A New Democrat MP said May 9 that people don’t want to visit his hometown’s central district due to opioid use and homelessness, according to a story in Blacklock’s Reporter.
“When I was little in Timmins, my Irish grannie used to call my Scottish grannie and we’d go uptown and all the old mining widows would sit at the Woolworth’s and the kids would go window shop,” said Timmins MP Charlie Angus. “Nobody wants to go into the downtown anymore because we are hit with the triple crises of mental health, opioid addiction, and homelessness.”
Mr. Angus was speaking at a hearing of the Commons human resources committee.
“What I see happening in my community in Timmins, I know it is as bad or worse in other northern communities,” he added. “The city is doing extraordinary work, but they’re not equipped for this job.”
The City of Timmins, population 42,000, sees more than 47,000 calls to police annually, according to municipal statistics.
His comments came as part of a discussion on the lack of affordable housing in Canada. Mr. Angus said it’s badly needed in northern Ontario.
“We have huge opportunities right now in northern Ontario, the mines are booming,” he said. “What’s stopping us is housing. We need four-plexes, we need co-op housing, we need seniors’ residences, we need enormous amounts of urban First Nations housing,” he said.
Mr. Angus’s comments on social problems come less than a month after another northern Ontario MP said public order is being affected by public drug use.
Thunder Bay MP Marcus Powlowski, a Liberal, said it’s a problem in many areas.
“There is certainly the perception by a lot of Canadians that a lot of downtown cores are basically out of control,” Mr. Powlowski told the Commons health committee on April 15.
“Certainly there is also the perception that around places like safe supply, safe injection sites, that things are worse, that there are people openly stoned in the street,” said Mr. Powlowski, a former emergency room doctor. “There are needles around on the street. There is excrement on the street.”
Mr. Powlowski said he witnessed public disorder in downtown Ottawa where safe supply drug sites operate within blocks of Parliament Hill. “A few months ago I was downtown in a bar here in Ottawa, not that I do that very often, but a couple of colleagues I met up with, one was assaulted as he was going to the bar, another one was threatened,” he said.
“Within a month of that, I was returning down Wellington Street from downtown, the Rideau Centre, and my son who is 15 was coming after me,” said Mr. Powlowski. “It was nighttime and there was someone out in the middle of the street, yelling and screaming, accosting cars.”
It was part of a question he was directing to police officers at the hearing who were talking about the opioid epidemic in Canada.
“Do you agree that a lot of Canadians who aren’t involved with drugs are increasingly unhappy with society in the downtown cores that are this way?” he asked.
Fiona Wilson, deputy chief for the Vancouver Police Department, said they were concerned about the problem before public drug use was decriminalized in B.C.
“All of the concerns that we had have been realized,” she said. “We’ve had some really concerning examples of public consumption, despite the fact that, in my experience, the vast majority of people who use drugs have no interest in doing so in front of children, for example, or in manners that I think are problematic.”
