Western Standard - January 12, 2024


Smith says weapons discovery at Edmonton homeless camp highlights urgency

Mentioned
Calgary Herald Country Hall Corey Dave
SMITH Is Canada Broken？ German Farmers’ freedom protest escalates to 30,000 people

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

173.18

Word count

780

Sentence count

56


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we talk about the growing problem of homeless people sleeping on the streets in the winter, and how to deal with it. We also talk about some of the dangers of sleeping in the snow, and what can be done about it.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 These cities are in a rock and a hard place. I mean, if they don't enforce, if they don't take
00:00:04.800 down these tents, we know how the activists will react when the fires happen, not if and when the
00:00:10.960 people are, you know, overdose or intoxicated to the point where they freeze to death and not
00:00:15.520 realize it. The city and authorities will get the blame for not having gone in there. But right now,
00:00:21.520 of course, they're getting the blame and being called heartless for going in and tearing down.
00:00:24.960 Like, is there ever going to be an acceptable answer to this? Actually, as Dave was speaking,
00:00:30.800 I was just thinking, if you had all the money and all the power in the world, what would
00:00:35.200 a solution be that could work? I could not think of one that does not require the active participation
00:00:43.600 of the person that you're trying to help. That is the challenge. I remember an article that you
00:00:51.280 wrote, Corey, probably three or four months ago, in which you mentioned the dilemma posed
00:00:58.160 by encountering a person passed out on, I think it was on a park bench,
00:01:04.480 laying there in stark misery. And is it the right thing to walk on by? Or should you intervene? And there
00:01:17.280 are people saying, I'll just leave them alone. And yet, that seems the cruelest outcome to just leave
00:01:24.560 somebody in misery. And yet, if you take care of them today, you will find them there again tomorrow.
00:01:35.520 So what exactly is, it is an incredible dilemma, because I think in this city, and I bet it's the
00:01:42.080 same in Edmonton. I mean, this is not a Calgary-Edmonton thing. There is an enormous reservoir
00:01:48.160 of goodwill, of people who want to help other people. The homeless center down there at the end
00:01:57.120 of Fourth Avenue was built on the basis of private donations, mostly, I have to say, from the oil patch.
00:02:04.880 I remember, you know, back in the Calgary Herald editorial board, these guys coming in and talking
00:02:12.080 about how they were, this is what we need to do, and it's going to be like this, and it's going to
00:02:15.440 be like that. And we're really going to make a difference. And there's a thousand homeless people,
00:02:19.280 and there will be a thousand less by the time we've finished. Well, good, how do you not support that?
00:02:24.960 And we did, we supported it wholeheartedly. But, you know, it hasn't worked out that way.
00:02:31.040 Well, to me, you have to spend real money in the mental health area. And I think it's been
00:02:37.520 criminally underfunded forever in Canada. And that's what these people need the most,
00:02:42.640 is some mental health, get their mental well-being.
00:02:45.920 Bad and addiction is treatment. And the two are tied closely together. I mean, a person who's
00:02:50.240 addicted often has underlying mental health issues. It takes the same sort of treatment to
00:02:54.640 try and get them functional or safe again. But that's the elephant in the room. A lot of people just
00:02:59.520 still refuse to discuss when it comes to the homelessness encampments. They start
00:03:04.000 wondering, well, what about the single mom with three kids or the person who got displaced because
00:03:07.760 his job got laid off? That's not who's in those camps. Quit pretending it is. They're at the shelters.
00:03:12.800 They're availing the services that are there, and they should. The ones in the camps, typically,
00:03:18.800 most of them are addicted. They're often dangerous. It's something else, you know, people don't like
00:03:23.840 talking about. But there's truth in this. We're seeing with the weapons in Calgary, it was firearms,
00:03:27.520 not just pellet guns and machetes and samurai swords. And they're often very addicted. You can't
00:03:32.480 put, how can you put with a single mom and three kids, the guy who's gone psychotic on methamphetamines
00:03:38.320 in the same room? You can't do that. It's not an appropriate place for them. We need to talk about
00:03:43.200 warehousing them somewhere. Nobody wants to say it, but I don't see any other. You look at a case in
00:03:49.920 Calgary before Christmas, three homeless guys. It was in an outskirts neighborhood. I think it was
00:03:56.720 Country Hall. So they obviously took the LRT to get there. They broke into one of the cabins, not
00:04:03.040 cabins, a garden shed at the Home Depot. And they went in there to get out of the cold and set a fire,
00:04:11.440 and all three of them ended up burning to death. So it's, you know, it's not just an encampment down
00:04:16.400 here at this, the far reaches of this, every city that's going to have to deal with it.