I feel resolutely mean-spirited about this week’s little party to hang ex-Ontario premier Mike Harris’s official portrait at Queen’s Park. Maybe it’s because I’ve been reading “street nurse” Cathy Crowe’s recent book on homelessness in Toronto, Dying for a Home. She pinpoints the first Harris year, 1995, and his slashing of already pitiful welfare payments, as the start of an apocalypse. “We began to see people who were still homeless after 10 years,” along with many new faces due to easier eviction rules and “signs of malnutrition and starvation.” She found herself often “giving someone a bus ticket to get to a grate at the end of the day” and added duct tape, Ensure, socks, mittens and granola bars to her nursing knapsack.

Three years later, watching scenes of displaced people during the ice storm, she had a “nursing epiphany”: “Homelessness is a man-made disaster.” It’s just like the ice storm or hurricane Katrina — huge dislocations, “clusters” of infections, reappearance of diseases such as TB — except it’s not caused by nature, it’s due to acts by people such as Mike Harris and, in that era, Jean Chrétien: welfare and EI cuts, eviction changes and, especially, cancellation of housing programs, which went from 1 per cent of public expenditures to zero. Et voilà: an unnatural disaster! At least the ice storm people got home eventually, and received sympathetic acknowledgment in the media. That’s why I don’t want to let Mike Harris and others off the spit. Maybe his official portrait should show him slowly turning over a fire.

In response, Cathy and others created the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee, TDRC. I confess with shame that, for years, my eyes have slid over this acronym, as if it’s NHL or CBC. I had no idea what a passionate, provocative declaration it implied. Such disasters are treated as unnatural, in that they don’t evoke swift, massive efforts to reverse their effects. But they are treated as natural, in the sense that they cannot be altered.

Then last week, I visited the cheery City of Toronto archives in the shadow of Casa Loma, to poke around in boxes dealing with the House of Industry, a private institution for the very needy that began in 1836 and lasted till the 1940s. It had me weeping, like the people in Cathy Crowe’s book, with their dignity and decline. Lots of “husband left her” notes and indentured kids, many sent from similar “houses” in England: “2 year old girl, Louisa Hopkins, to a shoemaker.” They had to stay till 18, when they were released, freed like slaves, with a few years back pay. The House checked for signs of “ill usage.” It distributed “bedsteads and blankets” for people who arrived unready for Toronto winters. Record-keeping was immaculate.

It seems to have been private and pre-welfare, yet not quite. It got its property from the city along with a sizable annual grant. All societies must deal with problems such as poverty and social justice, one way or another, harshly or kindly (or both), and government is inevitably part of the mix. At the archives, there’s also a photo show that includes pictures of the civic abattoir taken over by the city 100 years ago due to health concerns, then reprivatized later but under stricter regulation. There are no merely private or individual solutions to social problems, not ever. That’s why the boxes from the House of Industry seem antique and current.

Now it’s the national aboriginal day of action. Stephen Harper — Mike Harris in the present tense — cancelled $5-billion of aid agreed on in the Kelowna accord. Harperites say it would be misspent, but at least it would be misspent in a good cause, unlike the many billions that are just pointlessly spent. And to undermine any remaining goodwill, he dropped Canada’s support for the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. I feel like I should stop writing, right now, in case anyone thinks that just talking about this stuff has anything to do with actually acting on the problems.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.