On February 27, 2014, the Minister for Social Services, Véronique Hivon, launched the National Policy to Combat Homelessness. If the content of the current problems and the daily headlines concerning the phenomenon could lead us to believe that it has achieved nothing, we must rather question the missed opportunity to maintain the initial consensus around this tool and the instrumentalization unhealthy treatment to which it has been subjected by our governments. The natural and its specific needs therefore returned at a gallop after the adoption of the Policy, making us forget principles, rights and people.
The Policy makes it possible to embed structuring principles to ensure understanding of homelessness and better coherence between the often scattered actions taken to deal with it. It must give a structural dimension to a phenomenon that we too often tend to individualize, affirm the need for collective responsibility towards it and recognize the person experiencing homelessness as a citizen in their own right. It must give weapons to aid organizations, allowing them to invoke, if necessary, Politics when our levels of government are on the verge of making bad choices.
The Policy was born from a fight started in 2004 by the community sector under the banner of the Quebec Itinerant Solidarity Network (RSIQ). It is based on a seemingly very simple premise, namely that the situation of homelessness is made up of a set of rights that have been violated or denied and that it is the reintegration of these rights that can make it possible to win the case. on the roots of the phenomenon. We are talking here about the right to citizenship, to housing, to a decent income, to health, to education as well as to a network of aid and solidarity.
Minister Hivon affirmed, in addition to “Dying with dignity”, wanting to accomplish another project with the Homelessness Policy, namely that of “Living with dignity”. It’s never too late to do well. It is appropriate as a society to take a step back and, for a time at least, to stop managing with haste and amateurism a phenomenon which refers to something as complex as rights. Let’s take advantage of this 10e anniversary to sit down and collectively take stock of this flagship tool which, let us remember, was sealed in a beautiful moment of solidarity.
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