A Preventable Crisis

I recall standing with a one-term Ontario New Democratic MPP on Pine Street in Burlington.  It is a beautiful spring day in 1995.  A newly built non-profit housing project, Wellington Terrace, was celebrating its grand opening.  Balloons, refreshments and there is a ribbon is ready to be cut. 

“You know if we aren’t reelected there will be no more places like this built,” he told me.

No more built, I thought.  While I was sympathetic to his perspective, the view seemed more self-serving hyperbole than realistic forecast.

But the MPP was right. You know the story. 

Following World War II the federal government jumped into the housing field in a big way. Polices were slanted towards home ownership. While social housing and creation of rental housing weren’t high priorities, there were some initiatives.

Major cuts to government funding for social housing began in 1984. The Brian Mulroney government slashed national affordable housing spending by almost $2 billion. In 1993, Mulroney’s successor, Kim Campbell, cancelled all new funding for affordable housing.

Then things worsened with Paul Martin’s 1995 budget. 

On February 27 that year, Martin put on his budget boots and kicked responsibility for social housing down to the provinces.  He cancelled all spending on new social housing projects. The Finance Minister hung his hat on many of the popular clichés of the day calling for “hard choices” and “real change,” “smaller and smarter government,” bucking the status quo and “simple common sense.” 

The rhetoric mattered not at all to those who were struggling to find housing that was safe and affordable. What really mattered, as we have discovered, was that Canada now had no housing strategy; the only developed country without such a plan. 

Back to that spring day in 1995:  As I enjoyed the opening of one of the last non-profit housing communities built in Ontario, we were just months away from more cuts from the new Mike Harris government.  Their idea of common sense (in fact, they called it a revolution) included the cancellation of 17,000 units of co-op and non-profit housing that had been approved but not completed.

New Book

Recently I flashed back to that day in 1995 while reading Denise Davy’s book Her Name was Margaret - Life and Death on the Streets.

Margaret Jacobson died after falling and hitting her head in a Mr. Sub, where she'd gone to keep warm.  She was 51. 

The author gained access to nearly 900 pages of Margaret Jacobson’s medical records going back to the sixties.  Davy is able to show the impacts of deinstitutionalization quite well by doing this. I knew a few specifics about the impacts of this process/policy of discharging people into the community but had never seen it all laid out like this as she has done by using the medical records of one individual.

Her Name was Margaret is a difficult read because it is a reminder of how we lack political will to solve a solvable problem. As the author writes: “If society is judged by the way it treats its most vulnerable, then the way Margaret was treated shows how we have failed.”

Margaret was a child with great potential who developed mental health issues as a teen.  She had the misfortune of entering into the Ontario mental health system when the new idea of deinstitutionalization was the order of the day. Eventually, 80% of psychiatric hospital beds in Ontario were closed.  The thinking was that people with mental health issues could be better served in the community. However, without appropriate supports available in the community the idea was doomed to failure. 

 Margaret and many others were discharged to rundown unregulated boarding houses (later called second level lodging homes and more recently known as residential care facilities).  She bounced around in this world for 23 years.  Her health did not improve.

Through this, Margaret’s parents were of no help. In a letter, her father put her problems down to her “unwillingness to be delivered from the bondage of Satan….”

Denise Day winds up her book with reasons to hope that things can improve.  She cites various successful Housing First programs running in Canada and around the world.

‘Housing First’ is a recovery-oriented approach to ending homelessness that centers on quickly moving people experiencing homelessness into independent and permanent housing and then providing additional supports and services as needed.   That is how the Homeless Hub, part of a research institute devoted to homelessness in Canada, defines Housing First.

While working with people experiencing homelessness some thirty years ago, we didn’t have this rather wordy rationale for our work. I seem to recall something more like “if people just have stable. safe and affordable housing they will better able to cope with life’s challenges.”    It just makes sense.

Denise Davy asks if Margaret would have responded to those kinds of Housing First programs if they had been available to her. Her answer is yes.

This brings me back to that opening of Wellington Terrace in Burlington more than 25 years ago – the same year that Margaret Jacobson died on the streets of Hamilton.  

Wellington Terrace functions today offering 126 units of housing for older adults. Forty of those units offer some level of support.

That is the kind of support that could have helped Margaret and others.  It was needed then and is needed now but its availability has been greatly reduced by governments’ badly thought out policy and funding decisions.

As Davy says, “The mess that exists today was entirely man-made and preventable.” 

Her Name Was Margaret: Life and Death on the Streets by Denise Davy, Wolsak & Wynn, 2021, 300 pages.