Opinion: Governments failing Edmonton's homeless
This week Joshua Evans, Associate Professor at the University of Alberta and Chair of ECOHH's Policy and Communications Committee, penned an opinion piece published in the Edmonton Journal.
In it, Joshua tried to highlight the underlying connection between public attitudes toward people experiencing homelessness and political and police indifference or outright criminalization of those same people.
Some of the comments on the op-ed page demonstrate that public attitude:
"They're content living off chronic property crimes knowing they won't get charged for shoplifting every day, stealing people's block heater extension cords..."
"NOT ONLY ARE WE ALL TAXED TO DEATH ALL politicians expect us all to financially support homeless people and others that really we should NEVER have been FORCED to financially support"
At ECOHH we support the right of everyone to have an opinion. Theoretically, even the people who expressed the opinions above still care about other people, and would like to see fewer people experiencing homelessness on our streets. That's what we want as well. What we object to is the creation of poorly conceived and ineffective policies and the enforcement of those policies by agents of the state in a way that increases instead of decreasing suffering.
You can read the full op-ed here. We encourage readers to learn more. Joshua penned another article in September that gives some background on this op-ed, and you can read that here.
Thank you for following and caring about these issues.
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