Today I learned that the Hamilton Public Library has reduced its hours, and now requires all library users to scan their library card before they can enter. I feel queasy just thinking about this: public libraries are joyful places where everyone is welcome, knowledge is free, and connection and belonging are available to all. Seeing that a large and presumably well-resourced library in Ontario has decreased its availability and created some barriers to entry struck me as antithetical to my understanding of libraries and the spirit in which they operate.
And yet, I can’t blame them in the slightest, and can see this as an important step to ensuring that the library continues to offer those services, according to those values, in a safe and sustainable way. They made a hard choice, compromising on some things in order to strengthen others, adapting to a situation that has forced them into this position.
In this case, the situation is the current state of homelessness and addiction in the City of Hamilton. Already this year, library staff there have made over 100 paramedic calls and administered Naloxone, a drug that can stop a drug overdose, 40 times. Library users and staff should not have to respond to (or even witness) medical emergencies at that scale, and there are other challenges associated with the prevalence of residents in crisis in the library too. It makes sense, then, to monitor who is in the building, and to limit access for people whose behaviour may be abusive or disruptive. The library has very good reasons for this change.
Context Matters
If we just look at the facts as I’ve presented them so far, then we can understand the library’s decision, even if we feel sad that it has had to become a less open and welcoming place just to keep people safe. But we might also feel like we can safely lay blame for this decision: if only those homeless people weren’t doing drugs and disrupting things…
But if we ask just a few questions, we can see that it’s not that simple. We can see that the library should not have had to make this decision that goes against its DNA, because they should not have had to adjust to a context that should not exist. All we need to ask is why:
- Why are there so many unhoused residents in the library?
There’s a very long answer to this that examines economics and policy decisions going back many decades across two major political parties. But the short answer is that there aren’t enough shelters for all of the unhoused residents, and there aren’t any other public places for them to go in the winter time. The first part is entirely about inadequate public funding: the Ontario government spends less than 1/10th of what it would take to adequately solve homelessness, and much too little to even house them all in temporary emergency shelters. The second is more of a social issue: why don’t we have more places where people are welcome to just hang out, with no agenda and without having to buy stuff? In both cases, this is everyone’s problem, and we all can be part of the solution. (Ask me how!)
- Why are so many people overdosing in the library?
Overdosing on drugs usually happens for two reasons: first, because many street drugs are laced with fentanyl, a highly potent and addictive drug that makes users more addicted (and therefore more reliable customers to drug dealers) but also makes it difficult for a user to determine how much drugs they can safely take. And second, because the province used to fund Safe Consumption Sites to prevent this kind of overdose by giving people with drug dependencies a safe place to use their drug, where they can be monitored and saved. But the provincial government closed those safe consumption sites for ideological reasons, not because they were ineffective, and now those same people have to take their drug (I say “have to” because addiction is a physical dependency that doesn’t give them a choice) in a back alley or public restroom and hope that if they overdose someone will be able to save them. In the absence of safe consumption sites, the people who will save them are library clerks.
That’s not fair to residents with addictions. That’s not fair to library clerks. That’s not fair to other residents who use the library.
This is a situation that has been caused by many things, but very prominent among those things are policy choices by the Ford PC government over the past eight years, and the under-funding of shelters and the closure of safe consumption sites are just the policy decisions with the most direct impacts on this situation. This government has created conditions in which public libraries must make choices that go against their very natures in order to adapt to a crisis.
This is why I say that the library has done the wrong thing, but for the right reason.
Brighton Does It Too
Thankfully Brighton Public Library hasn’t had to make that decision. But the Municipality of Brighton sometimes does the wrong thing for the right reason, too. Our most obvious case has to do with the Emergency Detour Route.
Right now, if there’s an accident on the 401 traffic is diverted down to County Road 2, or as we call it here in Brighton, Main Street. Transport trucks line up for many kilometers to crawl through town, making getting virtually anywhere in town difficult if not impossible until the 401 reopens. Traffic also looks to alternate routes, taking Little Lake Road or Telephone Road to avoid the traffic jam; but those routes were not made for high traffic loads or big trucks, and vehicles get stuck and roads get worn out. We had a delegation to council last month from Telephone Road residents begging us to restrict truck traffic there to avoid this problem.
Of course, we need a different detour route entirely. We used to ask the province to upgrade Telephone Road so that it would be safe for big trucks and high traffic loads, so that traffic would not be diverted through town or try to take other routes that are less safe. But doing so was deemed too costly. That door is closed to us on account of price.
Yet at the very same time, the provincial government is intent on upgrading the 401 to add lanes virtually everywhere, including a proposed tunnel underneath the 401 that might cost $100 BILLION. Not to mention their intent to put highway 413 through the middle of the Greenbelt, land set aside for environmental protection. Upgrading Telephone Road to take truck traffic safely is too expensive, but we can find a hundred billion to tunnel under the biggest highway on the continent?
So Brighton has pivoted. While we know that the province wants to widen the 401 through Brighton anyway, we’ve now lobbied them to do it sooner with the hope that more lanes might mean that an accident on the 401 doesn’t close it down completely. Debris covering two lanes might still leave one lane open to traffic. I’m not sure it’s a realistic hope, but the better option has been rejected for reasons that don’t add up.
And here’s the thing: we know that adding more lanes to highways doesn’t actually reduce congestion. The amount of traffic that passes through Brighton on the 401 does not require additional highway capacity in the first place, but even if it did, we know that adding more lanes only encourages more drivers, and everywhere that has tried this has come to regret it. We will not be well-served in the long run by having more highway lanes going through our town; and yet, we still need a solution to the problem of the Emergency Detour Route bringing our whole town to a standstill every time the 401 closes.
So we’re doing the wrong thing, but for the right reason.
We Need Better than Bandaids
We’re familiar with band-aid solutions: the things we do to address the symptoms of the problem without addressing the problem itself. With a literal Band-Aid®, we put a bandage on a wound to stop the blood from coming out, and the real problem (the wound) gets healed automatically by the body over time. Policy problems don’t heal on their own over time though. Sometimes they stay constant, sometimes they get worse, and sometimes they mutate.
Doing the wrong thing for the right reason is how one group solves a policy issue caused by someone else, temporarily, in ways that cause other problems. The original problem has then mutated: it’s no longer an issue of housing or drug policy, now it’s a question of public safety and reduced access to libraries as safe places of free knowledge and belonging. That reduced access to libraries might further shift for the sake of public safety, if the housing and drug crises continue to get worse, and then we might see knock-on problems caused by the fact that libraries no longer fulfill their purpose in the community to the same degree: people who used to access the library to update their resumes and apply for jobs might not have that access when they need it, and miss opportunities that might result in them eventually becoming unhoused themselves, and life on the street might traumatize them to the point where they become addicted to drugs they only used to help them deal with the realities of homelessness, and then libraries are not safe places for them anymore at all because they’re likely to be denied access. And so on.
To use the Brighton highways example: if we are successful in supporting a highway expansion, we can expect more traffic to use it. If we have more traffic using it, we can expect more accidents. If we have more accidents, our volunteer firefighters get more calls, which means we need more firefighters and more equipment and more people’s lives are at risk. And so on. And detours are still likely to go through town, but now with even more traffic clogging up our town for longer. Whereas moving the EDR would change traffic on just one different road, but likely only during detours.
To adequately address a problem, we need to look at the root cause. The more we apply bandaids, and especially the more we have to apply bandaids to someone else’s policy problems, the more our problems will mutate and grow. It is only by addressing the issues underneath that we can avoid causing further problems down the road, not to mention the costs of taking action municipally to address provincial problems.
And this is truly a problem of provincial issues being addressed municipally. Almost everything that municipalities do today is either legislated by the province (i.e., they tell us explicitly that something is our job to address), or increasingly, something municipalities choose to do in order to address a problem that the province is allowing to fester in our community.
Treading Lightly, Empowering Others
I am conscious of this problem when I’m looking at how we at the municipal level can address issues that ultimately reside at the provincial level. The Brighton Homelessness Task Force was set up to ask this kind of question: how should a municipality respond to the housing and drug poisoning crises? If at all? We want to avoid creating new problems. One of the things that I quickly became convinced of was that if the Municipality of Brighton were to try to set up shelter services or support programs, we would be interfering with the role that the province has delegated to the County level; or (and perhaps worse) we would be taking responsibility for things that empathetic and motivated residents do to support one another. Interfering in either of those domains would cause immeasurable problems, none of which would be intended but would naturally result from our intervention.
Does that mean we should never solve problems or clean up someone else’s mess? Of course not. But we should be careful about how we do so. The Brighton Homelessness Task Force Report served to identify where the issues are best solved, as well as who in our community is in need of support. Our conclusion has been that we want to support those who are supporting others: while the library should not be a de facto emergency shelter, how can it serve to support the organizations and community volunteers who support unhoused residents? How can the municipality support those volunteers and groups, and support library workers too? We came up with some suggestions, none of which are the wrong thing for the right reason. Instead, these are all things that would be good to do whether we were in crisis or not, and whether our crises are in our jurisdiction or not. By strengthening our local community we will become more resilient, no matter what issues we face.
It might seem more decisive if we just opened a new program to address the issue directly. But by treading lightly and instead supporting those who are already doing good work, we avoid making the problem worse and dis-empowering those who are better positioned to address the issue.