“I was just mind-blown that there was somebody sitting there in the middle of the day doing drugs and nobody was doing anything about it,” he told The Epoch Times. Now, it’s a daily sight, he said.
“In the past five or six years, the whole area has really gone downhill,” he said, referring to his neighbourhood near the town’s core. “There’s garbage all over the place. There’s constantly screaming and fighting. It’s insane.”
A homeless shelter in the area has been the epicentre of the problems, but it’s not only Mr. Briscoe’s neighbourhood that has seen a change. A growing homeless encampment has been moving from place to place around the city, and smaller groups of tents have become a regular sight.
In the past couple weeks, the town has seen a rapid escalation in the violence and crime that has been steadily increasing for years.
On Sept. 22, Mr. Briscoe was attacked in his driveway and beaten unconscious; a gash on his face needed some 20 stitches. He has three children and he worries about their safety arriving home from school while he’s still at work. “I’m terrified,” he said.
“The symbol of law and order in our town is that police station, and right now it’s got a boarded door. It says a lot about where we stand,” resident Mr. Smith told The Epoch Times. He preferred to use a pseudonym, worried that speaking publicly on a controversial issue could impact his business.
‘Ontario’s Feel Good Town’
Cobourg is a small city with a quaint main drag—iron lampposts, cafes, hanging flower baskets—and a beautiful beach of soft, fine sand along Lake Ontario. It has long been a weekend getaway for city dwellers from Toronto, Peterborough, Kingston, and other places within a few hours’ drive.“I’m thinking people aren’t feeling as good anymore,” Jim Proskos, who works at a local car dealership, told The Epoch Times. He has lived in the area since 1996, having moved there from the Toronto area.
“People move to Cobourg—to small towns—because they want to get away from some of the big-city issues,” Mr. Proskos said. “Now the big-city issues are in the small towns.”
Residents have lost their sense of safety in Cobourg, he said. “I notice there are a lot of people that are strung out on drugs.”
It started in about 2018. Before that, residents say, the town had few visible homeless people and not much of a drug problem.
It had previously served for almost 20 years as a transition home for families experiencing hard times. Locals say they used to bring toys for the children there and it was part of the community.
Shelter Space, Encampment
Having a low barrier may increasingly become the norm for Ontario’s shelters. A recent landmark court case in Waterloo determined that city officials could not remove homeless encampments unless low-barrier shelter space was available for those displaced.The court decision built off a precedent-setting case in British Columbia that said removing encampments violates charter rights when shelter spaces aren’t available. The judge in the Waterloo case took it further, saying those shelter spaces must be low-barrier.
Some of the “barriers” that may prevent people from seeking shelter include curfews, prohibitions against drug use onsite, and the separation of couples to keep same-sex spaces.
Northumberland County, which is responsible for shelter space in Cobourg, did not reply to an Epoch Times inquiry about the number of shelter spaces available and any rules and regulations in place at the spaces.
Katie Donadel, 34, is one of the residents of the Cobourg encampment, which is currently located at the shuttered Brookside Youth Centre. She told The Epoch Times she was discharged from a shelter in July because she had “a messy room.”
Ms. Donadel said she later joined another program where they were housing people at a motel, but she was kicked out for waking the owner in the middle of the night. She said she and others woke him because they saw a man overdosing and were trying to get help.
“We’re pretty peaceful here as a people. We just want a place to rest our heads,” she said.
A security guard working at the encampment said there is some noise at night and residents in the area have complained. “A lot of their bickering is at night,” he said.
However, security hasn’t had major problems with violence at the encampment, he said. They work quickly to de-escalate situations. The police come occasionally, likely called by the encampment residents themselves, he said.
The surrounding area has multiple schools and a retirement home. A steady stream of high school students walked past the encampment at lunchtime on Oct. 2.
The security guard said he hasn’t seen the encampment residents approach the students, but some students did come into the encampment recently looking for a stolen bike.
Cobourg resident Rick Lovekin told The Epoch Times that encampment residents have allegedly stolen bikes on a regular basis.
Mr. Lovekin’s grandson and his friend locked their bikes up at the town’s marina and later found someone had cut the locks and taken the bikes. The friend’s mother was tenacious in tracking them down, Mr. Lovekin said.
She viewed security camera footage, allegedly saw an encampment resident stealing them, found him, and confronted him. The man denied stealing the bikes, but later told police where to find them.
Mr. Lovekin’s other grandson, 7 years old, had his bike stolen from outside his school near the encampment.
Mr. Lovekin owns a home near Transition House. He and his wife moved out when things got bad there. They live on a boat now.
He and Mr. Briscoe both said they were given no notice that a low-barrier shelter was opening near their homes. Mr. Lovekin said his home is his major asset and it’s much devalued now. He’s been able to rent it out, although finding renters wasn’t easy either.
“With the encampments and with people spreading out, all of Cobourg is starting to be affected, and there’s traction and momentum,” he said.
His grandchildren, ages 7, 9, and 14, still live next to Transition House. “My grandkids see them shooting up and smoking crack on a sidewalk. ... They saw a dead person at the end of the street.” He said drug dealers can be seen pulling up, opening their trunks, and making open transactions.
People struggling with addiction and homelessness need help, Mr. Lovekin said, but “what they’re doing is enabling and not solving anything.”
“I’m a carpenter. I’m not a sociologist,“ he said. ”But what you’re doing isn’t working.”
Mr. Lovekin said the worst thing is that this is the new norm and the police don’t act.
Cobourg Police Service declined an interview request. The Ontario Provincial Police did not respond to an inquiry by press time. The Epoch Times also requested interviews with Transition House, Cobourg Mayor Lucas Cleveland, and City Councillor Nicole Beatty, who has served as council liaison to Transition House.
Police Chief Paul VandeGraaf and Mayor Cleveland have both recently spoken publicly of the difficulty in maintaining law and order when the justice system allows repeat offenders out on bail.
The suspect, Daniel Tyler Foden, allegedly attempted to rob the man before assaulting him, then assaulted a police officer. Mr. Foden was released on bail Sept. 29 and later that day was again arrested for damaging property at a construction site.
“This is totally unacceptable at so many levels,” Mr. VandeGraaf said. “The decision of this court failed to support our community by allowing this person back into the community with no regard for the impact on the community, the victims, or the police.”
‘We Aren’t Leaving’: Camp Residents
Encampment resident Virginia Bailey, who has become something of a spokesperson for the encampment, told The Epoch Times on Oct. 2 she was expecting an evacuation attempt that day. Trespass notices were recently put up around the camp.“We aren’t leaving,” she said. “In the other locations, I guess we weren’t as savvy. We tried to just get along with them. We always left.”
Mr. Smith, who recently made it his mission to look into what’s happening, said he thinks the encampment is no longer about people in desperation with nowhere to go.
“The people that are there right now have been offered time and time again on a daily basis the resources and services necessary to get them out of those tents,” he said.
“Everybody who was serious about getting out of those tents has taken the offer. The people that are there are not homeless because they have no resources other than a tent. They are making a political statement.”
The Epoch Times asked Ms. Bailey if she had access to shelter space. Speaking quickly and inaudibly at times, she said she was told there was no space left at the motel overflow and to “go away, until they found out who we were,” and then she was told there was space. But she did not say why she did not stay in the space.
When asked what their plans are for winter and whether they will keep tenting, neither Ms. Bailey nor Ms. Donadel could say what they will do. Other encampment residents declined an interview.
Mr. Smith, who lives a few blocks from Transition House, recently decided he would start taking action after seeing the city’s problems worsen.
He has been researching legal standards, such as those regarding homeless encampments, the responsibilities of various levels of authority, and the financial accounting related to various initiatives. He has been out at the encampment talking to its residents to get their perspective.
“I’ve done my due diligence, and I continue to do so, and what I’m finding is that this kind of situation is happening all over towns and cities across North America,” he said.
It’s in small towns like Cobourg, he said, where it can be determined if these problems really can be solved. “If you’re going to turn the tide, if you’re going to make a difference, this is where you do it,” he said. “Neighbour helping neighbour is how we operate here.”
As someone who works in finance, Mr. Smith said it’s unbelievable to him that the money isn’t available to solve the problems for some 100 to 150 homeless people in the county.
That’s a small fraction of the whole county’s 90,000 people, Mr. Smith noted.
“The 1 percent—even less than 1 percent—is impeding the ability of the other 99.9 percent to live in peace and security,” he said. The cost of police and fire department calls to handle various situations should also be taken into account, he said.
Homeless people from all over the county come to Cobourg, he said, and many residents said homeless from as far away as Kingston and Peterborough all show up there.
“The more resources we give them, the more accommodative we are, the less we are solving this issue,” Mr. Smith said.
He has heard of incidents such as a woman running naked down the street, people having intercourse in someone’s backyard, and a man entering someone’s living room through an open window in the middle of the day.
“If we don’t get a grip on this, all the good people are going to leave,” Mr. Smith said.
