Charles Neil-Curly, 23, and Jeremy Roy, 21, arrived in Vancouver on a Greyhound bus on Wednesday afternoon. They were received by outreach workers who are assisting them as they settle in Vancouver.
The two young First Nations men said they were denied provincial funding to stay overnight at a North Battleford homeless shelter and were left with few options.
“I had my own bed and everything. It was good, but welfare just wouldn’t let me stay there, I guess,” Neil-Curly told reporters in Vancouver. “I asked for a ticket and five minutes later, I had it printed off and was leaving that night.”
After hearing Neil-Curly ask for — and receive — a bus ticket to Victoria, where he had family, Roy asked for a ticket to B.C., even though he had never left Saskatchewan before.
Don’t blame the two young men. Given the choice of being homeless in North Battleford or homeless in Victoria or Vancouver, who wouldn’t choose the latter? But a government social-services department is not a travel agency and shouldn’t be sending its clients to an area already scrambling to find accommodations for the homeless.
Officials in Saskatchewan are looking into the incident and will remind front-line workers “that clients should have a plan in place before they are given bus tickets for destinations away.”
The head of the homeless shelter in North Battleford said she didn’t believe plans were in place for the two men, who had been staying at the shelter for months. She was particularly worried about Roy, who has mental-health problems and didn’t know where he would get his medications.
In times past, so goes the folklore, homeless people were called hoboes, and they rode the rails from one place to another, looking for the place with the best handouts, the kindest people. They were often accosted by authorities who told them to move on.
In more recent times, former Alberta premier Ralph Klein sought to ease the strain on his province’s budget by offering the unemployed and homeless bus tickets to B.C. and Ontario. B.C. responded by imposing a three-month residency requirement for social assistance, but the B.C. Supreme Court ruled that measure unconstitutional.
We have progressed beyond the point where we tell the poor and the homeless: “Go somewhere else — your kind is not wanted here.” We should treat those in need with compassion and respect.
Canada is a country in which we can all cross provincial boundaries freely. We cannot prohibit homeless people from elsewhere from coming to B.C., nor should we try.
But no jurisdiction should be shuffling the homeless from one place to another. Saskatchewan should not be trying to export its homeless people to B.C. That does nothing to solve the problem there and only worsens the problem here.
