SCOTT ANDERSON -- “We're all being asked to care about them,” said one distraught merchant ... “But when will City Council start caring about us?”
A recent town hall in Vernon highlighted the two solitudes of opinion surrounding the so-called “homeless” problem happening across BC, and to a lesser extent across Canada right now. One body of opinion focuses on the well-being of the “homeless” while the other focuses on the harm the so-called “homeless” are creating. Perhaps the first thing to recognize is that the problem has been misnamed. It is not a homeless problem. A mass homelessness problem, as the term is commonly understood, is a product of an economic and / or climactic catastrophe. One example would be the dustbowl years of the 1930s, in which economic and climactic collapse brought destitute families from the prairies to settle in makeshift camps across BC, then the land of promise just as California was the promised land in Steinbeck's “Grapes of Wrath.” We had squatter camps here in Vernon in the 30s too, but they were families striving to live, and maybe even get ahead, in circumsta...