If we want your opinion, we’ll ask you for it — and pay you $20 besides. A City of Victoria workshop on short-term sheltering options attracted a capacity crowd to the conference centre, and no wonder — homeless people were given $20 each to attend the event. It sets a troubling precedent.
Mayor Lisa Helps called the event historic, saying it was important in a discussion on homelessness to hear from those most affected.
That’s true. Who better to talk about the problems of homelessness than the homeless themselves? But members of interest groups are usually not paid to come to public meetings to defend their interests. Their zeal for their cause should be enough motivation.
Helps defended the payments as being like consulting fees, saying the homeless people at the meeting were paid to share their expertise. It’s an interesting metaphor, but it falls apart on closer examination. The city would generally not hire a consultant with a personal stake in the issue. That’s called a conflict of interest.
The mayor said it’s customary for Our Place and other entities that deal with the homeless to give an honorarium to people attending. In fact, the payment was suggested by Don Evans, executive director of the Our Place Society, who said he knew what it would take to get useful input. While that might be something a nonprofit organization does occasionally, it is not something a municipality should do.
The workshop sought ideas for temporary solutions. As a more permanent solution, Helps has proposed the Capital Regional District borrow $50 million to build 367 housing units for the city’s homeless. Servicing the debt would cost each CRD household about $11 a year, she says, and maintaining the housing and appropriate support programs would cost another $7.7 million a year, which would be sought from the province.
Victoria city council voted 8-1 Thursday to take that proposal to the CRD board of directors.
It’s a bold plan, and bold plans are needed. Homelessness is costly to society and to those who don’t have shelter. Economics and compassion dictate concrete solutions.
But math is also involved. Savvy taxpayers will quickly calculate that the proposal involves spending about $136,000 per homeless person in initial capital costs, then about $20,000 per person a year for support. That’s a simplistic analysis of a complex problem, but those are hard numbers, and hard questions will be asked. Those questions are not made any easier by the knowledge that homeless people were each paid $20 to come to a workshop to talk about their problems and issues.
What do these payments suggest? Are they made on the assumption that homeless people are not like other people, that they need to be bribed to speak on their own behalf? Many suffer from mental illness and addictions, but that does not mean they are not autonomous, reasoning people.
The issue is about providing the homeless with shelter and support. Surely, they should care enough to participate in discussions about their own futures. It would have been appropriate to provide coffee and sandwiches at the meeting, but not cash payments.
Public input is vital, but that input should be freely given, not purchased.
