Belleville establishes Understanding Homelessness Task Force

Every city is faced with the unhoused, it’s not just us, it’s not just Ontario, it’s across Canada

This is the biggest social issue we are going to face. And unless our MPPs, who are responsible for mental health, homelessness, and drug addiction come to the table and that’s what I said to the paper today. One of those MPPs has sat around this table and has seen the issues we are having. Things like shelter beds, we lack them

I sat with the Downtown Business Association last week and actually cut out and put on to the tables what the City or the municipality is responsible for and what we use your taxes for. And on that sheet of paper, it does not say mental health, homelessness, doctor recruitment. We can’t do it on our own. Hopefully this plan will come out and put more emphasis on the government.

Mayor Neil Ellis

We talk about it all the time, but we are trying to wrestle something that is not our juristictional responsibility. When do these issues become the primary focus of our two MPPs Allsopp and Bresee? They’ve both been in the riding for many months, they continue to be in the riding. I scan the news everyday, I don’t see either one of them talking about it. They’ve made their one announcement on the Heart Hub funding, but they are not talking about the issues in their community of which they have juristictional responsibility, and that’s outright disappointing

A rhetorical question is, is their silence a form of silent downloading? Simply, we’re not going to talk about it, we don’t want to spend the money, and we’ll let municipalities wrestle this issue without the jurisdictional responsibility, without the resources, and without the tax dollars to make it happen. And that’s left with how do we try to fund something that we were never designed to fund?

Councillor Paul Carr