30% mark in their rent bills.
Further evidence of the feminization of poverty, if any was needed,
was provided by a 1985 Canada Mortgage and Housing Report which
revealed that fully 40% of families headed by a single female lived in
housing that was crowded and/or in need of serious maintenance,
and/or cost more than 30% of their income.
7
8
Throughout the 1980s another disturbing trend evolved in
Canadian cities, the process now termed gentrification
 79
 This process
involves the renovation of inner city housing stocks in the downtown
core, or zone of transition as Burgess referred to it. This is an area
immediately adjacent to the downtown core that would have been
composed, until the mid-1970s, of a variety of old housing stock in
poor and deteriorating condition given over to low income families,
boarding houses, and some commercial uses. During the latter half of
the 1970s there was a movement of middle- and high-income families
into this core area, and the remaking of deteriorating inner-city
neighbourhoods began a gradual, then accelerated pace of change.
These areas in Canadian cities like Montreal, Vancouver, Halifax and
Toronto have undergone a process of transformation into middle-
class enclaves. There is a variety of examples that one can cite across
the country: Toronto's Cabbagetown, Centretown in Ottawa,
Halifax's South End; Mount Royal in Montreal, and Kitsilano in
Vancouver. This development has not been restricted to the Canadian
scene for similar developments can be easily located in the Lewisham
and New Cross Gate areas of London, England, in various cities across
the United States and in a number of the countries of the European
Economic Community. The process then is not specific to Canada, and
this suggests that there are larger social and economic forces at work
in this development.
80
There are certainly some positive aspects of inner city
restructuring: (1) the renovation process preserves traditional housing
stocks and heritage housing; (2) renovated properties provide a
source of tax revenue for city councils; (3) there are spin-off effects
that are felt in the downtown areas in terms of revitalization of
businesses, and a reversion to pedestrian and people-centred streets.
However, the major drawback of these developments is that they
remove low cost housing from the housing market in the core area of
Another Night in Paradise ... 157
the city that provides accessible services for low-income individuals
and families. There are a number of feasible explanations of
gentrification that have been developed by housing and social
analysts. Two central features are:
1. Drastic increases in housing demand as a result of the
baby boom of the post-war era and the decline in
average household size. Between 1976 and 1986 the
overall number of Canadian households increased by
29 percent, there was a 38% increase in the number
of households with heads 25-34 years of age; and a
47% increase in households headed by those aged
35-44. During this same period the total population
of the country increased only 11 % .
8
2. There are a number of social trends which have
impacted to increase the demand for these forms of
housing. As Marlene Mackie, a noted sociologist has
pointed out, these include: a substantial increase in
Canadians who do not marry; increases in the
average age at which both males and females do
marry; increased divorce rates that create housing
demands; and decreases in the number of children
couples are having within both traditional and new
forms of relationships.
82
 This type of family unit has
shown a demonstrated preference for inner-city
housing, which they are in a position to afford given
dual income earning power. The inner city is a place
devoid of the sterility of suburban living now
associated with seniors, immigrant populations and
commuting problems. Disparate groups including
gays, artists, students, political activists, and those
who preferred a cosmopolitan lifestyle compete for
space in the downtown core. As George Fallis has
pointed out, gentrification reflects the shift that has
occurred within urban economic arrangements as
manufacturing jobs have been replaced by service
and a variety of managerial, professional,
administrative and technical forms of employment
that cluster in the downtown area.83
There are a number of factors associated with gentrification
that directly contribute to the production of homelessness. We have
158 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
already found that low rental housing disappears rapidly in the face
of renovation and renewal. This means that rooming houses that were
capable of providing rooms for a dozen people or more suddenly are
converted into space that is occupied by one or two individuals.
Landlords and property owners are motivated in this process to
attempt to convert aging apartment buildings and hotel properties
into condominiums for sale at staggering profits or to renovate once
affordable apartments into units that are only affordable to the
wealthy in society.
The extent of the loss can be readily appreciated when a review
of Canadian studies of the housing market is reviewed. In the City of
Toronto between 1975 and 1985 the number of private rental units
declined by 11,000, with the majority of this loss accounted for by low-
cost housing and rental units in core areas of the city.
84
 Between 1982
and 1986 The Ontario Task Force on Roomers, Boarders and Lodgers
estimated that 1,700 rooming houses were lost each year to
demolition or conversion.
85
 In Ottawa the loss was even greater as 40
percent of the rooming house units disappeared between the years of
1976 and 1979.
86
 These losses were largely confined to the
Centretown and Sandy Hill areas of the city. But when one considers
that this occurred only at the onset of the gentrification process, one
can estimate that this loss has accelerated appreciably in the past
decade-and-a-half. Finally, the city of Vancouver provides one of the
more startling examples of this decline, moved not only by the forces
of renovation but, as I discussed in an earlier chapter, by the push to
displace low-income persons from hotels where they were
permanently lodged, to accommodate tourists for Expo. During the
years 1973 to 1976, a collection of inner city neighbourhoods lost over
2400 rental units, which accelerated to a rate of 1,000 units per year
during the 1976 to 1981 period.
87
 Ley informs us that from 1976 to
1981 there was a pronounced elimination of low rental residential
hotels from Vancouver's zone of transition effectively reducing the
number from 1200to450.
88
In Calgary the vacancy rate reflects that of most of our other
urban centres. The effective vacancy rate during the latter half of the
1980s and early 1990s was a mere 1 %. Athough considered in isolation
this is a major contributor to homelessness, one must also weigh in
two additional factors, soaring rents and the cost of real estate, which
has experienced a steady rise through the past decade. These factors
have all made a substantial contribution to the rising rate of
homelessness in Calgary, and on the prairies generally. A 1990 report
that received input from 36 agencies estimates that there are, at a
Another Night in Paradise ... 159
minimum, 7,000 Calgarians with no 'fixed address' and this number is
growing at an alarming rate.
89
Seniors are a specific group in our society that are being hit
hard by the disappearing stock of affordable housing. The Council of
Aging in the Ottawa-Carleton area recently carried out a study that
concluded that there was a lack of affordable housing for seniors in
their catchment area.
90
 Women seniors, as we might expect given the
discussion in this chapter, were the most likely victims of this shortage,
particularly those who had incomes in the $10,000 to $30,000 range.
Examining data from the 1986 census the Council found that 83% of
the elderly population in Ontario is composed of women seniors over
the age of 65, and further that 85% of these women live in rented
rather than owned accommodation. This reflects our earlier analysis
of the feminization of poverty which mirrors womens' limited time
spent in the full-time work force during the past four decades and
their subsequent lack of private pension incomes from employment
sources.
91
The rise in rents during the 1980s was not only unprecedented
but accelerated at a rate unheard of in previous decades. In Toronto,
for example, rents increased some $562 for a three-bedroom
apartment in 1984 to $738 in 1988, or roughly a 32% increase.^
However, most apartments were renting for well above this as
demand outstripped supply, and landlords exceeded rent control
increases in a variety of ways. "Finders fees" of several thousand
dollars were not uncommon for quality apartments as renters
struggled to find good accommodation that was in severely limited
supply. This practice though illegal became part of the standard
practice of renting for several years and still continues today. In St.
John, rents for a similar apartment increased from $342 to $427 a
month, a rise of 24.8% .^
What has been the extent of federal investment in affordable
housing during this time of increasing crisis? It is reliably estimated
that since the mid-1970s successive federal governments have spent a
total of $5 billion to support the construction of rental housing.
During 1982 and 1983 it initiated programs to support first-time
home-buyers through grant programs that cost $1.5 billion. However,
in 1984 the government's expenditures in the area of direct housing
were a mere $942 million.
94
 Its own research was a direct comment on
the gravity of the situation and on its own unwillingness to address
the area of homelessness. In one 1985 consultation paper it was
discovered that there were in excess of 500,000 rental households that
were not living in adequate accommodation, that is, that was
physically adequate for their needs and uncrowded.
95
 A further
160 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
200,000 persons who were homeowners were in serious difficulties in
terms of being able to afford their houses. It was during this period, of
course, that thousands of Albertans walked away from their homes,
selling their rights in their properties to "dollar dealers" who paid
them $1 dollar for their homes and then rented them until foreclosure
proceedings were finalized and the house was seized.
96
 Government
estimates found that in all owned and rented properties that only
1.4% lacked basic facilities (running water, bathrooms, etc.) and
12.5% needed major repairs in order to bring them up to an
acceptable livable standard.
97
 All of these figures are estimates and
therefore open to some scrutiny. I would suggest that given the other
evidence on the decline of low income housing that we have already
examined that these estimates are conservative accountings of the
depth of the homelessness crisis in the mid-1980s. The full effects of
this acceleration in the lack of affordable housing and the
gentrification of our cities began to be fully felt in the 1990s.
Combined with rising record unemployment across the country,
declining incomes and standards of living, decreasing tax bases for the
support of welfare programs, and lack of government investment, the
full effect of the homelessness problem has only begun to be felt in
the first two years of the 1990s. Given all the indicators these
problems are not going to disappear in the near future. As Canada
adjusts to "new global economic realities", the transformation of our
work into service-based jobs , the effects of "Free Trade", and long-
term unemployment for millions of Canadians, homelessness has not
only assumed a central place in our societal social ills, but without a
fundamental shift in the approaches we have assumed towards this
problem it will become a problem without solution.
Greg Barak has argued that we can take one of two general
societal approaches to homelessness. Either we can approach the
homeless with understanding, working with them to find new
alternatives to the present limitations on a variety of our fundamental
economic and social policies, or we can continue to attack the
homeless as different and undeserving, making them into deviants
and criminals. This is a major juncture in our society that I argue will
have far reaching ramifications for the type of society we enjoy or
endure in the near future.
Another Night in Paradise ... 161
What is to be Done?
The Federal government in announcing a recent $500 million
initiative for 'children at risk'
98
 has acknowledged, if begrudgingly,
the depth of the problem. The problem is that the terminology they
are using waters down the problems faced by millions of our children.
The federal government's actions in this regard are not only not
beneficial but are patently patriarchal. These children, as the reader
will have understood by this point, are not "at risk," they have been
risked, and the futures they should have enjoyed, irrevocably
damaged by the federal government's economic and social policies
that have put them in this position in the first place.
99
 As Sheila Copps
commented in the House, "What good does it do to send out meal
guidelines to mothers when they have no food to give their
children?"TOO The image of Benoit Bouchard holding babies and
giving out handouts, of funds that should have been available years
ago to assure these personal tragedies should not have happened,
reflects the attempt by all levels of government to deny responsibility
for the production of the problems of homelessness, and to largely
ignore them.
In the final chapter of the book we explore alternatives to our
current societal approaches to homelessness analysing innovative
policies and ideas in the areas of government spending and housing.
This page intentionally left blank 
CHAPTER SIX
Ending Homelessness
/ must be invisible,
No one knows me,
I have crawled down dead end streets,
On my hands and knees.
Cause I'm a lonely stranger here
Well beyond my days
And I don't know what's goin' on
I'll be on my way.
Some will say, that I'm no good,
Maybe I agree,
Take a look,
Then walk away,
That's alright with me.
1
Helping the Homeless
Throughout this book the problem of homelessness in Canada
has been examined through both the individual perspective of those
who are suffering a homeless condition, and in a broader analysis of
the societal forces that produce homelessness. The overwhelming
majority of the homeless are not only deserving of renewed and
redirected efforts to ameliorate their conditions of living in the short
run, but of radical alternatives to eradicate homelessness for all but
164 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
that small minority who cannot, or will not, be helped by our efforts.
There are those who have lived through a variety of institutional
identities, often for many years, who have become socialized to a life
characterized by dependence, hopelessness, victimization on the
street, and in some cases the pathology of drugs, alcohol abuse or
mental illness. Whether it is the case of they have become accustomed
to life in a shelter, or the street and its relative freedoms, they do not
wish us to intervene in their lives and certainly this would not be
conscionable. They will not be converted or corrected to either
individual integration or some larger social purpose and will likely
remain dependent upon society for survival throughout their lives.
But these people we must remember only represent perhaps 3% of all
our homeless.
In this chapter I explore various means by which we as a society
can develop alternative ways of dealing with the homelessness crisis.
Since the evidence presented in the book thus far underscores the
failures of our current approaches I will attempt to consider ways in
which homelessness can be eliminated or substantially ameliorated in
Canada. To adopt this position is to suggest that homelessness is not a
social crisis that we have to allow to continue to grow, that we have
power both as individuals and as part of a larger society to address the
core problems that act as a catalyst to homelessness. This is in itself a
radical suggestion for it is contrary to a myriad of public and private
interests that have a vested interest in the continuation of this
devastating social problem.
Homelessness as a Social Enterprise
There is no doubt that unless the federal government tackles
the problems that are directly contributing to homelessness—extreme
and deepening poverty, acute shortages of housing and lack of
employment opportunities—that homelessness will continue to
flourish as a national disgrace. One of the central contradictions of
homelessness, like criminality, is that we are quite content to provide
shelters for the homeless, just as we are more than willing to build
prisons for the criminal in our society. But one of the clear findings of
research on charitable/social control institutions is simply that once
they are built we have no problem in quickly filling them.
Governments are able on one hand to ignore the problem of homeless
teens selling themselves in order to survive, while providing millions
for the building of shelters. Concomitantly, thousands of jobs have
been created for college- and university-educated social workers to
minister to the needs of the homeless. Homelessness, it can be
unequivocally demonstrated, creates work for many care workers,
Ending Homelessness ... 165
welfare workers, street workers and other associated social tinkerers
and control agents in our society. However, while we have no problem
committing vast sums of monies to tackling the problems of the
homelessness, it would be unthinkable simply to give the money to
the homeless so that they could purchase long-term accommodation
and to create jobs for them.
Our current approach places a disproportionate amount of our
resources into the provision of short-term solutions for the homeless.
While the provision of shelter spaces is vital, the transition to long-
term residency must be a priority of not only the funding bodies at all
levels of government, but of those working directly in the field. This
has been the case in several notable examples. In Oshawa, the men's
hostel was successful in renovating the second floor of their building
to provide private apartments for a dozen long-term chronic
homeless. In the supportive atmosphere that is engendered by the
dignity and privacy of one's own home, many of the men have been
able to escape lives that were once characterized by daily alcohol
abuse. Their lives have been invested with meaning, and they have
been given back their status as full-fledged citizens of our society.
Unfortunately we have been unable to the present to develop
any long-term preventative programs for the prevention of
homelessness. Taking teenagers as an example we find that that
government funding agencies are quite eager to fund successions of
studies dealing with street prostitution, runaways and children at risk.
There are several excellent researchers, including John Lowman of
Simon Fraser University, Livy Visano of York University, and Gus
Brannigan of The University of Calgary, who have conducted first rate
studies of street prostitution. We have had two commissions, The
Fraser and Badgely Reports that contributed to our knowledge in this
area in the 1980s. We have, in other words, an overabundance of
information on 'children at risk.' Case workers with decades of
experience can tell us that child abuse and neglect directly contribute
to the majority of homeless runaways in our society. Yet, despite all of
this work, we have to date, not been able to put a dent in the number
of children who annually join the ranks of the homeless prostitutes in
our society while others disappear into oblivion. Of what use is
research that simply documents these same problems over and over as
if something new was being discovered. The simple truth is we often
have no idea how to intervene effectively in the lives of those who live
on the margins of our society, or our ideas fall more within the realm
of 'tinkering' rather than fundamental change.
The level of government apathy on this problem in Canada
parallels that of the experience of the United States. It is often
166 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
suggested that Canada lags behind the United States by several years
in the development of social ills, and this certainly would appear to be
the case with homelessness. While James Wright, amongst others, has
informed us that homelessness began to assume the status of a major
social problem during the 1970s, it was not until the 1980s that
homelessness began to assume these dimensions in Canada. It was
during this period, as we learned in the discussion in Chapter 5, that
the effects of a shrinking housing supply and growing long-term
unemployment began to be fully felt in Canada. Politicians have been
largely reluctant to make public pronouncements concerning
homelessness perhaps hoping, in the conservative attitude that often
typifies Canada's approach to social ills, that somehow no one would
notice that something was very amiss.
A quick review of newspaper articles over the 1980s and into
the 1990s will reveal that few politicians have ventured an opinion on
homelessness, other than to pronounce that it was not a serious
problem, or to call on public-minded citizens, in an obscure way, to
help fight homelessness in their community. These calls typically occur
in the Christmas holiday season hoping to use guilt to motivate the
citizenry into action. This too forms part of the long standing
government attempts to make homelessness into issues of charity and
volunteerism. In this approach the community is seen as having a form
of never-ending capacity to absorb and ameliorate all kinds of
personal and social problems. Some examples that Canadians will be
familiar with are: (1) police promotion of community action against
crime (drug pushers, prostitutes) since authorities are "powerless to
do anything," and (2) government dumping of mentally ill patients
into the community when hospitals were closed as the community
would help them to regain their sanity. Incidentally, while the original
idea was to transfer the hospital financial resources to the community
this did not happen and so ex-patients were left to fend on their own,
often provoking anger in the neighbourhoods they settled in.
Homelessness can certainly be milked as a political issue for it
only requires that politicians show some concern for the plight of the
impoverished rather than paying attention to the roots of the
problem and without pledging concommitantly to act. In fact, it can
be reasonably argued that the majority of our efforts have been
largely confined to treating the symptoms of homelessness rather
than its causes. Our political priorities are interesting to consider.
Canada has little problem in finding billions to finance its
participation in the 'Gulf war' and on defence spending, but this
investment has meant that the pecuniary interests of the state have
not been focussed on homelessness as a pressing social challenge.
Ending Homelessness ... 167
Every cut that has been made by governments in the area of social
welfare spending most certainly has a devastating impact on families,
many of whom hover on the edge of homelessness and for whom such
cuts mean a further descent into disintegration. While there seems to
be no shortage of money for investment in advanced weaponry, there
are correspondingly calls for reductions in social programs so that our
spiralling national, provincial, and now, municipal debts will not grow
further out of control.
If politicians seem immune or indifferent to the plight of the
homeless then there are certainly lessons that one can take from this
book in terms of changing not only our attitudes but our approaches
to the homeless. First, we must move beyond simple toleration of the
homeless to a a recognition that this is a problem that cannot be
hidden in doorways, abandoned buildings and alleyways of our
nation. Homelessness is a problem that is taking centre stage in our
society. It is a problem that effects every aspect of our national and
social life in this country. The legions of the homeless and pre-
homeless, and those in living in poverty, number in the millions in
Canada. While the homeless have remained largely invisible in our
society, their numbers make it impossible to ignore them in the urban
context. Most of us are already aware that the number of people on
the street, begging, crying, in pain, destitute, hungry, homeless and
out of work is growing each year. It is virtually impossible in any large
metropolitan area to travel in the city without encountering the
homeless. They are no longer concentrated in the downtown core, but
have spread out throughout the cities, partly owing to the relocation
of various forms of temporary shelter accommodation in the suburbs,
and in some cases due to the efforts of the homeless to escape the
violence, pressures and oversaturation of the downtown areas.
Our attitudes towards the homeless reflect our own
ambivalence about their condition. Sometimes we feel inclined to give
a beggar money, whereas when we are confronted every half block
with demands for money we 'turn off the person. We thus make
them dependent on our charity rather than asking why they are there
in the first place, and how far are we from their fate. Again, in my
interviews with young homeless people, it was common for them to
express complete surprise at their present condition, a fate that they
had never dreamed could have befallen them. The problem with
charity is that it not only has limits but is never freely given. Somehow
we assuage our own guilt and admit our sense of powerlessness with
homelessness when we give the homeless money. It is at this moment
that one is most likely to understand that homelessness for the vast
majority is a product of forces well beyond their own control.
168 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
Attacking homelessness effectively will involve a radical shift in
our thinking. It must move beyond mere philosophizing on the
problem to action. It must move beyond the traditional conceptions
of social service provision for these are not adequate to meet the
needs of the homeless. This is a form of poverty that we have never
experienced before in this country, which not only cuts across social
and economic boundaries, but includes a widely diverse population of
individuals. The new homeless are single women, teens, mothers with
children, families, fathers with children, the unemployed who cannot
find work, the abused adolescent, senior citizens and the elderly,
refugees and illegal aliens. Within traditional approaches to
homelessness our efforts are bound to fail for they make an
underlying assumption that the problem is a temporary one that
requires only band-aid efforts over the short term. But as the economy
fails to respond, unemployment grows, welfare rolls pass the million
mark and our streets are flooded with the throwaway and cast-off
people of our society. There is no end in sight, nor will there be one
unless dramatic efforts are made.
Foodbanks and charitable organizations have begun to realize
that their organizations have been used by successive governments as
a way of avoiding responsibility for the homeless. Indeed, there has
been a concentrated effort to seek further involvement by religious
organizations in providing shelter and food for the homeless in the
rising tide of homelessness. In Michigan, the kind of scenario that
could easily be played out in Canada developed when the Governor,
John Engler, severely cut welfare benefits in midwinter 1991.
Suddenly thousands of welfare recipients were unable to make their
rent payments and were turfed onto the streets. Church basements
were quickly called into use to house the homeless as shelters were
filled to overflowing by a rush of homeless people. The lesson to be
learned from Michigan, and other states in the U.S., is that short-term
solutions will eventually exhaust the economic coffers of society, and
there will still be massive numbers of homeless, and those who are
poised to become homeless as soon as benefits are cut or eliminated.
Existing shelter arrangements are simply not sufficient under these
conditions.
The degree of disdain with which our society holds homeless
people is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that at the start of the
last federal election homeless people, it was recognized, were being
denied the right to vote. Until a church advocacy group brought the
issue to the courts in the middle of the election campaign there was
no movement on the part of our government to ensure that those
with 'no fixed address' could vote in elections. This ultimate denial of
Ending Homelessness ... 169
access to the democratic process is reminiscent of the struggles of
women much earlier in this century to obtain voter rights, for without
this fundamental right homeless people have no input into decision-
making in Canada. The fact that we are talking about the abrogation
of such a fundamental right in 1990 and not 1890 is compelling
evidence of our sustained attempt to render the homeless not only
invisible but powerless.
In an earlier chapter I examined the numerous laws which
circumscribe the lives of homeless people, including those dealing
with begging, vagrancy, and welfare entitlements and it is these laws
that will form the target for attacks by homeless people in the
political process. The homeless in this country, as with their
contemporaries in the United States, have to cope with trying to
organize in a widely disparate group of individuals who have perhaps
somewhat different political agendas. One of the starting points of
this organization is likely to be amongst women who may find
commonalities and support within the feminist movement towards
social and economic emancipation. Attempts by the homeless to gain
control over their lives are also hampered by the contradictions of
political gestures by our governments' leaders at all levels that lament
the problem of homelessness on one hand, while at the same time
failing to deliver on new programs or substantive economic initiatives.
President Bush, confronted at his inauguration by a protest of several
thousand homeless, promised a 'kinder, gentler America' and then
proceeded to cut social service budgets in line with state
governments. The homeless are, in reality, at the mercy of the state
and its offshoot agencies for with little voice in the political process,
except that provided by poverty advocacy groups, they are unable to
change the direction of political decisions in our country. When you
consider that until 1991 they possessed no ability to influence the
political process at all, except by their presence on city streets, it is no
wonder that they have remained invisible! While there will be
advocates of a conservative view of the homeless problem that will
suggest that there are far fewer homeless in this country than I have
suggested (in the face of estimates by direct care givers), the average
Canadians ignorance of the plight of the homeless, and the depth that
the problem has assumed in this country, is no accident. But no one
commentator can deny the suffering of women and children who go
hungry in our society, who go to bed hungry and would do so in
greater numbers were it not for charity, and have been denied
fundamental rights to decent housing, work and food by
unresponsive government policies and social service delivery.
Disenfranchised at the voting booth and without voice at the
170 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
provincial or national levels they have been simply convenient to
ignore. If we believe in the old adage that the squeaky wheel gets the
grease then homelessness is about to sound a shrill cry across this
country that will require extraordinary efforts to deal with.
The experience of homeless organizing in the U.S.A. has taught
us that not only are the homeless capable of organizing but that they
can become an effective voice for change over the conditions that
impinge upon their lives. The political fight of the homeless in Canada
for their basic rights has more than one foe. Aside from government
indifference, neglect and outright hostility, they also face
communities that oppose their existence in particular
neighbourhoods. The recently gentrified neighbourhoods of our
downtown spaces want the homeless removed from their space to
improve the quality of their lives. The homeless, as I have suggested,
are viewed as a threat to person and business, and therefore attempts
to construct low-cost housing, group homes and alternative forms of
accommodation are met with great public furor. Put simply, most
neighbourhoods do not want to accept society's marginal populations
into their midst. Proposals to build a shelter for young people in a
suburban area of Scarborough, Ontario were met with outrage by the
local homeowners and businesses. While many support the notion
that something must be done to help, particularly, the young
homeless, many see the issue strictly in terms of imagined falls in
property values or view the homeless as dangerous felons with an
appetite for trouble. The NIMBY or "not in my backyard" movement
has been not only vocal but extremely hostile to the imposition of the
deviant or marginal into their urban enclave. They view the homeless
in the same way as former President Reagan who saw the homeless as
being homeless "by choice." Two prominent Canadian analysts of the
homeless problem, George Fallis and Alex Murray, have suggested
that "homelessness is not so much evidence of people falling through
the cracks as it is evidence of a society less willing to help."
2
 Certainly
this reflects the current understanding we have of the dynamics of
homelessness, but it also reflects the lack of information about
homelessness and its causes that the average Canadian has been
subjected to.
The homeless are looking not for a handout as many of us
might surmise, but a hand-up in society. The overwhelming majority
of the homeless want to work, want to lead constructive lives and
want to be a part of society, not apart from it. The homeless are faced
with the problem of the incredible inertia in our service delivery
system and of attempting to coerce substantive changes out of it.
Ending Homelessness ... 171
Creative Alternatives to Homelessness
There are three levels of input that are central to the creation
of viable alternatives to homelessness, particularly in the provision of
affordable housing. There are: (1) the private sector, (2) third sector
organizations, and (3) municipal governments. The private sector can
and will respond to the need to build low-income housing if it is a
profitable venture.
Government priorities have to be redirected towards
partnerships that will make it viable to build, for example, mixed
income condominium and apartment units that generate substantial
numbers of housing units at a reasonable return on investment. The
private sector can also be encouraged to lend expertise to the design
of low-cost housing, and to take an active role in communities by
tying construction contracts to the provision of low-income housing
by developers.
Third sector organizations, which include churches, charitable
groups, self-help groups, co-operatives and non-profit groups as well
as numerous voluntary organizations, grow up in response to the
expressed needs of those less fortunate in our communities. The
contradiction for many of these groups is that traditionally they have
relied rather heavily on the government for funding of their activities.
One could cite amongst organizations that assist the homeless groups
who help released prisoners (John Howard Societies and Elizabeth Fry
groups); ex-psychiatric patients who have been de-institutionalized
(The Canadian Mental Health Association); battered and abused
women and children (shelters, rape crisis centres, hostels); the
physically challenged (associations for the disabled); seniors (various
seniors organizations); immigrants and refugees (settlement houses
and cultural associations). Third sector groups other than non-profit
housing groups have not been able to make serious inroads into the
problem of homelessness as they are often run by well-meaning yet
inexperienced amateurs and compete against one another for limited
funding or private charitable donations. The contribution they make
may be seen in their provision of some 8,000 beds nationwide. Overall,
when one examines permanent housing units, "all social housing in
Canada makes up about 3 percent of the national stock, and the
approximately 60,000 co-operative housing units underwritten by
CMHC are less than 1 percent." This is clearly not a serious effort to
address the needs of the homeless in other than a very temporary
way. The depth of our dependency on charitable organizations to
provide a wide range of services to the community is staggering with
over half of all the 47,000 charitable organizations being directed
towards welfare related activities. Voluntary and charity
172 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
organizations are being called upon by communities to fill the gaps
that governments at all levels are leaving in the field of service
provision in the welfare field, although as I have already pointed out,
their ability to provide these services is declining in the face of ever-
increasing need. United Way Agencies, for example, saw a real decline
of 10 percent in their operating budgets between 1991 and 1992, at a
time when demands are far outstripping their ability to provide
service at a desirable level. This has also precipitated turf wars over
not only who should provide services but which of the 'needy' are
truly deserving of attention. Women's organizations have argued that
treatment programs for male abusers should not be funded while
there is a shortage of beds for battered women and children. These
are obviously issues of ownership of the problem that will become
more common as both government investment and private sector
contribution to charitable groups dry up.
Nationally The Urban Core Support Network, which has
operated since 1974, supports numerous types of information and
strategies with local municipal residents' associations across the
country. At present, there are currently eighteen "regional
federations of housing co-operatives." The National Anti-Poverty
Organization has provided arms-length leadership since 1970 and
various forms of lobbying for improved housing to low-income
groups. Certainly, national and local native groups such as The
Assembly of First Nations and Native Friendship Centres, particularly in
the Prairies, Toronto and Vancouver, have attempted to address the
specific needs of native homeless through the establishment of hostel
programs and counselling.
In Toronto, organizations like the Fred Victor Mission have
been able to establish long-term small-scale residences for hard-to-
house single men, converting shelter space into a long-term solution.
Cityscape, a non-profit housing program, recently rented and
converted a large downtown warehouse facility into a residence for
50 street people, which allows them to convert open space within the
warehouse into personalized living space. This alternative that allows
for personal choice and freedom is one that is favoured by its
residents, but is only, once again, a short-term solution owing not only
to the fact that the project is limited in its funding period, but the fact
that warehouses of humanity do not pose more than a temporary, yet
innovative, alternative to street living. Since 1986, housing programs
have been relentlessly shifted to the provinces away from federal
responsibility. This according to Wolfe has engendered long, possibly
unlimited delays. In Halifax, for example, non-profit organizations
had so few housing starts they could not be recorded in 1986-87. This
Ending Homelessness ... 173
development has had the effect, they argue, of closing down many
community resource groups while causing other groups like the
Cooperative Housing Federation to set targets of 5,000 units per year
(a target that is not being reached). In the future it is likely that we
will witness co-operative efforts between public/private/third-sector
groups as has been the case in the U.S. and Britain. Other possible
avenues for addressing long-term homelessness may lie in innovative
schemes that require the acquisition of residential properties, low-cost
financing for housing projects, and coalitions between the homeless
and voluntary sector organizations.
5
The group Habitat for Humanity in the U.S. has provided an
interesting and potentially useful model for Canada. Their program
consists of community volunteers who donate their skills and local
building suppliers who donate materials to renovate derelict
properties or to build new houses in the manner of barn raisings.
Given investment by university researchers in the engineering field
into affordable housing alternatives it may be possible to provide
some limited amount of new and reconditioned housing in this
manner. The homeless have also come up with innovative mobile
shelters based upon the construction of a plywood 'capsule' that can
store a long-term homeless person's possessions as well as providing a
bed for the night. This form of radical solution is less likely to prove
viable as it does not decrease a homeless person's vulnerability to
personal attack by any measurable degree.
The final sector that has the most potential to contribute to the
amelioration of the homeless problem is the municipal governments
of the country. In their analysis of the role of municipal governments
Tom Carter and Ann McAfee correctly assert that municipalities,
although pressured daily by the ever-increasing number of homeless
who arrive requiring services, respond to homeless problems typically
"with inappropriate tools and inadequate funds." They argue that
city governments can adopt one of two strategies for dealing (or not
dealing) with homelessness. First, there is the reactor model which
involves action by the core power structures in the federal and
provincial government in alliance with non-profit and co-operative
groups. This occurs when the local government is unwilling to make
an investment in solving their homeless problems. The second role is
that which they have termed the facilitator model in which the city
responds to demands, and through a variety of means including
subsidies, action programs, lobbying with other levels of government
and supportive policies at the level of permit processing and rezoning,
encourages proactive enterprise. Some of our larger cities such as
Toronto have large departments that deal with the development of
174 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
low-cost housing. Vancouver and Regina also have delegated the
authority for this form of development to a separate city department.
Winnipeg, which attempted to address its housing problems through
the inauguration of the Winnipeg Housing Rehabilitation
Corporation, found that over a decade of work only 400 units had
been completed. Overall, the more than 100 municipal non-profit
housing organizations have largely operated in a reactive manner
rather than taking the role of comprehensive developer associated
with Toronto. Overall, one must conclude that 'municipalities are
weak when it comes to ability to respond to housing need.'
The problem of homelessness in our country can only be
attacked through the efforts of a variety of public and private groups
and the homeless themselves. One of the central lessons of the
development of widespread homelessness in the United States is that
at some identifiable point the homeless begin to organize into a
collective movement. The marches on Washington by the homeless in
the 1980s, tent city protests, and the involvement of celebrities in
bringing public attention to the plight of the homeless moved
homelessness from a marginal issue to the forefront of American
social consciousness. There are signs that this is beginning to happen
in Canada, for there is, in any society, a given juncture at which the
accumulated misery of all of the political and economic factors
discussed in this book, which impact upon the creation of the
homeless and their continual desperation, ignites the fires of protest
in groups that are so subjugated. In October of 1992 the homeless
marched in Ottawa to draw public and governmental attention to
their condition.
In the short term there are a number of suggestions that
emanated from the homeless people interviewed for this book. First, a
priority must be to make further improvements to short-term shelter
accommodation, to humanize it. This can be accomplished through a
refocusing of funds into the production of a positive living
environment and the provision of solid counselling, educational and
job placement. Shelters, since they are short-term at any rate, must
rework their current accommodations, improving both the physical
structures as well as the interior environment. While staff might not
wish the homeless to stay long-term it does not mean that in the
short-term they have to reside in shelters that resemble correctional
facilities. Neither does it mean that they have to be subjected to
arbitrary and punishing rules concerning their living environment,
particularly governing their rights to "lounge" if they wish to. Large
shelters must be closed and give way to smaller living units that
provide longer term residence rather than acting as a catalyst to the
Ending Homelessness ... 175
production of a wandering army of transients. Shelters must also be
built that accommodate various identifiable needs groups discussed
throughout this book and that allow the highest possible opportunity
for the homeless person to re-establish themselves. This is particularly
true in the area of shelter accommodation for women that I, since the
research was concluded for this book, has been substantially altered
for young women. As of 1992, only women between the ages of 16
and 18 are eligible to be funded for shelter accommodation on a per
diem rate.
6
 Those over 18 are now required to seek accommodation in
adult women's shelters that include a wide selection of homeless
women. The number and quality of these shelters in Canada are both
extremely low.
There are a number of short-term band-aids that are of
practical utility to the homeless that have been mentioned not only in
interviews conducted for this book but by various researchers on
homelessness. These have included variously: 1) more protection for
roomers; 2) the building of more public toilets and drinking
fountains; 3) liaison with employers to lower qualifications for jobs to
give a chance to those with limited job experience; 4) converting
abandoned or unused warehouse space and housing for the
homeless; 5) helping the homeless to purchase co-op dwelling units
that are collectively owned; 6) distributing low-income housing
throughout cities so that the homeless do not continue to be
stigmatized by relegation to the downtown core of 'skid row' or
similar areas; 7) more security of tenure in housing for those who do
have personal problems; 8) more public baths and places where street
people can safely, and with dignity, clean themselves; 9) co-operation
with department and other stores to provide appropriate clothing
and other necessities of life to the homeless. The Homeless Persons
Outreach Group in Toronto also concluded in 1989 that one of the
most important steps forward in attempts to change living conditions
for the homeless was the provision of forums in which to educate both
the public and politicians about them, to give them a human face.
Another recommendation of the group, which canvassed clients in a
number of hostels and shelters, echoed the expressed desire of many
of the persons with whom I spoke, and that was that the homeless
themselves should be employed to help the homeless. Organization s
like Beat the Street have taken this approach to tackling the challenge
of homelessness as it was started by three homeless people and now
has offices in several cities helping street people to become educated
and providing counselling and information services.
7
Baxter constructed another substantive list of recommen-
dations based upon her interviews in the Vancouver area. They
176 .. . DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
included: 1) educating the homeless concerning application for
special housing (for HIV positive persons, natives, the mentally ill, and
adolescents particularly); 2) social housing should be built on a small
scale, i.e., with room for eight or ten people and some supervision
available if needed, a view of positive housing expressed by many
long-term homeless in my sample; 3) changing societal attitudes that
it is permissible for people, including children, to "exchange sex for
shelter"; 4) homeless families have the right to be placed in decent,
safe accommodations suitable for children, not skid row motels and
hotels; 5) there should be a loosening of by-law regulations regarding
the rental of units in private homes; and 6) minimum wages and
welfare need to be increased so that they provide enough to live on,
not continually relegating the homeless to the "loop" of
homelessness.
8
While the above raise a number of praxis issues for immediate
consideration, the prospects for serious reductions in the number of
temporary, short-term, long-term, and chronic homeless will rely upon
more co-operative efforts. I have argued that homelessness cannot be
traced to one simple cause, often involving factors and contingencies
at both the personal and the structural levels, so solutions will cut
naturally across these boundaries. The personal is often related to the
public as C. Wright Mills instructed us. New partnerships that move
beyond current societal arrangements will be required to address this
social problem. At a minimum it will involve the homeless themselves,
all three levels of government, private enterprise, volunteers as well as
charities, and the community in which the homeless live.
Following Baxter, it is suggested that the inalienable right to
housing should be entrenched within the Canadian Charter of Rights
and Freedoms. More than half a million Canadian households endure
deplorable living conditions, prehomeless, while more than 100,000
are annually homeless. The central notion of this proposal is contained
within the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United
Nations of which Canada is a signatory. It states:
Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate
for health and well being . . . including food, clothing,
housing and medical care and necessary social services.
Similarly, Baxter argues that provincial governments should ensure
that discrimination in housing on the basis of sex, race, creed, family
composition or sexual preference, age, level or source of income, or
disability is not tolerated and is punished severely. While there are
clear signs that we are aware of systemic discrimination in the criminal
justice system, employment and housing, we have not seen, and
Ending Homelessness ... 177
homeless people have been the victim of, lack of effective
enforcement.
A number of proposals also emerged out of a symposium held
during the United Nations International Year of Shelter for the
Homeless by a number of housing experts in Canada. There
conclusions called for a reallocation of existing resources and a
reordering of priorities to meet the needs of the homeless. The
participants argued for solutions that are local in nature, flexible and
responsive to local conditions rather than anchored in national
policies that do not reflect grass roots needs or desires. No one
working with the homeless would argue for the creation of a ministry
of homelessness. The further bureaucratization of this problem, like
that evidenced in our federal government's approach to native
peoples, would result in more employment created by homelessness
rather than solutions that help the homeless. Fallis and Murray and
their colleagues suggest that an overarching approach that teams
government and the private sector will be able to address the
significant challenges of providing relief for the homeless. Centrally,
they cite the factors of income support, assisted housing, and social
services as core elements in finding innovative solutions to
homelessness. They confirm one of the central assertions of this, and
other works on homelessness in Canada, namely that, ".. . the
homeless simply do not have enough income to meet what all
Canadians would accept as basic needs." They conclude: "The money
can be found."
9
To Annihilate The Future or Not?
/ can at least say, here is the world that awaits you
if you are ever penniless.™
In this book I have attempted to explore both the human faces
of homelessness and the wider political and economic forces that
create homelessness in our society. The number of homeless in this
country has been growing steadily over the past decade in Canada, a
process that has seen rapid acceleration in the early 1990s. No longer
can we as a society ignore the homeless in our midst as they begin to
crowd the streets in ever-increasing numbers, and neither can we
delegate responsibility for their condition to them. While most of the
homeless services in our society for food, shelter and medical
assistance have improved also over the past decade so have the rising
numbers of homeless exhausted the capability of our current methods
of dealing with the homeless. In the end, the homeless are still on the
178 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
street, they rely upon our waning charity to survive, and have little or
no voice in the direction their lives are taking. Given the perilousness
of much of our own existence and the thin veil between homefulness
and homelessness in our society, our approach to the homeless in the
future requires radical redirection. Orwell wrote that the "great
redeeming feature of poverty" was "the fact it annihilates the
future." This is certainly true if we choose not to intervene. The
promise of The World Summit for Children held in September 1990,
and co-chaired by Prime Minister Mulroney, promised children would
become the nation's priority. Between that time and 1992 no new
major programs were announced to help children in poverty.
There are many thousands of lives that are being unalterably
damaged by the upward surge of homelessness in this country, and
we ignore this social condition at our own peril in Canada. As a
country that is undergoing rapid social and economic transformation
it is important that we not leave the homeless out on the street
awaiting our whimsical generosity. During the course of my research
when I interviewed a young homeless family, their daughter, a
precocious five-year-old, drew a stark depiction of three figures
crowded into a tiny black box. It was her depiction of life for the
homeless in a motel. She reminded me of my own daughter and the
home that awaited me. Leaving the interview, to face a Christmas
with no toys, no Christmas tree, and a macaroni dinner, she inquired
innocently as she hugged me, "Isn't there anyone who looks after
little children in Canada?" If this book accomplishes anything with
you, the reader, perhaps it is to find a positive answer to that question
for all homeless Canadians.
Endnotes
INTRODUCTION
1
Jones, Maxwell. The Therapeutic Community. London: RKP,
1960.
2
Egger, Steve. "Serial Killing of the Lambs in our Dreams".
Paper presented at The ACS Annual Meetings, Pittsburgh, March
1992.
3
Ericson, R.V. et al., Visualizing Deviance: A Study of News
Organization. University of Toronto Press, 1987 and T. Fleming, "Mad
Dogs, Beasts and Raving Matters: The Presentation of The Mentally
Disordered in the British Press," in T. Fleming and L. Visano (eds.)
Deviant Designations: Crime, Law and Deviance in Canada. Toronto:
Butterworths, 1983: 153-184.
4
SeeGreg Barak, Gimme Shelter, New York: Praeger, 1991 for a
review of extant literature.
SFigures released October 2,1992; CBC News, Windsor.
6
R.G. Smart, et al., Drugs. Youth and the Street. Toronto: ARF,
1990.
7
D. Milovanovic and S. Henry, "Constitutive Criminology" in
Criminology.
8
The interview sample consisted of: Victoria, 10 interviews (8
female, 2 male); Edmonton, 10 interviews (7 male, 3 female);
Vancouver, 15 interviews, (10 male, 5 female); Oshawa, 20 interviews
(19 males, 1 female); Windsor, 7 interviews (4 males, 3 females);
Toronto, 157 interviews (99 males, 38 females, 20 families). Families
are counted as one interview although partners, and in six cases,
180 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
children, attended at the interview. One family member may have
spoken about the experiences of up to six other members of the same
family unit. The age of respondents varies from 16 to 62 for females;
and 16 to 72 for males excluding children who were not direct
interview subjects.
9N. Denzin, Interpretive Interactionism, Newburg Park: Sage,
1989,48-49.
1
ON. Denzin, ibid., 7.
11
The Daily Bread Food Bank of Toronto, for instance, reported
that the fall food drive had raised only 50% of their target goal for
donations, leaving countless families without food. The Toronto Star,
October 10, 1992. See also Graham Riches, Food Banks and the
Welfare Crisis. Ottawa: Canadian Council on Social Development,
1986.
12
For a review of existing literature see Thomas O'Reilly-
Fleming, "No Home in Their Native Land: Homeless Canadians as
Marginal Persons in the Social Order," The Journal of Human Justice,
Vol. 2, Number 1, Autumn, 1990; 55-74.
CHAPTER ONE
1
R. Ropers, The Invisible Homeless, New York: Insight, 1988.
2
M. Mclaughlin, Homelessness in Canada—The Report of the
National Inquiry. Ottawa: Canadian Council on Social Development,
1987.
3
See Bingham, R. et al. (eds.). The Homeless in Contemporary
Society, Newbury Park: Sage, 1987; Hombs, M.E., and M. Snyder,
Homelessness in America—A Forced March to Nowhere, Washington:
Community for Creative Non-Violence, 1983; Hopper, K., and LS. Cox,
Litigation in Advocacy for The Homeless: The Case of New York City,
New York: Community Service Society, 1982.
4
Mayor Art Eggleton, New Year's Speech, City Television,
January 1,1991.
5
Examples include: The Fisher King, Curly Sue, and the 48 hours
documentary, Homeless in America.
6
The Gallup Report, (by L Bazinoff and P. Macintosh), Monday
February 18, 1991. See also Gallup Report (by L. Bozinoff and
A. Turcotte), Monday Sept. 14, 1992, which states, "that slightly more
than four-in-ten Canadian workers (41%) believe that there is a
chance that they may become unemployed." The Gallup Report of
Thursday May 7, 1992 found that, "Almost six-in-ten adult Canadians
cite some aspect of the economy as the most important problem
facing the country today. Fifty-nine percent of the public mention
unemployment, inflation, or a related economic ailment."
7
See the discussion in Chapters Five and Six of this book.
8For a discussion of the British situation see: O. Brandon,
Homelessness in London, London: Christian Action, 1973;
B. Saunders, Homeless Young People in Britain, London: Bedford
Square Press, 1986; S. Watson and H. Austerberry, Housing and
Homelessness—A Feminist Perspective. London: Routledge and
KeganPaul, 1986.
9This reflects somewhat the argument first advanced in
I. Taylor, P. Walton, and J. Young, The New Criminology, London:
RKP, 1975 for a fully human theory of social deviance. See also more
recent left realist arguments that advocate praxis at the local level;
M.D. Schwartz and W.S. Dekeseredy, "Left realist criminology:
Strengths, weaknesses and the feminist critique." Unpublished paper.
182 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
10
An estimate offered by the Canadian Council on Social
Development in M. Mclaughlin, 1987.
11
 Estimates provided by coalition of downtown shelter
agencies for youth in Toronto from various interview sources;
Canadian Mayor's conference 1990-91; R. Daly, A Comparative
Assessment of Programs Dealing with the Homeless Population in the
U.S., Canada and Britain. Ottawa: CMHC, 1991.
12
By June 1990, the average cost of a single-family dwelling in
Metropolitan Toronto was $265,000 according to Real Estate News.
High inflation rates prevalent until date 1992 were a contributing
factor.
13
Daly, ibid., 1991. For discussion of the changing composition
of U.S. homeless populations see, Penelope L Maza. Homeless
Children and their Families: A Preliminary Study. Washington: Child
Welfare League of America, 1988; Peter H. Rossi, Down and Out in
America: The Origins of Homelessness. Chicago: University of
Chicago, 1989.
14
One reflection of this is that "guides" to Toronto homeless
services are now given out in a variety of languages.
issee Barak, ibid., 1991.
16
L. Gorman, and J. McMullan, "In Defiance of the Law of the
Land: Social Control and the Unemployed Movement in the Dirty
Thirties in British Columbia," Canadian Criminology Forum, 8, 1987:
84-102; Nels Anderson, The Hobo: The Sociology of the Homeless
Man. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1923; N.Anderson, Men on
the Move. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1940.
17W. J. Chambliss, "A sociological analysis of the Law of
Vagrancy." Social Problems, 12: 46-67. The best account of the
history and application of vagrancy statutes. See also Ken Morrison,
"The Control of Vagrancy: Historical Perspectives." Paper presented
at the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association Meeting,
Victoria, British Columbia, June 1991.
18
For a praxis-based discussion of this problem see A. Borovoy,
When Freedoms Collide. Toronto: 1987. Borovoy has, for many years,
been chief legal counsel for the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.
19
For an in-depth analysis of the hypocrisy of both formal and
informal legal structures that exert control over the lives of homeless
Canadians see the discussion later in this book. In the American
context see G. Barak, Gimme Shelter. New York: Praeger, 1991.
20
ln Oshawa, Ontario business owners attempted to have
ENDNOTES/Chapter One ... 183
homeless people removed from the local adjoining park since their
presence was deemed to scare away potential customers.
2iFor a review of the major sources see T. O'Reilly-Fleming,
ibid., 1990.
22This is a matter of considerable debate in the literature and
hence of confusion and divisiveness in terms of comparative research.
For a good overview of this problem see James D. Wright, Address
Unknown: The Homeless in America. New York: New York University
Press, 1989.
23See for example, M. Hope and J. Young, The Faces of
Homelessness, Toronto: D.C. Heath, 1986.
24Coles Concise English Dictionary. Toronto: Coles Publishing
Limited, 1979: 832.
25Again, The Fisher King is one of the best examinations of
these popular images.
26K. Hopper et al., Not Making It Crazy: Some Remarks on the
Young Homeless Patient in New York City. New York: Community
Service Society, 1983 and K. Hopper et al., One Year Later: The
Homeless Poor in New York City. New York: Community Service
Society, 1982.
27Terence Morris, The Criminal Area. London: RKP, 1957 is the
classic example of research on the effects of overcrowding and
inadequate housing. See also, Robert E.L. Faris, Chicago Sociology:
1920-1932. San Francisco: Chandler, 1967; David I. Decker, et al.,
Urban Structure and Victimization, Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath,
1982; K.D. Harries, Crime and the Environment, Springfield, Illinois:
C.C. Thomas, 1980; and Robert E. Park, et al., The City. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1928.
28Walter S. Dekeseredy and Ronald Hinch, Woman Abuse:
Sociological Perspectives. Toronto: Thompson, 1991, 7-37. This is the
most comprehensive survey of woman abuse in Canada and the most
meticulously documented.
29L.A. Visano, This Idle Trade, Concord: Vitasana, 1987 and
M. Webber, Street Kids: The Tragedy of Canada's Runaways,
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991 are both excellent sources
on runaways and city street life in Canada. Another more personal
source in Evelyn Lau, Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid. Toronto:
Harper and Collins, 1989; Margaret A. Michaud, Dead End: Homeless
Teenagers, A Multi-Service Approach. Calgary: Detselig Enterprises,
1989. Bruce Ritter, Covenant House: Lifeline to the Street. New York:
184 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
Doubleday, 1987 provides an interesting account of some of the
innovative attempts to help runaway and homeless children.
30
D. Roth et al., Homelessness in Ohio: A Study of People in
Need. Columbus: Ohio Department of Mental Health, 1985.
31$. Watson and H. Austerberry, Housing and Homelessness—A
Feminist Perspective. London: RKP, 1986.
32M.E. Hombsand M. Snyder, ibid.
33
For a discussion of the gap between research and policy
consult Brian Fay, Social Theory and Political Practice. London:
George, Allan and Unwin, 1975.
34
F.S. Redburn and T.F. Buss, Responding to America's
Homeless—Public Policy Alternatives. New York: Praeger, 1986,45.
35
For a discussion of this in the American context see Edmund
McGarrell and Timothy Flanagan, Source Book of Criminal Justice
Statistics, 1984; Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1985
and M. Hindelang and M. Gottfredson, "The Victim's Decision Not to
Involve the Criminal Justice Process," in W. McDonald (ed.) Criminal
Justice and the Victim. Beverly Hills: Sage, 1976, 57-74. For a
Canadian source see R. Linden, (ed.) Criminology: A Canadian
Perspective, 2nd Edition. Toronto: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich,
1992:68-82.
36
G. Barak, Gimme Shelter, ibid.
37
For a discussion of the medias use of "crisis" reporting see
S. Hall et al., Policing The Crisis. London: Macmillan, 1978; and
R. Ericson, et al., Visualizing Deviance: A Study of News Organization.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987.
3
8D. S. Mallin, "Sheltering The Homeless," Canadian Home
Economics Journal, 37(3), Summer 1987:114-116.
3
9Quoted in The Toronto Star, December 30,1987: A1, A10.
40McLaughlin, 1987, ibid., 4-6.
4Mbid.,4.
42
An estimate reported in numerous interviews with service
personnel in Toronto: One shelter alone had more than 1,100
separate admissions over a one-year period.
43
Visano, 1987, ibid. Father Bruce Ritter, the founder of
Covenant House a shelter for teenagers located at the corner of
Church and Gerrard Streets in Toronto, has stated that 90% of street
kids sell sex in order to survive, often naively becoming entrapped in
the world of prostitution. The Toronto Star, February 11,1986: A12.
ENDNOTES/Chapter One ... 185
44Webber, Street Kids, ibid.
4
5put in the context of several youth riots in Toronto during
1992, the resentment of youth at being treated as 'throwaways' is
significant.
46The Montreal Gazette, April 1,1987: D1.
4?$ee for example, The Halifax Chronicle Herald, Nov. 29,
1986:1-2; The Winnipeg Free Press, August 10, 1987:40; The Montreal
Gazette, May 1, 1987:A4; The Winnipeg Free Press, February 21,
1987:49; and The Vancouver Sun, Nov. 29,1987:A1.
4
8David Bairstow, A Place to Call Home—Housing Solutions In
Low Income Singles in Ontario. Toronto: Ministry of Housing,
1986:35.
49D.S. Mallin, ibid.
50D. Bairstow, 1986.
51 United States Conference of Mayors, A Status Report on
Homeless Families in America's Cities—A29 City Survey. Washington:
U.S. Conference of Mayors, May 1987.
52
See F. Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England,
Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958; and Charles Dickens, Hard Times,
London: Penguin, 1978; and Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist. London:
Penguin, 1978.
53
A portion of the U.S. Mayor's Report, ibid., 1987 describes
the arrival of a family with two young children to their facility. When
offered a platform surface and toys to play with, the children could
not play. They were looking for a confined space that resembled the
backseat of an automobile.
54
One shelter worker commented with pride, "We make sure
they're all out of here by seven (a.m.). They can't just sit all day." This
reflected a general attitude in many, but not all, hostels for adult
males.
55D. Bairstow, ibid., 1986.
56
H. Brody, Natives on Skid Row, Winnipeg: Social Services
Publication, 1981; J. Hylton, "Locking up Indians in Saskatchewan," in
T. Fleming and L. Visano (eds.) Deviant Designations: Crime, Law and
Deviance in Canada. Toronto: Butterworths, 1983: 61-70.
57
For a compelling account see Geoffrey York, The
Dispossessed: Life and Health in Native Canada. London: Vintage,
1990.
58
Verdict of Coroner's Jury: Of the jury serving on the inquest
into the death of Drina Joubert, February 12-25th, 1986, aged 41
186 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
years. Ms. Joubert froze to death on December 17, 1985 in an
abandoned truck parked behind a Sherbourne Street address. She was
the 19th resident of Toronto to die of exposure since the beginning of
1984. See also Bairstow, 1986: 54 and The Toronto Star, February 12,
1986. The jury concluded, "Clearly, the bureaucracy designed to help
the most disadvantaged among us has become unresponsive to the
need of the people it was created to serve. It is fragmented and
inefficient."
59A. Scull, Decarceration: Community Treatment and the
Deviant. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1977.
60G. Barak, Gimme Shelter, 1992, ibid.
61 See Streethealth, Report on Homeless Persons, 1992.
62
Streethealth, ibid. Also, Baxter and Hopper, ibid., 1981: 18;
Wright, 1987; Hope and Young, ibid., 1986: 31-52; J. Sebastian,
"Homeless: A State of Vulnerability," Family and Community Health,
Vol. 8 (3) 1985: 11-24.
63A. Scull, Decarceration, 2nd Edition, 1984; 1-2,64-75.
64Baxter and Hopper, ibid., 1981: 1.
ssscull, 1984, ibid.
66j. Talbott, "Cure for the Chronically Mentally III—Still a
National Disgrace," American Journal of Psychiatry, 136, 688-89.
67
R. Reich and L. Segal, "Psychiatry Under Seige: The Chronic
Mentally III Shuffle to Oblivion," Psychiatric Annuals, 1973,3: 37-55.
ssvisano, ibid., 1987; O'Reilly-Fleming, ibid., 1990.
69
C. Krauthammer, "When Liberty Really Means Neglect,"
Time, 1985, December 2,103-104.
?OE. Bassuk, et al., "Is Homelessness a Mental Health Problem?"
American Journal of Psychiatry, 1984,141(12): 156-1550.
71
Hope and Young, ibid., 1986: 20.
72D. Roth, ibid., 1985.
73Hope and Young, ibid., 1986: 21.
74
K. Schloss and N. Giesbrecht, Apparently Suffering from
Mental Disorder. Toronto: Centre of Criminology, 1974.
75
G. Barak and R. Bohm, "The Crimes of the homeless or the
crime of homelessness?: On the dialectics of criminalization,
decriminalization, and victiminization," Contemporary Crises; 1989,
13: 275-288.
ENDNOTES/Chapter One ... 187
?6D. Snow et al., "The Myth of Pervasive Mental Illness Among
the Homeless," Social Problems, 33: 407-423.
?7J. Wright etal., ibid., 1987: 192-184.
78j. Wright, "The Mentally III Homeless: What is Myth and
What is Fact?" in Social Problems, 1988, Vol. 35, No. 2,182-191.
79Wright, ibid., 1988: 184.
SOD. Rosenhan, "On Being Sane in Insane Places," Science, 1973,
Vol. 179,205-258.
81R. Ropers, ibid., 1988: 81.
82Snowetal.,ibid., 1986.
83J. Wright, ibid., 1988: 183.
84J. Wright, etal., ibid., 1987.
85J. Wright, et al., ibid., 1987; J. Wright, ibid., 1988.
86J. Wright, ibid., 1988: 85.
87M. Tenszen, "Union Urges Pay Hikes in 'Toronto the Costly"
1
,
The Toronto Star, May 19,1990.
88Barak and Bohm, ibid., 1989; O'Reilly-Fleming, ibid., 1990.
89
J. Stein, "Qualitative Research Techniques and
Homelessness." Paper presented to the Qualitative Research
Conference, Glendon College, York University, May 1991.
90
N. Denzin, Interpretive Interactionism, ibid., 1989.
188 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
CHAPTER TWO
^Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and
Technology. Children in Poverty Towards a Better Future. Ottawa:
January 1991.
2
Mary Labatt, "Children in Poverty—Educators must be
advocates for children." Federation of Women Teachers' Associations
of Ontario, Newsletter, April/May 1991, Volume 9, Number 5:3.
3
Carolyn Jack. "Children in Poverty—A Startling Profile."
Canadian Forum, September 1990.
Awhile food banks are trying to move to a policy of closing their
doors in protest against government refusal to feed the hungry in
Canada this is a difficult task to accomplish in the current economic
depression. Until governments agree to finance the operation of food
banks they are likely to remain open. Some advocates believe
however, that closing the food banks and causing widespread hunger
and starvation is the only way to force the government to take over
the running of them, i.e., that government officials will only respond
when crises are occurring that are deeply disturbing to the general
populace. See also Jack, ibid, at 17.
5
Gordon Laxer, Open for Business, Toronto: Methuen, 1990.
The finest sociological exploration of the issues of the selling of
Canada to multinationals and U.S. financiers. A recent winner of the
John Porter Award in sociology from the Canadian Sociology and
Anthropology Association.
&The Windsor Star, May 1991.
7
A. Mitchell et al., The State of the Child in Ontario. Toronto:
Social Planning Council of Metropolitan Toronto, 1990.
8
There have been only a few published attempts to look at the
phenomenon of homelessness in Canada. They are: Sheila Baxter,
Under the Viaduct: Homeless in Beautiful B.C., Vancouver: New Star
Books, 1991. This work is based upon interviews with the homeless
and workers. Baxter is an experienced worker within the homeless
movement and previously did research in Montreal. Her book is a
valuable contribution to our knowledge. Lesley Harman, When a
Hostel Becomes a Home: Experiences of Women. Toronto: Network
Basic Series, Garamond, 1989. A field study of homeless women living
in hostel accommodation and a feminist analysis of the patriarchal
construction of homelessness in Canada. Marlene Webber, Street
ENDNOTES/Chapter Two ... 189
Kids, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. This is primarily a
look at runaway kids and their involvement in various forms of street
survival. It also examines some of the causes of family dysfunction in
Canadian society and the making of the street sex industry. See also
R. Morris and C Heffren, Street People Speak. Oakville: Mosaic, 1988.
9
See W. DeKeseredy and R. Hinch, Woman Abuse, generally.
Also T. Fleming, Violent Domestic Assault. Unpublished M.A. Thesis,
University of Toronto, Centre of Criminology, 1975. For a concise
review of Canadian studies see Des Ellis, The Wrong Stuff. Toronto:
Collier MacMillan, 1987. M.D. Smith, "The incidence and prevalence of
woman abuse in Toronto." Violence and Victims, 2 (3), 173-187.
iosee for example, M. Spencer, Foundations of Modern
Sociology, Toronto: Prentice Hall, 1990, Chapter 12. For an analysis of
the changing nature of the Canadian family see Marlene Mackie,
Exploring Gender Relations: A Canadian Perspective. Toronto:
Butterworths, 1983.
11
 According to R. Smart et al., in their report Drugs, Youth and
the Street, Toronto: Addiction Research Foundation, 1990 street
youth in their sample (N = 145) reported using drugs for "coping and
escapism." They also found that, "Drug and alcohol use among street
youth was much more a coping strategy for dealing with the street
life." Street youth reported that "once on the street it is difficult to
escape this lifestyle."
12
See T. Fleming, "Mad Dogs, Beasts and Raving Nutters: On
the Presentation of the Mentally Disordered in the British Press," in
T. Fleming and LVisano (eds.) Deviant Designations: Crime, Law and
Deviance in Canada. Toronto: Butterworths, 1987.
13
While it is unusual to see under 16s on the street one should
not infer that they are not among the homeless. Smart et al., ibid.,
reported that of 86% of their sample that had lived with their
biological parents that 19% had left home before the age of 11. Many
of the young people interviewed for this sample indicated that they
had left home before the age of 16, often when they were 10 or more
years of age. Some interview subjects reported that younger homeless
streetkids were often living in motel rooms where they made a living
as prostitutes but avoided the streets because they would be subject
to apprehension by the Childrens' Aid Society.
14
Alan Borovoy, Address to The University of Windsor, Faculty
of Law, 1990.
issee Webber, ibid., 39-78.
16
For sociological analysis of prostitution in the Canadian
context see, L. Stevens, The Stroll. Toronto: New Canada Publications,
190 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
1986; R.F. Badgely, Sexual Offences Against Children: A Report of the
Committee on Sexual Offences Against Children and Youths, Ottawa:
Supply and Services, Canada, 1984; J. Lowman, "Taking Young
Prostitutes Seriously," Canadian Review of Sociology and
Anthropology, 24 (1) 1987; Tom MacDonnell, Never Let Go: The
Tragedy of Kristy McFarlane, Toronto: MacMillan, 1987; The Fraser
Report on Prostitution and Pornography, Ottawa: Supply and Services
Canada, 1986; LVisano, This Idle Trade. Concord: Vitasana, 1987.
17
The practice of spending the last of the morning hours in
Johns' cars is referred to as "the breakfast club" on the street. Johns
park their cars in the wide laneways of Toronto's Rosedale community
and engage in sex, smoking, drinking and drug use with the street
prostitutes. As the sun rises they leave the alleyways and head to one
of the handful of all night cafes that welcome street people in
Toronto.
isphil Collins, Another Night in Paradise, by Phil Collins, 1989,
Copyright WEA Music of Canada Ltd, Atlantic Recording Corporation
from the album ... But Seriously.
19L Harman, ibid., 15-26.
20phil Collins, ibid., 1989, Copyright.
2iLabatt, ibid., 3-5. Labatt notes that far fewer father-led
single-parent families live in poverty, only 28.4%.
22National Council of Welfare. Women and Poverty Revisited :
A Report by the National Council of Welfare. Ottawa:Supply and
Services Canada, 1990. For one the best analyses of poverty effects in
Canada see D. Ross and R. Shillington, The Canadian Fact Book on
Poverty—1989. Ottawa: Canadian Council on Social Development,
1989. They cite a higher figure of 71.7%.
23$ee the discussion on mental illness and homelessness in the
first chapter of this book.
24An estimate proffered by several shelter workers
encountered during the research process.
25$ee L. MacLeod, Battered but not Beaten: Preventing Wife
Battering in Canada, Ottawa: Canadian Advisory Council on the Status
of Women, 1987, 38; W. DeKeseredy and R. Hinch, ibid., for a
discussion of the estimates of woman abuse provided by various
researchers.
26L MacLeod, ibid., 30-35.
CHAPTER THREE
1
 Jimmy Cox, Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out.
Copyright, MEA Inc., ASCAP. Performed by E. Clapton.
2
M. Foucualt, Discipline and Punish—The Birth of the Prison.
New York: Vintage, 1979. 135-169.
3
For an excellent discussion of teens and prostitution see
Marlene Webber's book Street Kids, 79-134.
4
Canadian Public Health Association. Street Youth and AIDS.
Ottawa: CPHA, 1990. The result of a "comprehensive" study by
Queen's University that interviewed 712 young people in ten cities
across Canada aged 15-20. They were, however, defined as street kids
if they had spent at least 24 hours away from home at any time during
the past year. Most researchers would reject this designation as too
inclusive, and not reflective of "hard core" street regulars. They found
32% of street youth never used condoms, while 42% used them "most
times or always." More than 50% of the male prostitutes had engaged
in anal intercourse.
5
Walter Miller, "Lower Class Culture as a Generating Milieu of
Gang Delinquency," Journal of Social Issues, 14 (3):5-19, 1958. The
propensity of male street hookers to characterize themselves as
heterosexual is also reflected in Visano's correspondents. See also
Webber, ibid., 114-5 for an interview that presents this point of view
in a positive and non-critical manner.
6
Robert Stebbins, Deviance: Tolerable Differences. Toronto:
Prentice-Hall, 1987. One of the most comprehensive examinations of
sexual deviance in the literature.
7|bid.
8
Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer. New York: Random House,
1977.
^Michael Bolton, When I'm Back on My Feet Again. Copyright,
CBS Records, 1989.
10
See also Chapter Five in this book.
192 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
CHAPTER FOUR
1
Neil Young, "People on the Street" 1986, Silver Fiddle Music,
ASCAP.
2
See Howard S. Becker, Outsiders. New York: Free Press, 1963.
Ostensibly the argument is that no behaviour is deviant until it is so
labelled by society. The use of L.S.D., for example, was not illegal in
the U.S.A. until the late 1960s when its use became criminalized.
Before that point it was one of the 'tolerable' deviances in our society
as Robert Stebbins pointed out in his work, Deviance: Tolerable
Differences. Toronto: Prentice-Hall, 1988. This process is referred to as
labelling. While some labels have little effect on those to whom they
are applied, others may carry significant weight in terms of evoking
negative societal reactions. The label "ex-criminal" has moral, legal
and social implications, while the label "lazy" carries with it more
limited sanctions.
3
Richard Ericson's early study of released delinquents in Britain,
Young Offenders and their Social Work. Farnborough: Gower, 1975 is
one the finest examples of field research on a group that engaged in
self-labelling. For an exhaustive analysis of labelling theory see R.
Ericson, Criminal Reactions: The Labelling Perspective. Farnborough:
Gower, 1975.
4
Stan Cohen, "The Punitive City: Notes on the Dispersal of
Social Control," Contemporary Crises, Vol. 3, 1979: 339-363, and Stan
Cohen, Visions of Social Control: Crime, Punishment and
Classification. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985. According to Cohen, the
net of control is growing progressively wider in contemporary society
and the mesh is becoming increasingly smaller, trapping persons who
were formally of no interest to social control agencies in its web. This
is, in essence, an outgrowth of the increasing size of control agencies
like the police and the progress in technological invasion into privacy.
This argument is very similar to that produced by Emile Durkheim on
the boundary maintenance functions of deviance, that is, as the
system of control swallows up all of the most visible and severe forms
of deviance, new more marginal types of deviance will be scanned for
infractions and be subject to criminalization. See my earlier article,
"The Bawdy House Boys: Some Notes on Media, Sporadic Moral
Crusades and Selective Law Enforcement," Canadian Criminology
Forum, Vol. 3, No.2,1981.
ENDNOTES/Chapter Four ... 193
5
Borovoy, ibid.
6Ben Carniol, Case Critical: Challenging Social Work in Canada.
Second Edition. Toronto: Between the Lines, 1990:91.
7|bid.,at92.
SHelen Levine, "The Personal is Political: Feminism and the
Helping Professions," in A. Miles and G. Finn (eds.) Feminism in
Canada: From Pressure to Politics. Montreal: Black Rose, 1982.
9|bid.,91.
1
ORobert Doyle and L. Visano, A Time for Action!—Access to
Health and Social Services for Members of Diverse Cultural and Racial
Groups in Metropolitan Toronto (Report 1). Toronto: Social Planning
Council of Metropolitan Toronto, 1987.
HM. Foucault, ibid.
i2For a feminist analysis see J. Dale and P. Foster, Feminists and
State Welfare, London: RKP, 1986. See also The General Welfare
Assistance Act, Sec. 1 (i) (i) Chapter 188. R.S.C. Statutes of Canada; The
Special Senate Subcommittee on Poverty, Poverty in Canada, Ottawa:
Information Canada, 1971:83 found that the welfare process was
degrading to all parties involved in it: "It repels both the people who
depend on the hand-outs and those who administer them. Alienation
on the part of welfare recipients and disenchantment on the part of
welfare administrators was evident..." In Ontario, short-term benefits
known as general welfare assistance typically are allocated to the
jobless and those with temporary illnesses. Family benefits is a longer
term form of aid and goes mainly to sole-support parents and disabled
people. See also Richard Titmuss, Commitment to Welfare, London:
Unwin, 1970.
i3The Windsor Star, April 1990.
14
Greg McDowell, "Hostel residents take pride in 'home," The
Oshawa Times, Saturday, July 28, 1990: 3. The residents found that
they had been the victim of discrimination. Neil Pare, a long-time
resident of the 18 unit men's hostel, commented, "They just put
everyone down instead of coming here and finding out what it is
like," he said, "There are many good people living here.""It was like a
Simcoe Street merchant was treated as a citizen of Oshawa and were
(sic) weren't." Article courtesy of Terry Dunn, Emergency Housing
Supervisor.
15
Brenda Ingersoll, "Scrambling for Shelter" The Detroit News,
Monday November 4, 1991. Kenneth Cole and Jim Mitzelfeld,
"Homeless Protests don't move Engler," The Detroit News, January 1,
1992. The Governor commented that a protest by homeless persons
194 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
who set up a tent city named "Englerville" outside of his office was to
be ignored since "clearly, they are here not because they are homeless
but because they represent people who are homeless and in need."
Engler said he believed that "many homeless people in the state have
set their expectations too high."
16
Tracey Nesdoly, "Drifter admits railyard killing," The Toronto
Sun, Thursday November 26,1991 :35.
17
See Elliott Leyton, Hunting Humans: The Rise of the Modern
Multiple Murderer, Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1986; and Neil
Boyd, The Last Dance: Murder in Canada. Toronto: Prentice-Hall,
1988.
18
See the review in G. Barak, Gimme Shelter and Barak and
Bohm, ibid.
19
B. McCarthy and J. Hagan, British Journal of Criminology.
20|bid.
21
 For the most thorough, although somewhat dated, example
see, Edwin Sutherland, The Professional Thief, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1937.
22
Clifford Shearing, Police Deviance. Toronto: Butterworths,
1983.
23
R. Ericson, Reproducing Order: A Study of Police Patrol Work.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982; and R. Ericson, Making
Crime: A Study of Detective Work. Toronto: Butterworths, 1981.
24
Visano, ibid, and personal communication with the author.
2
5See variously Barak, ibid.; Barak and Bohm, ibid.;
Streethealth, ibid.
26
Darryl Sturtevant, "Building Community Partnerships,"
Ottawa: Health and Welfare Canada, 1991. "Housing is an acute
problem for PLWAS (People Living With Aids), both because of their
frequent inability to hold down a full-time job and the social ostracism
they often experience." I am indebted to my colleague Alan Sears for
his discussion of unreleased research material on this important topic.
27
Canadian Council on Social Development, Overview, No.1,
Fall 1991.
28|bid.
2
9|bid.
30jjm Ward, Organizing the Homeless. Ottawa: CCSD, 1987.
The Windsor Star, February 18,1993.
3iMiller, ibid.
ENDNOTES/ChapterFour ... 195
32|bid.
33George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London. London:
Penguin, 1970:15.
34Harman, ibid.
35
Carniol writes, "For the many women clients who remain
trapped within poverty, the impact of welfare policies and practices
makes it abundantly clear that they remain subservient to and
controlled by others. In the name of public assistance women clients
are systematically degraded under the guise of official policy . . . The
welfare department's authority to terminate payments creates
profound fear and anxiety among male as well as female welfare
clients. The system further propagates ideas of male hegemony as
women are constantly questioned on whether males who live with
them give them money, while males are never asked the same
question about female live-in companions. The double standard is not
only painfully evident but patently discriminatory and sexist. In many
provinces single moms are "employable" even though they have
children who are not of school age so they must look for paid work or
be cut off welfare, presumably dragging their children behind them
to the interviews": 102-105.
196 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CAN ADA
CHAPTER FIVE
1
Harburg-Gorney, Brother Can You Spare a Dime? Harms Inc.
ASCAP. Copyright.
2$tatistics Canada, 1992. Press Release. Statistics on
Unemployment.
3
See Graham Riches, Food Banks and the Welfare Crisis,
Ottawa: Canadian Council on Social Development, 1986. Also Jacks,
ibid., and Labatt, ibid.
4
See "The Shelter Movement in Canada," in Vis-A-Vis, Ottawa:
CCSD, Summer 1989, Vol. 7, No.2. They state that by 1979 there were
71 shelters that housed women and their children in Canada. By 1987
this number had grown to 230 shelters and by 1988 end there were
292.
5C. Wright Mills, "The Big City: Private Troubles and Public
Issues," (edited by I. Horowitz), New York: Oxford, 1963, 395-404.1 am
referring here first to Mills, intertwining of the concepts of trouble
and issues (the personal and the structural).
6See Ratner and McMullan, 1985, ibid.
7
ln a free trade zone that takes in these countries there is a
natural market incentive for manufacturers to relocate in areas where
labour costs are substantially reduced, benefits are lessened and
environmental standards are not applied to production.
8
Steven Spitzer, "Towards a Marxian Theory of Deviance,"
Social Problems, 22, 5, 1975. There is, in effect, a 'surplus army of
labour' that is routinely discarded into the ranks of the unemployed
and the imprisoned and recalled when society needs their labour
services. There is no doubt that the numbers in this surplus army in
Canada have grown substantially over the last decade. S. McBride, Not
Working: State, Unemployment and Neo-Conservatism in Canada.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991, p. 31 writes,"massive
unemployment, once thought to have been banished, has returned as
an apparently intractable feature of the political and economic
landscape." For the relationship of this to criminal activity of the
homeless see W.A. Bonger, Criminality and Economic Conditions. New
York: Agathon, 1967.
9| refer here to political explanations and those academic
ENDNOTES/Chapter Five ... 197
writings which continue to shunt the homeless into the ranks of
medicalized conceptions of deviance in our society.
iO(Jnder Reagan the lights dimmed measurably as his approach
to economics favoured further assisting the wealthy to accumulate
wealth at the expense of the poor and middle class in society.
Burdened with this wealth they would then benevolently create jobs
for others in society, a further reinforcement of a patriarchal society.
In Canada, McBride, ibid, at 13, concluded that during the 1980s in
Canada, under Mulroney's Conservatives, quite the opposite
happened; "Instead of supplying the public purse with tax funds for
the state's welfare activities, business itself has become a recipient of
government spending." Gordon Ternowetsky, "Who Are the Real
Welfare Bums," Paper presented at The Organization for Justice
Conference, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, 1989. Ternowetsky found that
Canada's five biggest banks enjoyed profits of over $8 billion dollars
for a five-year period but cut their workforce by 11,119 employees.
Almost one-third of those profits reflect government tax breaks, i.e.,
federal and provincial governments did not collect statutory taxes
owing. There is some evidence that banks attempt to make these
profits look smaller in various quarters by stalling reporting of profits
so as not to raise public indignation.
11
 For a discussion of the production of deviant images see
Fleming, 1983, ibid.
1
2C Lombroso, "Criminal Man," in The Heritage of Modern
Criminology. Cambridge: Schenkmann. See also the excellent
overview by T. Caputo and R. Linden, "Early Theories of Criminology,"
in R. Linden (ed.) Criminology: A Canadian Perspective.
Toronto: Harcourt, 1992: 165-181.
13
Hopper, ibid.
^Fleming, 1983, ibid.
15
Jack Levin. Gossip. Englewood: Sage, 1992.
iSBarak, ibid, at 98.
1
?Paul Rock. "On the Ownership of Criminological Problems."
Paper presented at The Centre of Criminoloy, Toronto, 1981.
i8See Ward, ibid.; Baxter, ibid.; Webber, ibid.; A.D. Ross, The
Lost and the Lonely: Homeless Women in Montreal. Montreal: McGill
University; B. Farge, "Homeless Women and Freedom of Choice," in
Canadian Journal of Community Mental Health, 8 (1) 135-145.
1
9Snow et al., ibid.; Wright, ibid., Barak, ibid.
20Foucault, ibid.
198 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
21
Mackie, ibid.
22
Mackie, ibid., Spencer, ibid.
23
See DeKeseredy and Hinch, introductory chapter, ibid.
24
Thomas Fleming, "Violent Domestic Assault." Toronto:
Centre of Criminology, Unpublished M.A. Thesis, 1975.
25
DeKeseredy and Hinch, ibid., 1-2.
26$ee DeKeseredy and Hinch, ibid., for a discussion of issues in
non-reporting.
27
See Spencer, ibid.; DeKeseredy and Hinch, ibid.; T. O'Reilly-
Fleming, "Homeless Women and Children in Canada," in Canadian
Women's Studies, August, 1992.
28
See Spencer, ibid.
29
This is a difficult dilemma for many women attempting to
guage the seriousness of their situation in an abusive relationship as
versus the other forms of economic and psychological pain that life in
transition may cause them and their children.
30
See Peter Silverman, Who Speaks for the Children? The Plight
of the Battered Child. Toronto: General, 1978. Also McLeod, ibid.
31
Badgley, ibid.
32
lbid.
33
See for example, D. Currie, "State Intervention and the
'Liberation' of Women: A Femininst Exploration of Family Law" in T.
Caputo et al., (eds.) Law and Society: A Critical Perspective. Toronto:
Harcourt, 1989, 271-292. See generally C. Smart, Women, Crime and
Criminology. London: RKP, 1979.
34
The Windsor Star, "More feel grip of poverty," Thursday
January9,1992:A16.
3
5|bid.,atA16.
36
lbid.
f
 at A16. "Statistics Canada said the drop in incomes last
year was widespread."
3
?lbid. at A16. This represents an increase of 150,000 over 1989.
3
8|bid.
3
9|bid.
40
The Globe and Mail, "Cuts in Programs Cloud Future for Poor
Children," Saturday December 28,1991 :A9.
4i|bid.
42
lbid. Quebec now spends in excess of $10 million dollars a
year on school feeding programs.
ENDNOTES/Chapter Five ... 199
43|bid.
44|bid.
45|bid.
46|bid.
47|bid.
^statistics Canada. Press Release, October 1992. See also, The
Globe and Mail, "Bank rate plunges to 6.99%," April 16,1992:A1.
^Statistics Canada. Unemployment Figures, March 1992.
^Alternatively they may find that the funding for retraining
schemes has been exhausted due to rising demand. The Windsor Star,
May 9, 1992:A1, "Rising unemployment drains job retraining fund."
During the first four months of the year the $4 million dollar budget
had already been spent by Windsor's Canada Employment Centre.
^Restructuring is a form of "doublespeak" for cuts that
eliminate employment.
53
Announced by the Federal Conservative government.
54|_axer, ibid.
55
See The Windsor Star, "Latest figures continue to cloud local
economy," Thursday, January 9,1992: A1.
seibid.
57|bid.
ssibid.
59|bid., See also McBride, ibid.
60The Windsor Star, "III Payments soar along with
bankruptcies," Saturday, December 21,1991: A1.
6i|bid.
62|bid.
63|bid.
64The Globe and Mail, April 3,1992.
ssibid.
eeibid.
^Statistics Canada. Economic Trends, June 1991.
68p. Begin, Homelessness in Canada. Ottawa: Research Branch,
Library of Parliament, 19 April 1991. See also footnote 69.
69The Windsor Star, April 13, 1991: A2, "Ottawa says no to cash
for poor."
200 ... DOWN AND OUT IN CANADA
70The Toronto Star, "Metro faces 'horrendous' budget cuts,"
January?, 1992: A1.
7i|bid.
72
The Toronto Star, "Public is tired of food drives, organizers
fear," April 6,1992: A3; The Windsor Star, "Food bank demands aid,"
August 28, 1990, "Toronto's biggest food bank has threatened to bill
the Ontario government $32 million for services rendered since 1986.
They estimate that by 1991 they were feeding 87,000 people a month;
The Toronto Sun, "Poverty menaces our kids," November 26, 1991,
Fiona Knight of Foodshare said, "51,000 children use foodbanks every
month—up 80% since last year. More than 300,000 children live in
poverty in Ontario; Labatt, ibid, at 3, reports that by 1991 the Daily
Food Bank was giving away 140,00 pounds of food a week, the same
amount they had given away in the entire year in 1984; Jack, ibid,
reports that 560,000 children depended on food banks to eat in
Canada in 1991 and that 1 in 7 children in Toronto are dependent on
food banks. University students have also felt the crunch of a rapidly
declining economy and the effects of large losses in the summer and
part-time employment market. See Krishnan Ray, "Students flock to
food banks as aid falls short," Excalibur, December 4, 1991; Marilyn
Scott, "U of T food bank to open soon at Women's Centre," in The
Varsity, February 6, 1992. See also The Globe and Mail, "Death of
infant five years ago carries child-poverty message," March 30, 1992...
physicians and food bank organizers cited the example of a child's
death from starvation to illustrate how poverty-stricken children in
Manitoba are increasingly in danger because they are often poor and
ill-fed."
73|bid.
74|bid.
75
Shelters may offer a period for "transition" but they rarely
provide long-term residence.
76Begin, ibid.
77|bid.
78|bid.
79Gentrification is a process that refers to the conversion of
former low-cost housing through renovation into housing for the
middle and upper classes. An example of this process would be the
Riverdale district of Toronto formerly a part of "Cabbagetown," a
reference to the Irish poor who once inhabited the former slums of
this area.
ENDNOTES/Chapter Five ... 201
SOGeorge Fallis and Alex Murray, Housing the Homeless and
Poor: New Partnerships among the Private, Public and Third Sectors,
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990. This is a well researched
and very well written book on alternative means of tackling the
problems of the homeless. See particularly Alex Murray's excellent
chapter entitled, "Homelessness: The People," pp. 16-48. The book
presents an excellent analysis of the process of gentrification. See also
the discussion in Barak, ibid.
81 Statistics Canada, 1987.
82
Mackie, ibid.
83Fallis in Fallis and Murray, ibid.
840'Reilly-Fleming, 1990.
85Qntario Task Force on Roomers, Boarders and Lodgers, ibid.
86Fallis and Murray, ibid, at 60
87|bid., at 60. O'Reilly-Fleming, 1990, ibid.
88D. Ley, Gentrification in Canadian Inner Cities. Ottawa:
CMHC, 1985.
89Qn the Outside Looking In: An Examination of Homelessness
in Calgary. 1991. Research Report: Social Services.
90Begin, ibid.
9iBegin, ibid.
92Begin, ibid.
93Begin, ibid.
94|bid.
95|bid.
96|bid.
97|bid.
98This initiative is for intervention and education.
99You cannot be at risk if you have already suffered the
indignities associated with poverty and homelessness that have been
discussed in this book. This creative use of doublespeak leads to the
false conclusion that the 'risk' can be eliminated in advance of
damage that has already taken its toll.
ioo$heila Copps as reported on CBC NEWS.