BarrieToday welcomes letters to the editor at [email protected] or via the website. Please include your full name, daytime phone number and address (for verification of authorship, not publication). The following letter is from Toronto's Ron Anicich, who is co-chair of the Raise the Rates Coalition, a provincewide advocacy group.
Recent discussions about homeless encampments in Barrie have focused heavily on enforcement and removal, while missing the fundamental cause of this crisis: poverty enforced by woefully inadequate social assistance rates.
As winter approaches and temperatures drop, our unhoused neighbours face impossible choices. When Ontario Works provides only $733 monthly and the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) offers just $1,368, how can anyone afford Barrie's soaring rents, which now average over $1,800 for a basic one-bedroom apartment?
The math simply doesn't add up.
The city's approach of displacing encampments isn't solving homelessness; it's merely shuffling human suffering from one location to another. Each displacement costs taxpayers significant money in enforcement and cleanup while traumatizing vulnerable community members who have nowhere else to go.
Instead of investing in bylaw enforcement and police responses, we should be loudly demanding that the provincial government raise social assistance rates to levels that actually reflect our city's cost of living. The current rates haven't meaningfully increased in decades, while Barrie's housing costs have skyrocketed. Is it any wonder that more of our neighbours are finding themselves unable to maintain housing?
The recent opening of the winter shelter on Rose Street, while welcome, is a Band-Aid solution. Even with expanded shelter capacity, many individuals will remain unhoused simply because they cannot afford rent anywhere in our city. No amount of emergency shelter beds can solve a crisis caused by income levels that make housing mathematically impossible.
Rather than continuing to criminalize poverty and homelessness, Barrie needs to advocate for real solutions. City council should be passing resolutions demanding immediate social assistance reform from the province. Every dollar spent on encampment removal would be better invested in affordable housing and poverty reduction.
Barrie prides itself on being a caring community. Let's prove it by fighting for the systemic changes that will actually prevent homelessness, starting with social assistance rates that reflect the real cost of living in Barrie.
Ron Anicich
Raise the Rates Coalition, co-chair
