Lock Up ‘Lost Souls’? A Bus-Riding Journalist’s Wrong Direction

Anyone who follows the news in any major Canadian city over the past few years has likely heard some variation of this refrain from politicians and the media.

There’s chaos and disorder in the streets. Someone needs to step in to protect law-abiding citizens from random violence.

In Alberta, Premier Danielle Smith is preparing to introduce her so-called Compassionate Intervention Act to empower police to detain unhoused people who use drugs publicly and force them into recovery.

Next door in British Columbia, NDP Leader David Eby and Conservative Party of BC Leader John Rustad are vowing to incarcerate some unhoused people after the coming provincial election.

Against this backdrop, a troubling trend has emerged in media: journalists leaving their ivory towers to ride public transit, only to report their discomfort at seeing people in crisis.

These subjective, anecdotal stories serve to justify an increasingly authoritarian crackdown on marginalized people — those viewed as nuisances, swept out of sight and into forced treatment without their consent.

Globe and Mail columnist Marcus Gee provided the latest contribution to this genre with an Oct. 4 piece headlined “My Toronto Transit Ride Shows Why It’s Not Wrong to Consider Involuntary Care for Mental Illness.”

Here is how Gee describes five people he saw on a Toronto streetcar, who in his view bolster the case for involuntary treatment.

“When I got on, a guy was lying passed out or asleep on the long bench at the back, taking up all the seats. A barefoot man in dirty clothes was walking up and down the aisle. At Yonge Street, just in front of the Eaton Centre, he got off and meandered unsteadily through the midday crowd.

“Three others got on. One was a big guy in sweats and a hoodie. He took a seat, talking incoherently to no one in particular. Every few words was a curse. Another was a skinny guy with tangled hair who was dragging a beat-up rolling suitcase and muttering to himself in Spanish. The third was a middle-aged woman in jean shorts and red slippers in the shape of rabbits. She was playing music on a portable speaker, turned up high, and shouting at some invisible enemy.”

One wasn’t wearing shoes, another was wearing rabbit slippers. One was “shouting at some invisible enemy,” another was “talking incoherently to no one in particular,” and another was “muttering to himself in Spanish.” One was sleeping on a few seats, another was blasting music.

What all these people have in common is that they appear to be suffering from a combination of homelessness and mental health issues.

More importantly, none of what Gee describes represents any meaningful threat to public safety beyond making him uncomfortable, which is especially stunning when you consider that Gee has been to literal war zones, including Kosovo and East Timor.

For regular transit users in major cities, scenes like the one Gee describes as shocking are commonplace. Most people are capable of tuning it out by reading a book or listening to a podcast. But Gee wasn’t just on the streetcar to go about his day — he was there to help manufacture a narrative.

“In another age, a cop might have carted them all off to a jail cell or a dank asylum. People with mental illness were society’s ultimate outcasts, locked away and forgotten. Those days are thankfully over,” he writes.

“But that it was wrong to pen them up doesn’t make it right to leave them to wander the streets in such a state.”

So, on the one hand, Gee would never want a return to the days when police officers scoop up people in distress off the streets to institutionalize them. But, on the other hand, these people cannot be permitted “to wander the streets in such a state.”

Well, what does that leave us with? Gee doesn’t say, but he does say how “heartbreaking [it is] to see these lost souls lying on the sidewalks or riding the subway, alone and unaided.”

He then goes on to praise the B.C. and Alberta governments for “promising to take action,” chiding those simpletons who are concerned about criminalizing homelessness and mental illness.

“Most people are not demanding change because they are bigots,” Gee writes somewhat defensively. “They are reacting to what they see all around them. And what they see is not good.

“Whatever systems exist to care for the unfortunate people who live on our streets are visibly failing.”

He doesn’t specify any of these systems, let alone attempt to explain what led to their failure, describing unhoused people as unfortunate, suggesting their predicament was the result of mere bad luck and not the result of a series of misguided policy decisions implemented over decades.

Might increased homelessness be the result of a systematic defunding of social housing in Canada over the past 30 years by Liberal and Conservative federal governments while deadbeat landlords scoop up increasing portions of housing supply as a vehicle for investment?

Gee doesn’t say.

He specifically raises the spectre of those who “have stopped taking their medications and have lost the ability to make sensible decisions,” without any apparent curiosity as to why someone might just stop taking their medications.

Is it mere misfortune, or the fact that Canada is the only country with public health care that doesn’t include prescription drug coverage, leaving one in every five Canadians without prescription drug insurance?

Gee doesn’t seem to care.

Instead, he treats his transit ride like a zoo visit, describing his encounters with vulnerable people as a rhetorical device to justify policies that are already in motion.