Dispatches from the Left

Staying alive when your province is trying to kill you

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Lighthouse Emergency Shelter

On February 26, Lighthouse emergency shelter in North Battleford announced that it would be closing its doors, effective April 1, after a partnership fell through. The loss of the 37-bed shelter will be devastating. An average of 20-25 people use the shelter on a given night and 22 full- and part-time staff will find themselves without work in an economy already reeling from the effects of the pandemic. 

One of the most infuriating details of the closure is the fact that shelter operators estimate that it only costs between $750,000-$800,000 per year to run the facility. That’s $3.2 million less than the provincial government has forked over to keep the WHL afloat and barely more than the $400,000-$500,000 the government has estimated they’ll spend on the legal costs alone of fighting the carbon tax. How could they allow such a vital service to fail? For the same reason they allowed it to be vulnerable to failure in the first place. In 2016, the provincial government cut Lighthouse’s core funding by 90 per cent, forcing them to rely on partnerships with other groups to stay afloat. It’s important not to think of these moves as “cost-cutting measures,” on behalf of the government, because they aren’t. It costs far more to keep a person overnight in cells, or the ER, than it does to keep them in an emergency shelter. These are malicious cuts. They are degrading, and they are cruel, and they are indicative of a carceral ideology that would rather pay more to lock people up - or pay nothing and let them die - than give them a warm, safe place to spend the night. 

The Lighthouse North Battleford via Facebook

The death of Kimberly Squirrel in Saskatoon showed how very grave the consequences of a lack of shelter can be in this province, but even when the weather won’t kill you immediately, the effects of homelessness, whether temporary or chronic, on the physical and psychological health of a person are staggering. Allowing the Lighthouse to close is an affront to everyone. It is a direct and intentional violation of the social contract and an abdication of our government’s responsibility to the people who live here. Maybe it’s time to start turning up on the doorstep of Lori Carr, Scott Moe, and every other Sask Party cabinet minister, demanding a place to sleep for the night. 

Scott Moe hates you

It’s as good an explanation as any as to why the premier has suggested that, as Saskatchewan carries on racking up the highest COVID-19 case counts in  the country, the meagre restrictions already in place might be loosened as early as next week. All of the current COVID restrictions are set to expire on March 19, just a under a year since the province recorded its first pandemic deaths. Although case counts are currently declining, things are far graver now than they were then - more than half of the COVID deaths in Saskatchewan have occurred in the past three months. The province has had the highest infection rates per capita in the country for weeks. We know that the people who will be harmed most by a hasty withdrawal of restrictions will be racialized people, poor folks, the elderly, and the disabled. 

Government of Canada

Saskatchewan is in a unique geographical position. Tucked near the centre of the country, for the past year now we have watched the pandemic approach us on both sides. While our landlocked location is a barrier in many ways (hello, would you like to build in B̶i̶l̶l̶ ̶B̶o̶y̶d̶'̶s̶ Saskatchewan’s only inland port? No? Why did we build it then?) it (should have been) a boon during COVID times. We had the advantage of seeing the mistakes neighbouring provinces made, and the opportunity to avoid them. And yet we didn’t. 389 people have died from COVID in Saskatchewan, 79 of those in just the past month. Those people are dead. They don’t get a do over. Their families don’t get a do over. They’re gone, and it is a staggering, unfathomable, and utterly needless loss. By comparison, in Nova Scotia, a province with a similar sized, but far denser population, 65 people have died. And yet Scott Moe continues to dig in his heels, to say that he wouldn’t change a thing. To watch as variants now approach from both sides, as we fail to immunize our most vulnerable and our most at-risk. Rather than doing nothing, the premier is promising to do worse than nothing. To roll back what protections we have, despite the warnings from other provinces, from healthcare professionals, and from the numbers of the sick and the dead. The Saskatchewan Party has been grossly negligent in their handling of the pandemic, and this negligence has cost precious lives. That the premier would continue to deny the seriousness of this crisis is a betrayal of the worst kind. 

Privatization is violence

By now it should be no surprise to anyone that private companies are incapable of delivering services of any kind. The need to generate profits for shareholders is simply incompatible with service provision. It’s difficult to even lay blame on a particular corporation at this point because, while they are predatory, they haven’t exactly been dishonest about it. They are operating as they have said they would operate. If someone puts a fox in your henhouse and it kills all your hens, you don’t blame the fox. 

That doesn’t mean that companies shouldn’t be held accountable - as journalist Nora Loreto wrote nine months ago, everyone from CEOs to board members to management staff (and, I would add, the governments who pursued privatization in the first place) deserve blame and sanction for the crisis of long term care homes - just that the focus should always be on the root of the problem: not the companies themselves, but the principle of privatization. As we look forward to the (eventual, possible, hopeful) end of the COVID pandemic, we have more proof than ever that privatization simply doesn’t work, at least not for the people. It does what it's supposed to for the private companies, which is to say, it generates profit for shareholders. But that’s the extent of it. 

Maljoe via Flickr

Now is the time to put efforts into organizing around taking back our Crowns, restoring services like laundry, cleaning, and food services that have been contracted out to private companies, and putting a stop to privatization of any kind. For-profit service provision is violence. This year we have done nothing but pay for the short term profits gained by the privatization of vaccine labs, of long term care, of STC, of all the auxiliary services necessary to make our healthcare system function. The cost has been far more than we can bear. Privatization robs the public of control over the ways that our communities are run. It robs us of oversight, of opportunity, and, in the case of those who died so Extendicare could have its most profitable year ever, it robs us of our lives. Public ownership isn’t a panacea for the problems of our time. But it is a step towards justice and equity. 

Read more: Why Crown corporations do it better; how the loss of the STC has devastated the lives of disabled people, put women at risk of violence, and kept cancer patients from getting their medicine. 

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