A homeless man in Toronto. Photo by Ashton Emanuel/Flickr.

We are now living in a period when poverty, homelessness, and social abandonment have reached crisis levels and the need for a united working-class challenge to this state of affairs is more important than ever.

The official discourse in our society is geared to the proposition that poverty and homelessness stem from personal failings, if not moral dereliction. This assumption is shared by both right-wing and more liberal commentators, even if it is expressed by them in significantly different terms.

The right-wingers simply condemn the poor as the architects of their own misfortune and seek to impose the full burden of austerity measures on them, backed up, of course, by generous doses of aggressive policing and prison sentences.

The kindlier liberals want to address poverty and make society more equitable but they still see things primarily in terms of maladjusted poor people who need to be saved. An unhoused woman who was a member of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP), with which I was an organizer for 28 years, once told me jokingly that she couldn’t possibly find housing because she had 10 social workers who depended on her for their livelihoods.

Personal troubles and public issues

If you were to ask people to identify the main factors that lead to homelessness, it is highly likely that mental health issues and addiction would figure prominently in the list of suggested causes. Politicians and the corporate media promote these notions tirelessly; however, they don’t actually hold up under scrutiny.

There is unquestionably a very significant correlation between the experience of homelessness and mental health and addiction issues. The Homeless Hub informs us that 30-40 percent of those experiencing homelessness have a mental illness and that 20-25 percent of people experiencing homelessness “suffer from concurrent disorders” including severe mental illness and addictions.

It is worth noting, however, that the Canadian Mental Health Association has found that “in any given year, one in five people in Canada are living with a mental illness,” and that “by age 40, about half of Canada’s population will have or have had a mental illness, and in their lifetime.”

That’s an awful lot of people with mental health issues who remain housed and it gives us........

© Canadian Dimension