Author: Dr. Andrew Sancton
There are two kinds of responses to street level urban social challenges such as seeing people living on the streets. The first focuses on the homeless: the system needs to be fixed. Once the system is fixed, there will be very few, if any, homeless people and hence there will be very few people sleeping on sidewalks. From this perspective, the problem of the homeless is solved by addressing the root cause.
The other response is to see a person using drugs or engaging in prostitution and to focus on the impact of such behaviour on society as a whole. Such behaviour is seen as a sign of disorder. From this perspective, the cause of the behaviour is less important than the fact that people judge it to be offensive, and perhaps even threatening. The fact that people are engaging in these activities is a failure of our legal system in that police are without the authority or resources to stop these behaviours.
Canadians can address both responses at the same time. To improve the effectiveness of these responses, the roles of the three levels of government need to be more clearly defined. This discussion paper argues that provincial governments need to be clearly responsible for root causes. It further argues that both the federal and provincial governments should more clearly empower municipal governments to be responsible for urban disorder.
This paper is not about determining how intergovernmental overlaps can be overcome through agreements, but rather about how we might reconceptualize the scope of governmental jurisdictions in Canada.