Justifying homelessness.

It has been suggested that homeless people deserve to be thrown out on the street and criminalized for not taking "personal responsibility" for the trauma, neglect, abuse, and absence of supports at all stages of life that create homeless people.

It has been suggested further that homeless people are the "floor" and billionaires the "ceiling" of a just economic system that has always worked this way.

Here are some numbers for you:

According to Statistics Canada: "From 1982 to 2014, the proportion of market income earned by the bottom half of earners fell by 28%. Meanwhile, the share earned by the top half increased by 5%. The largest gains were made in the highest earning brackets. The top 1% saw their share of income rise by 53%, the top 0.1% by 90% and the top 0.01% by 133%." (Market income is total income excluding payments from government programs.)

It should come as no surprise, therefore, that according to the Toronto Star on July 6, 2023, "The wealthiest 20% of households controlled nearly 68% of the total net worth in Canada in the first quarter of 2023, while the least wealthy 40% accounted for 2.7%."

Bear in mind that rents in Victoria increased 27% from July, 2020 to July, 2021 after increasing 15% from July, 2019 to July, 2020, a compound rate of growth over that 2-year period of 46%. In 2021, one in five dollars spent in BC was spent on rent, almost three times more than was spent on healthcare and social assistance.

Canada's corporate tax rate was 51% in 1981. By 2012, it had been slashed to 26%, where it has remained ever since. The marginal tax rate for extremely wealthy people was more than 70% from 1950 to 1970. It was slashed, too, to less than 50% by the year 2000. In 1940, the highest marginal tax rate in Canada was more than 90%.

Regulations that had constrained profiteering prior to 1980 have been steadily rolled back, and federal dollars mandated in 1957 to cover 50% of provincial and territorial healthcare costs were replaced in 1977 with accounting gimmicks that have resulted in chronic understaffing, overwork, and burnout ever since. Meanwhile, public financing for purpose-built affordable workforce rental housing, which constructed more than 20,000 units per year throughout the 1970s, ground almost to a halt in 1994.

Finally, "Nearly two-thirds of Canada's 47,633 beds for the mentally ill were closed," according to the Globe and Mail, "during the 15-year period from 1960 to 1976. The policy was intended to free people with mental-health problems from the often inhumane, white-coated asylums made famous by the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." But no support system was put in place to house and provide treatment for these people once they were released."

Riverview Hospital, operated in Coquitlam under the governance of BC Mental Health & Addiction Services, was the last mental health facility in BC when it closed in July 2012.

All of these policy changes favoring corporations and Canada's richest households at everybody else's expense were made deliberately to redistribute Canada's wealth from the bottom to the top of the net-worth pyramid.

They all can be reversed.