I completely agree that being mayor of a big city doesn’t have to be easy.
More and more homeless people are entering public libraries and often falling asleep there because of poor hygiene, emitting unpleasant odors and sometimes carrying bed bugs.
Montreal authorities are considering allowing them to be expelled from these places or even fining them (how would they pay?).
Pardon?
Immediately, scream! Are you asking her to leave? What an insensitive, cruel, non-inclusive idea! All new vocabulary is present.
Since then, Valérie Plante has been juggling this hot and smelly potato.
Above all, she does not want to turn “discrimination” into another word whose use today is so lax that it loses its meaning.
Many questions come to mind.
If shelters are inadequate for these unfortunate people, is that a reason to turn public libraries into shelters themselves?
- Listen to Joseph Facal’s column on QUB radio :
Do users who pay for these libraries with the idea of benefiting from places of silence, relaxation, reading and learning have the right to expect to find places of silence, relaxation, reading, etc. upon entering? ? Study?
Did you know (I mean this ironically) that librarians also have training in social work, reintegration, safety management in public places, crisis intervention for severe mental health issues of a homeless person, behavioral violence and hard drug use?
Did you know that teachers who bring entire classes of children to the library to introduce them to reading are also trained to respond to such situations? Not me.
If people start using our libraries less because they’ve lived there or because they’re worried about having an unpleasant experience there, what are we going to do to try to bring them back?
We will tell them that we have finally decided to do what we had previously given up on doing, which is to make sure that these are places where we find the atmosphere that we are supposed to find there?
I also wonder how many of these people, so full of compassion and so outraged by the proposed measure, visit these libraries.
And let the good souls who want to accommodate these unfortunate people in their own homes raise their hands.
Photo agency QMI, JOEL LEMAY
Mission
Of course, homelessness is a serious and growing problem that must be addressed with realism and compassion.
The reasons for this are many: drug addiction, mental health, lack of suitable accommodation, lost newcomers, etc.
There is no major city in the West that escapes this phenomenon.
Final solutions? NO. More effective approaches than cheap moralism? Surely.
But using our public libraries as supplementary resources without saying much is certainly not one of them.