Library and Archives Canada is housing the homeless.

The following example is not what most people have in mind when they think of a government-funded housing project.

Today at Library and Archives Canada, I saw a man enter the building whom I had seen there before.  He talks a lot, usually to himself.  The air surrounding him indicates he does not often talk to soap and water.  I once saw him eating cereal straight from the box on one of the couches in the front hall of the building.  When I had seen him at the archives building several months ago, he told me about a conversation with a lady he had at St. Luke’s.  I knew he did not mean St. Luke Lutheran Church where I attend, but an online search revealed St. Luke’s Anglican Church, which runs extensive services for homeless people.  I concluded that the man stays warm, dry, and occupied by spending his time at Library and Archives Canada, reading books or looking at documents.  A pass to the facility is free and available for all.  Today I saw him while I was preparing to store my jacket and book bag in one of the lockers in the coat room.  He arrived with a large bag and began arranging items on the counter, including a box of cereal and a couple of cans of Zoodles or Scarrios (pasta shapes of zoo animals or ghosts in tomato sauce, kind of a Canadian imitation of Chef Boyardee). 

Library and Archives Canada is a federal institution.  The federal government has not done enough to support public housing and end homelessness.  Decades of cuts, and more recently, an outright ideological ambivalence towards any meaningful effort to end homelessness and poverty has led to the situation we have now.  People have been displaced by mostly negative changes in the economy, and many homeless people I see on the streets are aboriginal, which reflects a tremendously huge combination of social problems.  It’s a sad example when the only thing we have that comes close to a federal public housing program is when homeless people spend their days in a library owned by the federal government and store their few belongings in its coat room while Senators serve in an antiquated, unelected, and unaccountable institution up the street and pay for fishing trips and high society social events with public money that could have been used to feed, clothe, bathe, and house people who need it.  Library and Archives Canada is not supposed to be the Department of Housing.