The right question.

A Times Colonist reader asked on August 20, 2024, "How do we extricate ourselves from a situation where public safety is no longer a guarantee walking around downtown Victoria?"

Step one is to ask the right question, which is: "Why is Canada's economy unable to house our population or care adequately for mentally ill or drug addicted Canadians?"

According to the Globe and Mail on October 31, 2006:

The most troublesome cohort among the homeless has always been those with mental-health issues. The group's numbers began growing in the 1960s, when the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill became all the rage.

During the 15-year period from 1960 to 1976, nearly two-thirds of Canada's 47,633 beds for the mentally ill were closed. 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.

Deinstitutionalization may go down as the worst public-health policy decision of the past 50 years. Not because it wasn't a noble idea, but because there was no support system in place to help these people once they were released. Often, their new institutional addresses were prisons, rat-infested boarding rooms, streets or alleyways. At one point in the 1990s, a quarter of inmates in B.C. jails were mentally ill.

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.

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 50.9% in 1981. By 2012, it had been slashed to 26.1%, 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, burnout, and early retirement ever since, not to mention inadequate numbers of future healthcare professionals trained to serve a growing, aging population.

Meanwhile, public financing for purpose-built affordable workforce rental housing, which constructed more than 20,000 units per year throughout the 1970s and 1980s, ground almost to a halt in 1994.

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. Predictably, this resulted in the people most in need having access to the least.

All of these policies can be reversed.