The Prince George group Together We Stand winning the Affordable Housing Champion Award from the BC Non-profit Housing Association would be hilarious, if it wasn’t so tragic.
Founded in 2019, Together We Stand was instrumental in the legal battle between the City of Prince George and the residents of the Moccasin Flats encampment, with the court eventually ruling that the city could not clear out the encampment without first showing there was adequate housing space available for the homeless.
No argument here that Together We Stand is deserving of an award for calling out local government for trampling on the legal rights of vulnerable people.
But that doesn’t make Together We Stand deserving of an award for championing affordable housing.
How exactly does a group that actively enables and encourages fellow Prince George residents to continue to live in the unsafe squalor of Moccasin Flats as an expression of their human rights win a housing award?
To refer to the living conditions in Moccasin Flats as housing is an insult to the suffering people living there.
As a city and as a society, we can, and we must, do better than encampments to provide safe and secure housing for people unable and/or unwilling to care for themselves while struggling with mental health and addiction.
Governments could start by exercising their legal authority to remove the chronic criminal offenders among the homeless population (who routinely prey upon the most vulnerable of the unhoused) and give them some long-term, albeit involuntary, secure housing, more commonly referred to as jail. Besides safe and humane living conditions, jail also offers the support programs needed to help those individuals turn their lives around, if they so choose.
Fighting for the protection of encampments should not be confused with fighting for the well-being of people who have reached such a low point in their lives that they believe trying to survive in a place like that is the best option they have.
To do so is what endless oppression, delusionally twisted into a virtuous defence of the less fortunate, looks like.
That’s the hypocrisy of giving Together We Stand a housing award.
Neil Godbout is the Citizen’s editor.
