The association’s announcement was led by Burlington Mayor Marianne Meed Ward (OBCM chair) as she called on the upper levels of government to develop an action plan to address the lack of social housing and wrap-around support available to those suffering from homelessness and addiction issues, and to solve the crisis created by bad policy, radical advocates and drug pushers.
"Ontario municipalities are struggling," Meed Ward begins.
"We're struggling with an issue that we can't solve on our own. What is happening on our streets across this province is an unprecedented humanitarian crisis. There are too many people unhoused living in encampments or other unsafe conditions and they're struggling with mental health and addictions issues," she explains.
As further noted in the announcement, homelessness often leads to drug addiction and chronic drug use leads to brain injury, then these issues are downloaded onto the streets of towns, cities and municipalities left grappling with the fallout of failed federal and provincial initiatives.
“We are currently overwhelmed by the opioid crisis,” said Camille Quenneville, CEO of the Ontario Division of the Canadian Mental Health Association. Quenneville explains that seven people die every day of opioid-related overdoses, which translates to approximately 2,500 to 3,000 people annually.
Ultimately, it’s taxpayers who are left bearing the cost of these failures through rising property taxes.
Waterloo Mayor Dorothy McCabe said that their region put a “tremendous amount of money from property taxes” into the roadmap strategy titled Plan to End Chronic Homelessness.
“These are issues that the property tax system was never set up to address,” McCabe continues, highlighting the inappropriate structure that exists currently.
“We have poured millions of dollars in our region into addressing this and we’re taking it off of the backs of our local residents and citizens.”
The Justin Trudeau Liberals' failing one-billion-dollar drug supply strategy known as the Canadian Drugs and Substances Strategy, first implemented in 2017, oxymoronically peddled the ideologies of harm reduction and safer supply of illicit drugs. This strategy has resulted in chaos descending into Canadian city streets and taxpaying residents being put under siege in their own communities.
As businesses and downtown areas grow increasingly destitute, it's clear that urgent changes are needed before more lives are lost at the hands of heinous policy failure.
