Municipalities call on province to help solve encampment crisis

Sarnia council reviewing options for Rainbow Park An update on Rainbow Park homeless encampment in Sarnia. Bryan Bicknell reports.

Municipalities are calling for new funding and tools from the province to help deal with urban encampments. This comes as the city of Sarnia continues to grapple with the expanding tent-city population at Rainbow Park, just south of the downtown.

Ashley Classen has been staying in the Rainbow Park encampment for about three months. She said she knows well that many permanent residents in the neighbourhood don’t like people living in the park, but she has nowhere else to go.

“Where can you really go because it’s over-run? Where are we going to go?” she questioned.

“If not here, it’s going to be somewhere else. So, is it just going to be unhappiness and unrest everywhere we go.”

Next week, Sarnia city council will consider a proposed encampment protocol with health and safety measures for any new encampments. The new rules, however, would not apply to Rainbow Park, as Sarnia Police have already stated they would need a court order to dismantle the encampment.

What Mayor Mike Bradley wants is for the provincial government to come up with a province-wide strategy for encampments.

“It’s trying to bring care and control to any encampment, or any tent city, that pops up throughout the community,” he explained.

“It’s a result of what happened at Rainbow. You can’t make it retroactive. But, there’s a much greater issue here. People in Canada should not be living in tents in cities across this country,” he said.

Bradley’s comments echo a report by the Association of Municipalities of Ontario (AMO), which calls on senior governments to help solve the homelessness crisis.

The paper, published last month, makes the case for investments in solutions like supportive housing for those with addiction and mental health issues.

AMO spokesperson, Kingston mayor Bryan Paterson, is hoping the province will announce new tools to help municipalities at the AMO conference later this month.

“We’ve been getting increasingly vocal as municipalities over the last couple of years as the situation continues to deteriorate, as the challenges get even more severe,” Paterson told CTV News.

“So no, we’re certainly going in hoping that there absolutely will be a response to our call.”

In the meantime, Ashley Classen was busy on a sunny afternoon setting up an umbrella outside her tent at Rainbow Park made in the shade, at least for now.

“When I first came out it seemed a little crazy, but now that I’ve gotten my little spot, it’s more or less home for me right now,” she said.