Public figures call attention to homelessness

No one knows just how many Yukoners don’t have a place to call their own.

No one knows just how many Yukoners don’t have a place to call their own.

There has never been a comprehensive and reliable homeless head count done in Whitehorse, or anywhere else in the territory, for that matter, but an unofficial survey done last January indicated at least 71 Whitehorse residents have inadequate housing.

It’s a statistically unreliable number, says Debbie Thomas of the Yukon Anti-Poverty Coalition, but it gives a snapshot of people living in their vehicles, sleeping rough, renting rooms daily or weekly until the money runs out or couch surfing.

“Homelessness is not the sort of stereotypical person you see on the river front,” Thomas told the Star this morning.

“People who are homeless might be holding down a job or going to school. People who are getting by, but really struggling to do so.”

The idea that homelessness is limited to people who are unemployed and sleeping on the street is inaccurate, Thomas says.

“Many of us are just one or two paycheques away from being homeless. There are just so many things that might contribute to it.”

Elizabeth Hanson, the new leader of the Yukon’s New Democrats, has firsthand knowledge of that tenuous balance.

When Hanson’s father died in a plane crash when she was still a child, her family was left standing on the brink.

“My mother went from being a secure middle-class wife to a single mother of six children,” Hanson recalled today.

“But she had security in a house that she had built and the mortgage was paid off by insurance.”

If it hadn’t have been for that secure housing, Hanson says, there is no telling what would have happened to the new widow and her children.

“We were lucky,” she says. “Many people aren’t, so how then do we establish security of housing for people who don’t own that house or have that insurance?”

Hanson is one of several “high-profile” Yukoners who are participating in Homelessness Action Week, a campaign co-ordinated by the anti-poverty coalition.

Representatives and hopefuls from the municipal, territorial and federal levels of government have signed up to spend a week away from their own beds, sleeping on couches and floors in an attempt to raise awareness and increase understanding about homelessness.

John Streicker, the territory’s Green Party candidate for the next federal election, said his goal is not to simply hang out at friends’ houses all week, but to spend his days gaining a better understanding of what it is to be without a home.

“I want to try to see through meeting people where they crash and maybe seeing if I can crash with them,” Streicker says. “Maybe spend a night with the outreach van.”

The van is run by Blood Ties Four Directions and moves around the city providing sandwiches, hot coffee, condoms, needles and counselling to Yukoners living on the margins.

Streicker has made the choice to live rough before, although in very different circumstances.

After returning from work overseas several years ago, he found himself broke and unemployed.

He decided to live out of his vehicle until he could get back on his feet. He is quick to point out he had more options and resources than most people who find themselves homeless.

“I had a van, I had a van with a bed in it. I had a bike that I could ride to job interviews with and I had clean shirts I could wear to those interviews,” he says.

“There’s going to be a spectrum of people with a suite of reasons for doing what they do,” Streicker says, acknowledging that some people who live in the rough are doing so by choice.

“I don’t think this is about trying to impose lifestyles on people but there are a lot of people out there who don’t want to be in the situation they are in and would like to change and improve that situation.”

Hanson also has previous experience spending nights on the street. As a social worker in Calgary, she spent a summer working night shifts aimed at better understanding the homelessness situation in that city.

“It was during the boom years when the streets were paved with gold and people were flooding the city looking for work. But not everyone was making it big. People were dying on the streets and they sent us out to connect with people and see what we could do to help.

“I saw a whole other side of Calgary that summer. I thought I knew it from growing up there, but I didn’t. I’ve been in the Yukon for 20 years and I know I’m going to see a side of things I’ve never experienced before.”

Hanson says she was uncertain about participating in the exercise when it was first suggested to her. She didn’t want it to be just that: an exercise.

“The situation is very complex. I know from my time in Calgary that you can’t understand it in a week, because I still didn’t understand it all in a summer.”

“I don’t believe that doing this for a week means I will know it intimately but I will know it better than if I didn’t,” Streicker says.

“So that is one of the interim goals, to gain a better understanding…. It’s not about ending homelessness today. But the more we can dive into it, the more we can do to eliminate it.”

Mayor Bev Buckway is among those high-profile politicians participating in the couch surfing exercise.