London City Hall (credit: XFM News).
London’s Strategic Priorities and Policy Committee met on Tuesday, in what became a long and convoluted debate around the city’s encampment policy.
One of the main questions was how the city will be funding the Community Encampment Plan next year. While temporary funding is available from the city to carry the program to the end of 2024, councillors say that it is time for the other levels of government to step up.
“The time has come to draw a line—the buck has to stop somewhere,” says Deputy Mayor Shawn Lewis. “We cannot continue…to lay everything on the feet of property taxes.
According to the City of London website, the Community Encampment Plan supports Londoners living in tent communities around the city. City-funded service depots provide people living in encampments with the following:
- Safe and clean drinking water
- Hygiene and sanitation facilities
- Resources and support to ensure fire safety
- Waste management and garbage collection systems
- Social supports and services
- Resources to support personal safety of residents
The cost of continuing to fund the depots for the next two months until the end of 2024 will be a little over $140,000, but Lewis does not think London should foot the bill any longer.
Anticipated costs for encampment depots for the rest of 2024 (credit: London.ca)
“The housing and homelessness crisis we have now was not caused by municipalities. It was caused by bad decisions of former federal and provincial governments over the last couple of decades.”
He listed off government decisions that he believes have contributed to the current crisis: the closing of psychiatric hospitals, the safe supply program, and the immigration policies of Canada today.
“These are the policy failures that led to tremendous pressure on rental stock, on housing, that have forced people who were in housing out into homelessness situations,” he says. “These problems have been the direct result of policies of other levels of government and they need to step up and start funding some of these (municipal efforts).”
The federal government announced $250M in funding for municipal encampment strategies back in the spring.
“It’s the end of October, and we haven’t seen a nickel of it, and neither has any other city in this country—and that is shameful.”
The committee voted to engage the federal government to get the funding, and without it, the future of these support programs may be in jeopardy.
Another issue that councillors discussed was the encampment setback distance. Council recently decided that encampments would need to be at least 100 metres away from many private residences, but city staff have said that this is unenforceable and makes too much of the city off-limits.
Community members turned up to make their voices heard.
“To a property owner, a distance of 25 metres from the property line is roughly the distance of an average suburban backyard,” says one London man. “So what we’re talking about is potentially a large encampment situated…a backyard’s distance away from people who want to enjoy their property safely.”
A motion was discussed to reduce this distance to 25 metres, but it failed to pass. For now, the setback distance remains at 100 metres.
