I readily agree that it must not be easy to be mayor of a big city.
Growing numbers of homeless people, with poor hygiene and emitting unpleasant odors, sometimes carrying bedbugs, enter public libraries and often fall asleep there.
The Montreal authorities are considering allowing their expulsion from these places, or even imposing fines on them (how would they pay?).
Pardon?
Immediately, outcry! Ask them to leave? What an insensitive, cruel, non-inclusive idea! All the new vocabulary is there.
Since then, Valérie Plante has been juggling this hot and smelly potato.
Above all, she doesn’t want to make “discrimination”, she says, another of those words whose use, these days, is so lax that it loses its meaning.
Lots of questions rush through my poor head.
If shelters for these unfortunate people are insufficient, is that a reason to let public libraries become shelters themselves?
- Listen to Joseph Facal’s column via QUB radio :
Do users who pay for these libraries with the idea of being able to benefit from places of silence, relaxation, reading and study have the right to expect, when they enter, to find… places of silence, relaxation, reading and study?
Did you know (I’m being ironic) that librarians also have training in social work, reintegration, management of security in public places, crisis intervention when a homeless person has serious mental health problems, behavioral violence and of using hard drugs?
Did you know that teachers who bring entire classes of children to the library to try to give them a taste for reading were also trained to react to these situations? Not me.
If people start to use our libraries less because they have lived there or because they fear having an unpleasant experience there, what will we do afterwards to try to bring them back?
We will tell them that we have finally decided to do what we had given up doing before, that is to say, to ensure that these are places where we find the atmosphere that are we supposed to find it there?
I also wonder how many of these people, so full of compassion, so scandalized by the proposed measure, frequent these libraries.
And let the good souls who would accommodate these unfortunate people in their own home raise their hands.
Photo Agence QMI, JOEL LEMAY
Stake
Of course, homelessness is a serious and growing problem that must be addressed with realism and compassion.
Its causes are numerous: drug addiction, mental health, insufficient adapted accommodation, new arrivals who are lost track of, etc.
There is not a large city in the West that escapes the phenomenon.
Final solutions? No. More effective approaches than cheap moralism? Certainly.
But enlisting our public libraries, without saying so much, as complementary resources is certainly not one of them.