This business with the 310 Division St. Emergency shelter is a mess, a BIG mess. Let’s imagine you sitting on Mars and watching the action what would you see?

Angry neighbours, die-hard absolutists (Absolute in their opinion that any homeless drugged up mentally ill person is a product of their own misfortune and why should the rest of us help them in any way), the people who believe in Mandatory Rehabilitation and incarceration, a County Council who is in charge of the social portfolio for the homeless and a Cobourg Council that is convinced that the way out of the quagmire is to put restrictions on the Agency mandated to handle the problem. We also see a minority of the population brave enough to point out there are other ways to handle the problem: Harm Reduction, Safe Consumption Sites, more affordable housing. more mental health clinics, more detox facilities and addiction services.

Neither side will talk to the other and the hardliners take great delight in vilifying to the point of community ostracisation of some of the more outspoken advocates for Harm Reduction people, there is certainly no attempt to bridge the gap here. Just insults and invective hurled!

Opinions have hardened in the three years since the problem became unbearable. We now have a situation where Northumberland County’s Social Services departments, the Cobourg Police and the local shelter, an NGO funded by the County have received great gobs of money and the situation appears to have grown worse.

The BurdReport wrote about the political games being played here between the County Council and Cobourg Council here. Since then Cobourg Council has had another meeting to discuss “Who shall we meet with and Where” Read about it here this meeting is headlined “Cobourg Extends Olive Branch on Shelter Negotiations”. In short the olive branch is an instruction for the Cobourg staff to meet with the County staff to work seek compromise on the outstanding issues that prevent the 310 Shelter from opening.

Again an exercise in ‘power politics’ so don’t be surprised when the respective Staffs either cannot come to an agreement or one of the respective Councils involved refuses to accept the result of the meeting.

The view from 30,000ft

It appears from us that the hardlines coming from Cobourg are driven by two factors:

1. The Mayor of Cobourg’s admitted stance that compromise is impossible with the current set of County Councillors he has to work with
2. The very loud and consistent support given to and encouraged, by the Mayor from the Hardliners and Fedup Residents of the Area.

Both of these attitudes are driven by the opinion that the only people to blame in this situation is the County.

Also looking at the County side

1. The County has not been as efficient in this portfolio as it should have been, slow response times in the crisis, bad communications in the efforts from the County to alleviate the situation and obviously is fighting the perception that whatever they have been doing has been autocratic and wasteful.

So where do we go from here?

How about banging some heads! If this was an Industrial Dispute there would be calls for Mediators. That is not possible here, the personality conflicts, from all parties, have made that impossible.

If the sticking points are the two outlined in the exemption requests to the Bylaw that Cobourg claims that it has the power to regulate the activities of any operation in in Cobourg, let’s discuss the bylaw and the exemptions – are they reasonable? More importantly are they even legal? Unfortunately the arguments about legality will not hasten the opening of the shelter so they are important but not germane to the present discussion.

1. The requirement in the bylaw that makes the operators of the 310 Division shelter responsible for the security and neighborhood cleanup, in a 500 metre radius, is very broad, unworkable and costly and onerous as well as punitive to the operator. A compromise must be negotiated.
2. The Bylaw makes the “Operator and its Agents” personally liable for the activities of the residents with that 500 metre radius. Again unworkable, probably illegal and a condition that the County says they cannot comply with. This must be withdrawn or rewritten to live within the law of commercial liability.

These conclusions are pessimistic, where victory is being demanded, by one side and the situation is being viewed as a “win or lose”. There are no winners here and the losers in this case are the unfortunates needing access to the shelter beds; immediately.