Harm Enabling
Public health emergency threatens community
You look out the window to find two people huddled by your home in a downtown neighbourhood.
They’re doing drugs.
You call the police.
They won’t come. The constable on the phone tells you it’s not trespassing if they are on your property during daylight.
It’s an increasingly common scene and a common reply.
The people from all walks of life who live in Old St. John’s, in the area below Military Road and LeMarchant, east to Cavendish Square and west to the end of Water Street, will tell you stories like that one or worse. The further east you go, especially around a shelter of some kind, the number of stories and the sordidness of the behaviour described ramps up dramatically.
Of men and women, but mostly men, who hang around where neighbours gather, possibly innocently but always with some menacing potential.
Of the city buses, which now have security on some routes because of violence and verbal abuse aimed at drivers or other passengers, and of buses passing some stops where people who have been thrown off one bus wait to see if the next bus hasn’t gotten the message about them yet.
Of discarded needles and other drug material.
Of men and women walking around in shouting matches with someonereal or in their delusions, some picking fights with passersby or local people coming out of their homes to go to work.
Of people robbing a local convenience store and squatting in some place out of easy sight nearby to go through their gain, sell whatever they can to buy drugs, and then start over again on the same cycle.
Of garbage, dirt, and filth. In the area around Bannerman Park, residents clean up their own property daily and some clean the public spaces as well in addition to the heavier workload faced by City workers.
Of human excrement in the laneways between neighbourhoods and houses or in yards.
Of people trading sex for money in laneways between houses, like the rest doing whatever they are up to - at all hours of the day or night - in public just tucked away out of sight of cameras. They don’t worry about being seen. Only recorded.
The brutal stabbing murder at one shelter last winter or the confrontations or the arrest of another man for public masturbation near a neighbourhood school serve as constant reminders of the threat of violence that goes with the panhandling, loitering, robbery, assault, mental illness, and rampant drug abuse other people mask with the marketing word “homelessness.”
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People who work daily with drug users and people with mental illness will tell you that the most effective strategy for any community is harm reduction. The idea balances the needs of the people with addictions and mental illness with the wider community need for health and safety. It’s pragmatic, humane, and - as the name says - is focused on lessening harm to everyone.
In St. John’s as in other communities in Newfoundland and Labrador, there’s no coherent government response either provincially or municipally that comes even close to harm reduction. The result is what’s happening in St. John’s and Goose Bay but that exists to one level or another in major centres across the province.
The police constable who told the caller it’s not trespassing if it’s daytime is literally right. The law calls trespassing something that happens at night but the criminal code also has a charge for mischief, which means the same thing. That’s the charge for what people commonly call trespassing. The idea that people can come onto a homeowner’s or business owner’s property and do as they please is absurd.
The constable was sorting the pile of calls into the basket of things the police don’t have to deal with. Officers know the courts are overcrowded, that most of these cases will either result in light sentences or chronic no-shows, there’s not enough police, not enough spaces in the province’s crumbling jail system, and most of all police know that for most of these drug and mental health calls, they are not the right tool for the job. That’s why they’ll deal with murder and with public masturbation but a couple of people smoking crack in your backyard or a public laneway isn’t a call they’ll take.
The police intervention is also potentially the wrong response. And that’s the problem in St. John’s and other parts of the province. Except for the cops, there’s no one else.
There are plenty of shelters and shelter spaces for people who don’t have a place to sleep indoors especially after the government’s sweetheart deal married up one of the governing party’s well-connected donor’s underused hotel space with a local advocacy group and a pot of government cash to hire people to make it look like something's happening. There’s even private bus hires to carry people from the hotel by the airport to the streets they used to live on and maybe back again. Sounds counterproductive and in some ways it is. The government goal wasn’t to come up with a strategy to deal with the problem itself, after all, just to deal with the problem of the story being on the news every night.
But the Comfort Inn has fewer than 50 people in its 160 bed capacity even though the guy running the place these days was on the news recently telling us that shelters in the city were full and there was a hard winter coming. Meanwhile, the made-up-department of housing and mental health and addictions hasn’t been doing much more than issuing shelter standards that look good on paper but that don’t deliver anything to increase services to people with mental health and drug addictions that would reduce the shelter demand and start lowering the harm to other members of the community.
Besides, shelter standards don’t make a difference to the folks on the streets. Many of the problems in the neighbourhoods around shelters are from people thrown out of shelters for their behaviour not people who don't have a bunk. Even some or people in shelters have other homes. The real problem with lack of standards is something else, again, as we’ve known for years.
If people are housed in privately-owned spaces, they aren’t getting the counseling and other services available in government-run spaces. There’s no excuse for that yet when that came to light five years ago, politicians were more concerned about who might earn a buck from the misery than focus on the need to give the same services regardless of who owns the building the bedroom is in. Notice that the Canadian Press story on the murder focused on the irrelevant detail that it took place in a “for-profit” space. It's a red herring.
Who owns the spaces is also meaningless if we don’t know the relative costs. And we cannot tell what government spends because officials hide the information. In 2024, budget news releases played up the additional $14 million but there’s no way of knowing how much government spent annually before that since government changed the way it reports spending almost 20 years ago. Mental health and addictions that used to be included as a separate item with community health is now buried in the total amount given to the regional health authorities for everything. If you try to probe those numbers with the health authorities, good luck. You’ll have to file an access to information request or go through uncommunication officers rather than just look online to find information that could be and ought to be in public.
There are annual reports on the strategic plan for each health region but no measurable targets to know how they plan to “improve access” to mental health care. In 2024, almost half of the government’s entire budget - including money spent under the newly created mental health and addictions department - is buried in one line item for all health care. A quarter of the way through the 21st century, there’s no way of easily finding out where it goes like we could before the Internet in the last century.
Drill down further and you still cannot tease out what services are dealing with the drug-related problems in St. John’s or anywhere else. There are Mobile Crisis Response Teams that include people from the police and the regional health authority but there’s no report of what they do. And as their name suggests, they are a crisis team not something to handle the day-to-day drug activities that aren’t at crisis level. The thing is, though, that as time goes by, the sorts of things that might have been a crisis a few months or years ago - people defecating in public, used needles laying about - are now so commonplace that a crisis is something rare and much worse. And as the people going through this public health emergency daily will tell you when you react to the stories they tell, they quickly forget the rest of the city, let alone the rest of the province, doesn’t live like this.
The hundreds of delegates to this year's Energy NL conference in June heard stories about the wealth from the province’s energy sector that was here already and more that would come. Billions more. On the Water Street side, under an awning, a man was camped, as far removed from the wealth inside the building as anyone could imagine. There the first day. Disappeared by someone before the second day. The contrast remains with you months later.
Every year since 2020, there’s been a pedestrian mall made out of part of Water Street from June to August and every year the thing’s been running, people say the whole thing is marred by panhandling that in 2024 most called more “aggressive” than usual. Not just aggressive but more aggressive.
“St. John’s Mayor Danny Breen says the city is pleased with another successful season for the pedestrian mall,” VOCM reported on September 4, “but he admits aggressive panhandling is an issue they are hoping to address.
Breen says calls for greater police patrols in the downtown is a matter that falls under the jurisdiction of the province.
“It’s something that we would like to see, more patrols, particularly in the downtown area.”
In 2020, Gaylynne Gulliver of the association that represents downtown businesses said discussions between a committee of some of her members and officials from St. John’s city council talked to groups like - as CBC reported - “Thrive, Choices for Youth and the Gathering Place for insight on how the city and groups like Downtown St. John's can help get people the things they need to get off the streets.” The comments are quaintly innocent in hindsight but they reflect a problem that’s been around for years and that has only grown worse since the pandemic. Yet nothing gets better.
They also point to a spin-off problem from the drug and mental health issues on the City’s downtown streets. It has an economic impact as tourists and residents alike encounter the City’s problem in the face. The downtown is less attractive to residents and it is less attractive to businesses, many of which have decamped to other parts of the city in the past five years as the province offloads try he public health emergency.
Breen’s comment about the need for more police, but that’s provincial, is also a subtle hint of another problem that makes finding workable solutions to the province’s drug addiction and mental health crisis even harder to find. The problem is not just the political incoherence in Confederation Building, the sclerotic bureaucracy that still works as if it were in the 20th century, or the near-impossibility of working on a problem that straddles multiple departments. Look at bodies at the morgue to dee how even that simple problem couldn’t get fixed for months and, even after adding more money is going to cost taxpayers more than it should every year not just once.
The relationship between the provincial government and the City remains abysmal too. The incompetence of the emergency response during Snowmaggedon was not a one-off. It’s every-day reality. And on an issue like mental health and addictions, where the provincial government has the money, the power, and the jurisdiction, but the City and its residents bear the cost, there are not many ways to get government’s attention.
There’s also a self-fulfilling prophecy in there as well since both municipal and provincial politicians work in silence among themselves these days with little information leaking outside the closed circles of power and status to ordinary people. The deaths at the parking garage quickly disappeared from public view in the conspiracy of silence and even the mildly worded column here on that got surprisingly aggressive pushback against *any* discussion of what happened and how officials responded.
That same conspiracy of silence accompanies issues like the ones raised this time. The issues only made the news when a group of activists, armed with slogans and not much more paralysed the provincial government for months. The deal that got the problem off the news involved bringing the main advocacy group into the tent of service providers alongside government, thereby limiting its ability to advocate effectively. It’s a classic political move and very much the way things work in Newfoundland and Labrador since 2003.
And when the provincial government finally shut down the encampment at Colonial Building, they didn’t solve the problem. They merely moved the people into the neighbouring lanes and backyards and street and into the park, likely until the snow flies again and the encampment springs up somewhere else.
The problems in Old St. John’s are a public health emergency. Same in Goose Bay. The province’s award-winning chief public health officer is nowhere to be seen. Instead there is official silence unless it is self-congratulatory. And in the media, the stories seldom get any attention and certainly nothing in detail about the scope of the problems and the inadequate official response.
After all, it’s easier to do a story on the routine replacement of fire fighting equipment and buy into the pre-election government hype for its “investment” than report that replacing clapped out equipment is what government’s supposed to do and that *this* $3 million was only needed because government failed to replace models that were expiring. The public health emergency does not come prepackaged except with false assumptions.
The drug and mental health emergency in St. John’s is not just a public health problem. It’s public safety. And that points to the chronic failure of governments of different political stripes over the past 20 years to improve detention facilities and the treatment and other services to people detained legally by the justice department. Replacing the Penitentiary is not about jailing people. It’s about providing secure space to help people who are in jail often because of drug and mental health problems that no one can fix otherwise.
As a society we need to take a humane, pragmatic approach to this crisis. That includes a range of responses, including ones that involve the courts and police. It also must include breaking the conspiracy among the political and bureaucratic class that keeps any discussion of these responses out of the public space. We must reject their elitist responses especially if they use people with addictions and mental illness as a political prop for their own slogan-addled agendas. After all, the cause of the behaviour, the responsibility for the behaviour is - in much of what we are talking about - on the other side of stopping it in the first place.
The people suffering by the unwillingness of public officials, of those with power to take effective action are not just those on the streets. They are the rest of the community that must put up with all the behaviour that goes with it. The behaviour is not somewhere else. It is in their neighbourhoods and near or in their homes. It may well be only a matter of time before someone takes matters into their own hands more so than they already are by keeping streets and public spaces clean.
What is happening is not healthy. It is not healthy for the people with drug addictions and mental health issues and it is not healthy for those around them. It has real human costs on individuals and the continued emergency erodes our community literally and figuratively, physically and in spirit.
It cannot continue.