On Wednesday afternoon my good friend Undercoverkity headed over to City Hall to ask a difficult question of city councillor Shelley Carroll. Stalked by a former member of Occupy Toronto lovingly known as PottyMouth, Frank joined the media scrum at the end of the day’s session and asked a very fair question:
“Why is it that we’re finding, miraculously, housing for a whole bunch of refugees when we don’t have housing for the people who actually need them?”
Carroll, being the type of weasel who’d hire an unrepentant ex-convict , responded with weasel words (apologies for PottyMouth’s interruption at the end of the video):
“I’m not going to pit one homeless person against another!”
Ward 33’s “brave” city councillor’s response was to attack a citizen of our fair city with the ugly implication that he was “pitting” homeless people against each other. Besides the fact her response was unnecessarily nasty, there was an even bigger problem- Carroll, as she often is, was full of crap.
But, as a member of the Canadian Border Services Agency explains in the video, the majority of Syrian refugees who’ve come to Canada already had homes in other countries. The sad fact about the government’s mad rush to ship in refugees is that they’re not bringing in the people who are genuinely suffering- the vast majority were already far away from potential danger.
I’m all for bringing refugees into the country. I understand the problems faced by people living in camps from my experience volunteering at a camp in former Yugoslavia in the early 1990’s. Life sucks in refugee camps; we should do everything possible to help people living in that predicament- be it sending them supplies or helping them find new homes.
But the problem is that the government is using Syrian refugees for political purposes- packing them into the country as fast as is humanly possible to make Canadians feel good about themselves. This doesn’t only hurt the homeless we could be helping instead (some who are allegedly being kicked out of hotels for refugees), but it hurts the refugees we’re shipping in. Many of the refugees who who were pulled out of stable apartments found themselves stuck living in the same hotels we’re throwing Canadians out of.
Both sides end up living in worse situations than they had before. Madness!
Personally, I’m disgusted by Canadas blatant politicization of the refugee issue. These are people we’re talking about – both the homeless and the refugees – and we’re doing a great disservice to both sides. And while it’s not Shelley Carroll’s fault as a city politician, she’s obviously part of the problem.
Time for a change Canada- remember, folks, it’s 2016!
