When Systems Go Bad

On Friday I sent a letter to County Councillors. I still haven’t slept well this weekend (and I’m writing this at 2am on Monday morning), and I’ve spent a lot of that time thinking about the situation at hand, and how it relates to my master’s thesis on the nature of evil. All these years later, it turned out to be relevant after all. But first, the letter.

The Letter

Warden and Northumberland County Councillors,
c/o County Clerk
Northumberland County Headquarters
555 Courthouse Road
Cobourg, ON K9A 5J6

December 5, 2025

Dear Council,

Thank you again for allowing me to speak at the Social Services Committee. I was struck by Chance Brown’s delegation immediately after mine, in two ways: first, I know Chance just well enough to be able to say that he did not look well at all; and second, that his request was very simple, “just let me sleep.”

I’ve begun to do some research into that request. Our warming room has a policy of not allowing users to sleep, and so far as I’ve been able to find, it is the only warming room anywhere with such a policy. Councillor Cleveland became quite passionate when it was suggested that it was Cobourg’s Emergency Care Establishment by-law that prompted this policy; he insists that it is the provincial Fire Code, and that any claim otherwise is misinformation. But while the ECE violation that was issued against the warming hub at 310 Division Street earlier this year (April 10th) referenced a Fire Code violation due to people sleeping in a room not designated for sleep, no Fire Marshal weighed in on that alleged violation; the County requested that Cobourg’s Fire Marshal do so, and they declined, as they had not issued the ticket. By-Law declined the County’s request for a review, so the County sought a judicial review. Ultimately, the judicial review was withdrawn, and the subsequent press release indicated that “County Council has no interest in prolonged and expensive public disputes, and will therefore pursue no further legal action pertaining to this order. As from the beginning, the County remains fully committed to working with the Town of Cobourg to ensure 310 Division Street continues to operate in a manner that meets the highest standards of safety and care. While we may not always agree on interpretation of the ECE By-law for this purpose, we share a commitment to the health, safety, and well-being of all residents, and strengthening our community.”

The magnanimous and constructive approach the County chose to pursue was and is morally laudable, but the outcomes we’ve seen since are not. In deciding not to pursue legal conflict with the Town of Cobourg, County Council has subsequently changed the model of the shelter to one that is “higher barrier”, requiring sobriety for admission and removing the warming hub altogether. The Town of Cobourg refused to issue another ECE license for any other warming hub located in Cobourg unless it was on County property, and even once it was established in Committee Room A at 555 Courthouse Road, it was with the rule that nobody using the warming hub would be allowed to sleep. The comfortable committee chairs that I enjoy when I attend meetings in Committee Room A are wheeled out each evening and replaced with hard plastic chairs; and when people succumb to exhaustion anyway, the on-duty security guards are required to prod them awake again or remove them from the premises. This is done to avoid another ECE by-law complaint, and the possibility of losing yet another warming room. 

I’ve been trying to determine if this is a matter of interpretation of the Fire Code, or a matter of selective enforcement of the Fire Code, because I cannot find any other jurisdiction that enforces the Fire Code on warming rooms or shelter operations in this way. Logically, I lean toward it being a matter of interpretation: though Councillor Cleveland maintains that allowing people to sleep in a staffed and monitored facility that was not built for sleeping would be unsafe, I find it hard to believe that every other warming room in the country is simply looking the other way. While residents of Cobourg in favour of the ECE by-law often refer to Durham for their model of shelter services, it is worth noting that the new warming hub in Ajax is being called a “sleep space.” I have asked around, and fire professionals from other jurisdictions refuse to comment on matters outside their own jurisdiction; fair enough. But Cobourg’s Fire Marshal has also not commented, as they did not issue the April ticket, so I cannot find any Fire Marshal willing to agree with Councillor Cleveland’s claim that the ECE by-law is merely enforcing the Fire Code. Perhaps it is, but we’re being asked to take his word for it without the support of any actual Fire Code experts or professionals. With the withdrawal of the judicial review, no legal experts have settled the matter either. But it is a very serious matter, and I have heard that Human Rights complaints have been filed on the basis of the warming room’s policy being, in effect, enforced sleep deprivation.

If you google “sleep deprivation in international law,” the first few hits are for a paper aptly titled “Sleep Is a Human Right, and Its Deprivation Is Torture.” The paper explores case law from various jurisdictions around the world in which sleep deprivation has been ruled as torture or cruel and unusual punishment. While the authors note that the effects of sleep deprivation can vary greatly from one person to another, “poor sleep hygiene is associated with cardiovascular disease, inattention, learning difficulties, mental health disorders, and numerous other medical problems in adults and children.” Notably, sleep deprivation was one of the methods of torture used at Guantanamo Bay against Omar Khadr.

I searched for the effects of sleep deprivation, and while the flood of hits made finding good sources challenging, Wikipedia has a well-referenced page that points out, among many other things, that:

• just 21 hours of sleeplessness creates effects in the body comparable to a .08% blood alcohol level;
• sleep deprivation can cause mental health disorders such as depression, and depression can in turn cause chronic insomnia;
• sleep deprivation can reduce someone’s ability to fall asleep – which is to say, depriving someone of sleep now will deprive them of more sleep later;
• sleep quality is directly related to immunity levels, and sleep deprivation reduces the body’s ability to heal;
• sleep deprivation is related to massively increased risk of cardiovascular disease and type-2 diabetes;
• in extreme cases, sleep deprivation can lead to hallucinations, memory loss and confusion, seizures, mania, psychosis, and violent behaviour.

I respect Councillor Cleveland’s dedication to upholding the safety of the users of the warming hub, and of the community more broadly. But the current policy of the warming room, which is in place specifically to avoid having its ECE license revoked, is putting the most vulnerable residents in our community not just at risk of harm, but in direct harm. Its effects on their bodies and minds are in some ways equivalent to the drugs these residents are required to abstain from if they are to have access to a bed at the emergency shelter. In the name of doing good, we are doing lasting harm.

On that basis, I urge County Council to call an emergency meeting and use whatever powers it has to change this policy. If it is possible to comply with the ECE by-law through a zoning change or declaration of emergency that removes the question of Fire Code compliance, I urge you to do so immediately. But please do not wait for Cobourg’s go-ahead to stop this harm. The desire to prevent discord between the County and Cobourg must not trump the rights and health of our residents, and it is preferable to violate a by-law than to violate human rights. We are well over the line of actively perpetrating harm against our own residents because of this policy. Please act immediately.

Sincerely,

Jeff Wheeldon

The Thesis

I won’t rewrite my MA thesis here, but I’ll give you a one-sentence version:

Evil is less about malevolent beings than it is about good systems gone bad.

I was writing about ancient understandings of evil, comparing biblical stories about demons (malevolent beings) to biblical texts about systemic evil (referred to as “the powers and principalities,” “thrones,” “dominions,” “authorities,” etc). Even in ancient times, there were some who saw Caesar as evil, or influenced or even possessed by evil, while others knew that no matter who sat on the throne the system itself would perpetuate that evil. Every Caesar is replaceable; it is the throne itself that is the true power, and that power can be good, evil, or more often, both at the same time.

The situation the letter above describes is a great example. Over the past few years I’ve spent a lot of time looking at ways that the systems that are designed to keep us safe can actually make life harder for our neighbours who are unhoused. The Fire Code is a particularly challenging one: a fire inspection can result in an order to fix things in a home (add fire alarms, properly vent dryers or stoves, replace windows or doors), but a landlord can use a renovation as an excuse to evict a tenant (often called a “renoviction”); so an order designed to keep a person safe can indirectly support their exploitation and put them more directly in harm’s way. Similarly, a Zoning By-law is part of a larger system designed to ensure that homes are regulated so that the people who live in them are safe; but if the only shelter someone has is a travel trailer or a converted corner of a barn, enforcing the zoning by-law can mean that someone who was precariously housed is now completely unhoused.

What is worse, a by-law or code infraction, or homelessness? Who is responsible for that person becoming unhoused? Who is responsible for their safety, when the system designed for their safety puts them into an even worse position? Who is liable if the people who enforce our by-laws and codes look the other way?

The Domination System

A few years ago (last term), a Cobourg councillor brought a motion suggesting that the town choose not to enforce its parks by-law. By-law staff were enforcing the prohibition against camping, against people who were setting up tents in parks in an effort to survive homelessness. The original intent of the by-law was to prevent people from camping recreationally in parks, but nonetheless by-law staff were effectively playing cat and mouse with unhoused residents, evicting them from the park over and over again, confiscating tents and belongings only to have someone else supply that person with a new tent that would be set up in another back corner of a different park. The suggestion the councillor brought was: what if we just let these people shelter in peace? They just want to be left alone, and have nowhere else to go; why are we wasting money harassing unhoused residents?

Staff brought a report in response to this simple question, and the report pointed out that it wasn’t so simple. Municipalities have a duty to enforce their by-laws, and a law that is not upheld is problematic if not unjust; the by-law was part of a larger system of public safety that included the Fire Code, and due to some risk of fire as people attempt to cook in tents the town would need to add additional support to the office of the Fire Marshal; and because of all of this, the town would also suffer additional liability, which would mean higher insurance bills. I don’t recall the exact figure, but I think the estimate of the cost to not enforce the by-laws was somewhere around $400k/year. Just to leave people alone.

When a system designed to do something good, like regulating society or keeping people safe, instead harms someone, we call it systemic injustice. When multiple systems do that to the same person at the same time we call it intersectional injustice, a kind of Venn diagram of oppression. Theologian Walter Wink called this “the Domination System,” a system he believed was personified in scripture under the name “Satan.” Evil is not so much a malevolent person; it is rather a system intended for good that nonetheless does great evil.

Meanwhile in Northumberland County

Which brings us back to the present moment. Cobourg has a by-law called the Emergency Care Establishment By-Law, intended to regulate shelters. It requires shelters to maintain a high standard of care, including that the shelter meet the requirements of the various codes that already regulate every building and operation, like the Fire Code. By having a by-law that requires adherence to the Fire Code, Cobourg has inadvertently created the conditions for systemic injustice: now there are two overlapping systems enforcing a code that, as noted above, can already sometimes result in less safety for people who are vulnerable. The ECE by-law is also challenging from a legal perspective because it is a mechanism by which a lower-tier municipal government regulates the operations of the upper-tier municipal government; usually, regulations come down from above, not up from below, and this is the first instance of this kind of regulation that I’m aware of.

So far, the ECE by-law has been enforced more stringently than the Fire Code on its own. As I mentioned in the letter I sent to County Council, I can’t find any other jurisdiction that applies the Fire Code to a warming room in a way that prevents people from sleeping. I’ve looked, and asked around. And even the Cobourg Fire Marshal has not enforced the Fire Code in this instance; it’s only been through the ECE by-law. But because the ECE by-law requires the warming room to have a special license in order to operate at all, and because past enforcement of the by-law has ruled that allowing people to sleep in the warming room is a violation, if the County were to decide not to keep warming room users awake all night it could conceivably result in the County losing its license to operate the warming room at all. That puts the Social Services team in a bind: either keep people awake, or everyone loses the warming room.

But keeping people awake is effectively torture, and a human rights abuse. We can’t keep doing this. We are actively harming people in order to avoid putting them in danger of succumbing to the elements, all because of a by-law intended to keep these very same people safe. It’s truly evil.

We Must Not Scapegoat

When faced with evil like this, it’s VERY tempting to look for a devil to blame. But remember, Caesar is replaceable; it’s the throne, the system of power, that perpetuates evil. Pointing to the individuals who uphold the laws isn’t helpful.

I used to work as a security guard, so I can relate to the people who work security at the warming room; but I can’t even imagine being asked to kick the chair leg of anyone who is falling asleep, all night long. It’s inhumane for the guard, too. Same thing for the by-law enforcement officers who have to evict people from parks; it’s soul-sucking work that makes a person question their life choices, and maybe their own humanity. Fire Marshals shouldn’t be blamed for enforcing the Fire Code, even though there are situations where doing so can do more harm than good; it’s not their fault the system is inflexible, and that some landlords are predatory.

And even the politicians who are ultimately responsible for the systems, the people who sit on the thrones and hold dominion, are not devils plotting to oppress the vulnerable. Having seen the system from the inside over the past three years, I can honestly say that politicians often feel powerless in the system too. We have duties to the system that are greater than our powers to control it (for good reason!), so when there are systems of overlapping rules and it’s our job to uphold them…well, sometimes we can see the potential for harm coming, and feel like we can’t avoid it. And sometimes it takes an outside voice to remind us of what we can do, because someone who isn’t quite as enmeshed in the system as we are can sometimes see just how obvious the evil is. Sometimes all it takes is a letter that frames the issue around people, instead of systemic inertia, to remind us that it’s worth paying the system’s cost in order to ensure that the system helps rather than harms.

Which is why I have suggested that we stop torturing people, even if it results in a by-law infraction. It seems obvious when you say it that way, right? I have faith in the members of County Council (all of them), that having now seen it that way, they will take action. There are lots of things still to iron out regarding how to regulate shelters to ensure a high standard of care, and whether the ECE by-law is needed in order to do so, and that might be a rocky road; but in the meantime, we can’t put systems before people. Doing so is the very definition of evil.