Don't look now, but . . .

Homelessness is a ghost story, and Canada is fast becoming a haunted house.

by Michael Nenonen <mnenonen@republic-news.org>

In psychoanalytic lore, ghosts signify the “return of the repressed,” the resurgence of those thoughts, memories, and feelings that we've cast into unconscious darkness. These mental contents are normally too painful, shameful, or frightening to allow into our awareness. We bury our guilty secrets alongside our traumas, our inadequacies, and our fears.

Ruling over this underworld kingdom is our knowledge of our own mortality—of the decay of our bodies and minds, the loss of our status and strength, the indignity of our annihilation and ultimate irrelevancy. Abandoned and famished, these condemned children of our inner lives become increasingly alien. Try as we might, we can't get rid of them. The dead are invulnerable, Hell is eternal, and every grave is an open door. When the cemetery's soil collapses and the repressed re-emerge, they appear uncanny and threatening, reminding us of what we're desperate to forget.

So it is with those who've suffered social death, who haunt the labyrinths of shadow just beyond our windows' light. Every homeless person expresses the cruelty and injustice of the society we've created and that we re-create every minute of every day. They expose our mercilessness and our vulnerability. They remind us that as we become weak we become expendable. In destitution and madness, in ugliness and addiction, they reveal the most terrible miseries of the human condition, a condition ready at any moment to assert its sovereignty over each of us. In the homeless we see our own deaths. In 2005 we have more opportunities than ever before to gaze into this abyss.

Following the poor-bashing precedent set by the supposedly compassionate NDP regime of the previous decade, the BC Liberals have reduced child care support, lowered employment standards, encouraged children to enter the work force, and introduced a $6 “training wage.” Earnings exemptions have been eliminated, training and educational opportunities have been cut, and transition-to-work assistance is a thing of the past. A family's federal baby bonus continues to be automatically deducted from the family's provincial income assistance allowance. Income assistance rates are now set so far below the poverty line that it's nearly impossible to live on them. Adults on income assistance are only covered for the least expensive dental procedures, such as extraction, and so, as the cheapness of their diet takes its toll upon their teeth, the pulling begins, leaving toothless smiles with which to charm potential landlords and employers.

Many recipients can't find decent housing, and BC Housing has a waiting list of nearly 10,000 applicants. Income assistance workers have lost whatever discretionary decision-making power they once had, a power they regularly used to respond to crises and hardships in their clients' lives. Worker burnout is at epidemic levels. Those who leave are likely to be replaced by newcomers with backgrounds in business and finance, rather than social services. According to former workers I've spoken with, people with a social conscience and an ethical backbone are regularly screened out during the hiring process. The system seems geared to prevent as many people from accessing income assistance as possible, regardless of the legitimacy of their needs.

The BC Public Interest Advocacy Centre, on behalf of fifteen anti-poverty groups in BC, has filed a systemic complaint about the practices of the Ministry of Human Resources. The Centre argues that the Ministry often fails to conduct required emergency needs assessments—assessments designed to determine whether the three week waiting period should be set aside—even when the applicant is homeless, hungry, fleeing a violent situation, or severely ill. When people ask to have their decision reconsidered, the Ministry often fails to completely disclose all the information used to make the decision, rendering the appeal process extremely difficult and decidedly unfair. People with brain injuries, addictions, mental illnesses, learning disabilities, and developmental delays are hit hard by a number of Ministry practices, such as the practice of closing the files of someone who fails to attend a single review appointment. MHR workers conduct extensive searches of people's residences during unannounced home visits, violating fundamental privacy rights. People who aren't at home to receive MHR staff during these unannounced visits often have their cheques withheld.

The human consequences of these and other policies are quite literally all around us, but we can't look clearly upon them because we're ashamed of our collective sins and terrified of what homelessness signifies. And so we try to drive the homeless back to the boneyard. Our cities' police forces harass and terrorize those who sit and sleep on public cement. Our provincial legislature passes a Safe Streets Act to silence any wretch who dares plead too loudly. Kelowna sends the RCMP to retrieve the shopping carts the destitute rely upon to carry both their meager belongings and the bottles they've pitifully scrounged from the filth. We conceal our crimes of desecration behind platitudes of property rights and public safety, but in our hearts we know what we've done.

As frightening as this story is, it's only just begun. One wonders how the plot will unfold from here. Ghost stories grow more ghastly the longer the dead are denied their due. Sometimes the insults to their dignity are so dire that death's dominion spills across entire nations . How many of us will be claimed by the streets as our economic and social orders become ever more vicious? How many will be forced to plunge our hands into garbage cans before death claims us for its own? In the original Dawn of the Dead—one of the more corporeal ghost stories of recent decades—an elderly priest warns that when the dead walk we must stop the killing or lose the war. We'd do well to heed his advice.

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