Cambridge council will circulate a resolution to all levels of government backing the Ontario Big City Mayors' recent call for more support to help municipalities tackle the crisis in homelessness, mental health and addictions.
Mayor Jan Liggett was one of 13 Ontario mayors to sign a letter last month asking the province to pass legislation that gives municipalities the power to disband homeless encampments and force some of the people living there into involuntary mental health treatment.
She presented a motion to council Tuesday to reaffirm that stance.
The resolution also asks for revisions to the court system with a focus on rehabilitation, seeks updates to the Trespass to Property Act, and calls for a prohibition of open and public use of illicit drugs with clear enforcement guidelines.
Councillors Ross Earnshaw, Sheri Roberts and Scott Hamilton opposed the motion, particularly its call for an urgent review of mandatory mental health and addictions care and treatment.
Critics of that idea, some of whom delegated last night, said not only is mandatory treatment a violation of human rights, it's also proven ineffective.
Hamilton said he agrees with the idea of getting more government support to help people in crisis, but he struggled with parts of the motion that ignore expert opinion on how to help.
"It's a health crisis, not a political crisis," he said. "I personally feel I lack the expertise to make a very complex decision about a health crisis that could very well end up killing people. That's not a decision that we should be making."
The health experts and an overwhelming body of evidence say that mandatory or involuntary treatment doesn't work and in fact exacerbates the problem by lowering tolerance and increasing the risk of overdose, he said.
"It behooves us to listen to those experts in our community that spend their lives studying this and that spend their careers on the ground every day with people suffering from these issues. We should pay attention to them."
Some of those experts included three professors from Wilfrid Laurier who wrote to council prior to last night's meeting urging them not to support the motion.
"Criminalizing people seeking shelter in public spaces will simply push them into more dangerous situations and make it more difficult for them to access necessary support to exit homelessness," Hamilton read.
He also cited the Canadian Civil Liberties Associaton, which has stated repeatedly that forcing people into treatment facilities against their will is unconstitutional, unlawful, "counterproductive and harmful."
"Every time we've seen politicians in our country remove the rights of vulnerable groups. Years later, that's been a huge mistake."
Coun. Sheri Roberts agreed, saying she was equally troubled with parts of the motion she called punitive. She echoed Hamilton's feeling that it's better to listen to healthcare experts.
"We just have to look in our history," she said. "There was disturbing history of forced treatment on people with disabilities for a long time and this was shown to be nothing but negative."
Coun. Adam Cooper supported it saying it's about changing what clearly isn't working while also responding to concerns about safety and the community's ability to thrive when encampments are allowed.
The social disruption, drug activity and criminal activity that occurs in encampments is not up for debate, he said. "We've seen it."
"It affects surrounding communities. The monetary cost to communities is immense as is the danger to those inside and surrounding these encampments."
He said he won't sit back and wait for someone to die in one of the encampments before action is taken to remove them.
"The residents of this city have rights too and this motion supports giving us the necessary legal authority to act immediately and effectively when public safety is at risk."
Getting drug users clean, he added, voluntarily or not, can take many attempts, but you can guarantee no success whatsoever when you don't even try, he said.
"Addicts are dying because our current policies are helping them to do it and doing precious little to stop it."
Coun. Mike Devine said he doesn't agree with parts of the motion but reminded everyone that it's a resolution. "We're not writing law here."
He called it a start to get us down a road that could lead to more beds for people that need them, including institutions and rehab centres dedicated to people who want help for whatever they're going through.
"I'm the first one to say you put somebody into rehab and they don't want to be there, it's not going to work. I've seen it, time and time again," he said.
But in justifying her position on the motion, Liggett cited a recent opinion piece in the Globe and Mail written by Robert Tanguay, an addiction psychiatrist, and Angie Hamilton, a co-founder of Families for Addiction Recovery.
It says a systematic review of the effectiveness of involuntary treatment is inconclusive. They point to involuntary treatment as the only compassionate route to recovery when people are lacking the capacity to make treatment decisions on their own.
"Do we wait until years down the road when the studies come forward and let more and more people die? People who don't have the mental capacity to make decisions, whether it's mental health or whether it's addictions? Do we just leave them alone and say, 'oh, we haven't done the proper research so we're not going to help you?'"
"I'm not willing to do that and neither were 28 mayors that sat around that table and spent six hours putting that together."
She said she made a commitment when she became mayor to not let the crisis continue or worsen and she admonished anyone who says she and others lack compassion.
"I have addicts in my family. I have taken homeless into my home, so before anybody says walk a mile in their shoes, I've done that. I have that lived experience," Liggett said. "There are those around the horseshoe who have been in that same place."
