This is from the city where it’s illegal to be homeless. One man even collected over $100,000 in fines for being homeless.
Yeah, that’ll help.
What happens if the man does not pay? Will they put him in jail?
Canada does not have debtor’s jail. Nothing will really happen except that more fines will keep racking up. No collection agency is going to take on a homeless person’s debt, so eventually those debts will just disappear, assuming he makes no effort to pay them off.
In the meantime, if he tries to escape homelessness, it’s a lot harder nowadays to find an apartment with a landlord that doesn’t check your credit, and 100k+ in unpaid debts looks really bad.
In the ultimate act of irony… Maybe they’ll put him in a house.
Man that sounded wild to me, so I dug around a bit and it’s fucking true. Although the amount is closer to $110,000 it’s still insane.
Hey, we heard you can’t afford a house, so we’re charging you fines in the amount of what it would have cost to buy a house…we’re so cool! We solved homelessness! Because now if you want to be homeless, it actually costs more to NOT buy a house. So you may as well just buy a house!
We did it guys! We ended the concept of homelessness! High five!
I mean why don’t the homeless just buy a house? Are they stupid?
Have they tried just being rich and buying their own building to sleep in front of?
Maybe it’s their broke mentality that’s the issue bro stay on the grind 🔥 💯
we’re charging you fines in the amount of what it would have cost to buy a house
Oh how I wish I could buy a house for that kind of money. You should go look at what housing costs in Canadian cities.
$169k https://www.realtor.ca/real-estate/27687505/158-douglas-avenue-fredericton
Although the being sold “AS IS, WHERE IS” is a bit concerning. Flood risk maybe?
If you can produce $110k in fines you can probably also pull off a downpayment and at least a few years of payments. If you can’t buy a house that’s still several years of renting.
Yeah, it was from awhile ago. I couldn’t remember if it was one or two hundred thousand. I’ve corrected my comment to be more accurate. Here’s an article on it.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/montreal-homeless-man-100k-fines-1.3473707
Aaaah, I love living in a capitalist hellscape
It’s not “being homeless” that is illegal, though. It’s drinking in public, begging or sleeping in the metro. And it sure is tough not staying in the metro during winter. There are some organisms that can provide shelter, but not enough for everyone, and it usually cost a couple dollars, which not everyone have everyday. And it’s a real problem on both sides, as the metro was not meant to become a shelter for the homeless, and people have been complaining more and more that they feel unsafe there.
Sure “being homeless” isn’t the crime itself but you’re being naive if you don’t think the laws make homelessness illegal. What are they supposed to do? Go find a piece of land no one has claim to and freeze to death?
And what are we supposed to do? Legalize all drugs and being drunk in public just to avoid having to fine them, and install beds everywhere in the Underground City (and in this post’s case, in emergency stairwells at the Complexe Desjardins) with no regard for their regular use?
Sure, let’s work on proposing more accessible legal alternatives. Just take note that these laws weren’t created to punish the homeless, but to have a clean and safe public space - which have been degrading for some time now.We could just house them. That seems to work.
That sound pretty much like the “If you’re poor, just buy a house” people.
I think you don’t know much about Montréal. There are solutions already in place to help homeless people who want to go out of the street, but the housing crisis is pretty new and it will take years to solve. It wasn’t so bad a few years ago.It’s actually nothing like that at all. What you’re describing is putting a societal problem on the shoulders of individuals. What I’m suggesting is that society should actually fix the problems it has created.
Every place that has taken a “housing first” approach has seen success out of it. But people insist on making the problem more complicated than it is, because we’ve built an entire society on the false idea that poor people somehow deserve to be poor and anything done to help them is somehow unjust.
Unhoused? Has homeless as a word been banned?
I think the idea is to put the responsibility for housing onto society/authority as opposed to the victim.
Doesn’t homeless imply its society’s fault too?
Perhaps to some people, but to me it does sound like a homeless person just happens to be without.
Whereas an unhoused person has been let down by whoever is responsible for ensuring people are housed.
I dont see how. If anything, its just a matter of time until you see houseless as being their fault. Because the baggage is something you (and society in general) is adding. Its not implicit in the word itself.
Welcome to the euphemism treadmill
In the US they mean different things, as homeless includes people living in other people’s homes. That can include people whose house just burnt down and are living with friends or family because they lost their permanent residence (home). U housed is about where they are staying.
People on the street are homeless and unhoused.
Not sure about Canada, but in the US:
Homeless = no permanent residence, which also includes couch surfing, parents and children who just fled an abusive family member and are temporarily ltaying with friends or relatives, and people who are living in their car. All people without a home.
Unhoused = homeless people that don’t have a roof over their heads. Might include living in a car.
Great way to lose customers
Having said that, what’s up with the “unhoused” thing? It homeless. Are we now calling it differently because homeless is now all of the sudden insulting? How long until “unhoused” suddenly is a bad word?
Can we please just stop pushing changing words? Homeless is fine, you’re without a home. It sucks, people should support you, not shun you, but changing words is just virtue signalling that doesn’t do anything to make anything better for anyone
but changing words is just virtue signalling that doesn’t do anything to make anything better for anyone
… And if you are the type of neoliberal politician that wants to pretend they care about people while never actually doing anything to help anyone other than the megacorps when you get into power – Then this is literally all you’ll ever do for people. Linguistic fuckery. Making up new words for things. Fucking around with definitions. And you know that there will be an army of people who will defend this, and shoot down people who actually want to do something on grounds that they said the “wrong” words.
The argument for ‘unhoused’ is that it humanises the person – But it’s really pushing it.
Yeah, this… Stop haggling with words, actually do something to fix it
Spoiler: they won’t
Homeless what, exactly? Sorry, you’re gonna need to throw in the word “person” just to be clear.
I’ll asume y’all are stupid and privileged and not just cruel. Home can be a public shelter, it is about people. A house is a thing you rent or own.
Not everything is politics, virtue signaling or about you. We use different words because language changes, because society changes. That is why you don’t speak Anglo-Saxon anymore.
It’s about precision. The condition people are talking about is not having a house, regardless of whether they have a home. This is why unhoused is being used more often.
It’s not part of an agenda, it is not about you. Grow up.
Of course! Relax. It’s more precise to be clear they’re talking about people unhoused.
Ugh how did this super old song become a thing… I swear people are getting dumber. I hated it when they sang it at summer camp, and I still hate it now.
Super old? 2016?
I was forced to sing it in school in the 90s. Along with the Jamba The Hutt/McDonalds song.
This comment thread now feels uniquely American.
I have never heard those songs, in the 90s at school and scout camps in Australia we would sing Ging Gang Goolie, Alice the Camel, and Ain’t no Flies.
Also for some reason we would chant about how ugly and unlovable we are and resign ourselves to eating worms… Children’s songs are so unhinged.
Jokes on them, noise canceling headphones are cheaper than a house
What’s with the wording of this title? “Unhoused people” instead of “Homeless”/“Homeless people”
It’s another one of those whack a mole words people are pushing. Once everyone gives in and we start using unhoused, it will suddenly switch to uninhabited because it’s racists to houses or something!
It’s annoying as hell, because instead of fixing the issues we’re mastrubating about words and alienating people that we need to fix the issue.
I heard a really good explanation of this on NPR. Homeless is a label put on a person, similar to saying a person is a redhead. The implication of saying that someone is homeless is that it defines who they are, that it cannot be easily changed.
Unhoused is more descriptive of the situation that a person is in. This is a condition that can be changed, it isn’t who the person is.
As I revisit this and think it through though, it seems like another way of pushing the goal. There are absolutely negative connotations with the word homeless, but the same venom will eventually attach to unhoused as well.
So as a worker with a house, can I sue when I go insane from hearing that song over and over? Didn’t they do this in Guantánamo to torture and break people?
They only had death metal and industrial goth music back then. Nothing as terrible as Baby Shark existed at the time.
Doesn’t this violate the Geneva convention ?
How so?
It’s a joke. The implication is that the repeated playing of Baby Shark could be considered torture, other cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment and punishment.
Homeless people aren’t POWs though, doesn’t it only apply to POWs?
yeah it’s completely legal to torture people so long as you don’t call them your prisoners
Dude, I’m not saying this is a cool and good thing to do lol, fuck them for doing this, for real. It’s that the Geneva convention has to do with stuff relating to war and a lot of the things people say violate it often don’t. Like people will say that tear gas is a Geneva convention violation but it actually says tear gas is allowable for controlling prison riots.
I just wish people would point to actually relevant documents when criticizing people for their misdeeds if they’re bringing up documents. The truth is we shouldn’t need some document to criticize this action. It’s inherently disgusting. It distracts from the point when people bring up irrelevant things like the Geneva convention.
I honestly don’t know if this is better or worse than the ear murdering high pitched screeching they play in the stairwells at a mall in Ottawa
laughs in Deafness
At least its music, though this does confirm that Baby Shark is something they’d have played at Gitmo if it’d been around 2 decades ago.
I have been to many places where things like these are everywhere:
Imagine this but diesel powered, a bit chonkier, and they just emit this high pitched scream (there are other versions called ‘mosquito alarms’), and has extremely bright, blue strobing lights that will induce seizures in anyone susceptible.
Oh if baby shark had been around two decades ago…
They have one of those outside the Home Depot in DC playing classical music to pacify all the day laborers hanging around hoping to pick up work.
JFC, the cruelty really is the point…
We can solve homelessness once and for all by making every part of civilization just suck as much as possible. If literally no part of our society is capable of supporting safety and life, then all the homeless people will just move along
Homelessness? Oh, you mean unhousedness! Many of them are also unreadful and non-jobulated.
What’s the point of your comment?
