From Your City’s Front Lines
Editorial by S. DiBiagio
It is -44°C in Thunder Bay, Ontario on January 23, 2025 at 8:30 pm. It is the start of the deepest freeze so far this year, although we’ve been in frostbite territory for weeks. Outreach workers are in an exhausted overdrive and on overtime, searching around the city in frantic desperation to save lives from the dropping temperature. They find a man sleeping under nothing but a single tarp, his face hanging with icicles; he still hoists a shovel and helps dig out their vehicle that is too sunken into the snow to move. There is no real housing for these people; the overflow shelter beds are inaccessible or feel unsafe for all of them and the storm is going to last for days. The icy air seems to splinter and crack with the weight of a critical question: “How could anyone have survived this outside?”
Two long, cold months later and the city finally declares a humanitarian crisis over homelessness. They have done this instead of what local service providers and Indigenous leaders have demanded: the declaration of a state of emergency. The difference is that a humanitarian crisis continues dialogue about homelessness locally, while a state of emergency brings in the provincial government to address system inequalities and failures. These system inequalities and failures are what is pushing more and more people outside, and as we continue to talk the issue to death in-house, real people are facing death by exposure.
People who find themselves unhoused are people coping with grief, those experiencing the impacts of genocide and colonial-based systems, and people living in or fleeing domestic violence. They are people in severe chronic pain, people living with illness and mental health struggles, and those in stages of recovery. They all share the experience of having the city’s resources coming up short, and then being blamed for being non-compliant or ungrateful when they point this out. They also share the experience of being villainized for the ways that they are processing pain, loss, and life’s often unimaginable hardships.
If declaring a humanitarian crisis means recognizing homelessness as an issue, what have city leaders been doing up to this point? When our service providers have already banded together, where was the city looking? When we demanded a state of emergency, why did the city decide to declare a humanitarian crisis, which does little but place yet more pressure on underfunded, understaffed, and overcrowded agencies?
These city leaders, from the warmth of their offices, are again busying themselves with band-aid solutions in response to a problem that is leaving community members outside. In too many cases, it is taking from them their lives and limbs. I can’t forget seeing frostbite that's so advanced that amputation is the only medical option. I can’t forget hearing a man quietly saying that he will have to relearn how to use his hands with several of his fingers now missing.
Declaring a humanitarian crisis is a statement of pretty words, and we need more. We need direct action now, and the declaration of a state of emergency to bring the provincial government to the table. We need accountability from the bodies that say they are housing people and yet who are setting up systems and policies that make houselessness into a revolving door, with barrier-rich wait lists that span years. None of this situation is just and everyone deserves to be housed. Nothing drives that point home more than Thunder Bay’s real coldest nights of the year.