September 29, 2003
With about a month and a half left to go in the city of Toronto’s municipal campaign, mayoral candidate John Nunziata has been getting a lot of attention over his plan to remove the homeless from the city’s streets.
Nunziata’s desire to rid the streets of its homeless inhabitants is laudable. Having people sleeping on sidewalks and loitering on the streets is not helping Toronto’s tourism industry that has been hit hard since the outbreak of SARS last spring. And having the homeless put into shelters is much more realistic than fellow candidate Barbara Hall’s view that the only problem that the homeless have is a lack of affordable housing. Many of the homeless live on the streets because they are mentally ill or have serious alcohol and/or drug problems.
But Nunziata’s approach to the homeless is reminiscent of the methods used by Uncle Joe Stalin. In a frightening aspect of Nunziata’s plan, he wants to have those who are living on the streets declared to be "adults in need of protection". They can then be forcibly removed from the streets and put into shelters. To declare that someone needs protection implies that they lack the mental ability to make rational decisions. But many of those who live on the streets prefer living outdoors in sub zero temperatures to staying in a shelter. On the street they are less likely to be bothered by others, many of whom are mentally ill and spend the night screaming at non existent entities. There is less chance that a street person’s meager possessions will be stolen while asleep on the street as opposed to in a shelter. And many of those on the street are loners who don’t want to share their sleeping quarters with hordes of others. Others, simply don’t like the rules, however lax, that the shelters impose on them.
John Nunziata is constantly touted in the media as being "right-wing" and grouped with candidates John Tory and Tom Jakobek. But Nunziata is a capital "L" and small "l" liberal, and there is nothing right-wing about him. His solution to Toronto’s homeless problem is more akin to something that Joseph Stalin imposed in the Soviet Union than it is to something former premier Mike Harris would have come up with. Nunziata’s solution is totalitarian. It smacks of fascism. Declaring that an adult is a person in need of protection because you disagree with the way he or she chooses to live their lives is no different than Stalin’s sending political dissidents to psychiatric facilities because they disagreed with how the fatherland was being run.
Nunziata is touted as being the "law and order" candidate, but his ideas have nothing to do with law and order. It’s one thing to make sleeping on the street an offence and impose legal sanctions on the activity--it’s another to deem people who do it, many times for logical reasons, to be in need of protection from the state. It makes you wonder what other conduct some residents of Toronto engage in that Uncle John finds objectionable and thinks that citizens should be found to be in need of protection. This is the same John Nunziata, who as an MP in 1989 brought a private members' bill forward that would see women who had an abortion be subject to two years in jail.
Contained in Nunziata’s solution to the homeless problem is to give power to paramedics to forcibly remove the refusniks who refuse to voluntarily go off to their designated city run gulag. No person who is truly for law and order would so callously give policing powers of arrest and detention to non peace officers. No one became a paramedic so that they can go out and perform policing functions. What’s next? Perhaps Uncle John will try and tackle the city’s garbage problem by giving hot dog vendors the power to arrest and detain litterers. It’s scary.
This is not the first Stalinesque solution that Nunziata has come up with during his campaign. When Corrections Canada released a sex offender with a record going back 40 years, to a halfway house close to where Holly Jones, the 10-year-old who was brutally murdered last May, Nunziata led the charge to have sex offenders sent out of the city. The mayoral hopeful vowed that sex offenders were not going to live in his neighbourhood near his children. Despite the fact that the feds showed great insensitivity to the community by placing the con in that particular area of the city so soon after Holly’s murder, does not alter the fact that you can’t rid the city of those who have been lawfully released into the community by running them out of town and forcing them to go to North Bay, Thornhill or Siberia.
Candidate John Tory called Nunziata an extremist.
John Tory was being kind.