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With pressure mounting for accountability for the millions of dollars being spent on addressing the homelessness crisis, some social service agencies have launched a public relations campaign. They are all working to achieve the goals of the NDP government’s Your Way Home program, and in the world they inhabit, it has been a success.

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For the neighbourhoods afflicted with the entrenchment of encampments, it’s been anything but.

The supposed goal of keeping the riverbank areas free of tents and lean-tos after being cleared was quickly undermined by workers from Main Street Project, who were caught on camera providing a tent and helping an encampment get re-established. The agency was rewarded with the city’s only outreach contract. Since then, its leader has made public pronouncements disputing that the city has the right to enact bylaws to bar encampments that bring disorder, violence, explosions, and filth to playgrounds, parks, and trails, while lobbying for more funding for their sector. Even last week, new bright yellow tents were popping up along Waterfront Drive.

A recent glowing newspaper feature about what one reader called an “alphabet soup” of agencies profiled the “collaboration” between groups like MSP, Sunshine House, N’Dinawemak, and Oyate Tipi Cumini Yape. A representative from another organization involved claimed that focusing on the feelings of the homeless campers is foundational to their compassionate approach, saying “we move at the speed of trust.”

Those social service agencies are collectively hauling in millions upon millions of dollars to resolve the homelessness problem. Every agency has directors, department heads, managers and of course fundraisers. “The level of redundancy is shameful,” a source with years of experience in the sector told me.

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