In every major city in Canada, you can see people, huddled over grates, covered with sleeping bags, taking shelter in entrance ways to stay warm. The plight of the homeless is most troubling as winter comes to Canada, but it is a dangerous, precarious situation at any time. Sometimes those who lack affordable housing struggle in less visible ways, one rent cheque away from disaster.
Anglicans across the country are looking for ways to work for change. In November, Virginia Platt, a parishioner at St. Peter’s Anglican Church in Winnipeg, was part of a group picketing a decommissioned military base in the city. The Right to Housing Coalition, of which the diocese of Rupert’s Land is a member, was protesting the fact that more than 100 houses on the base have remained empty for the past five years, costing $1.5 million per year to heat and maintain. The coalition is calling on the federal government to permit the houses to be used as transitional housing for families who lack affordable housing.
I drove by the unused military base in Winnipeg referred to in the article this morning on my way back from our Christmas visit with family. Chimneys all over this enormous base show that it is being heated, but apart from security, there is absolutely no one on hundreds of acres of buildings and homes. This huge base, once very active, used to be on the edge of the city, now it is enveloped by suburbs. Meanwhile, homelessness in -30 weather plagues Winnipeg. I ask myself as I drive by dozens of houses, all of them vacant, are they waiting for another world war that might make this military monstrosity useful? My social activist days are behind me, but this stuff is crazy, and shows how a government can create a chronic screwup.