'At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge,'
said the gentleman, taking up a pen, 'it is more than
usually desirable that we should make some slight
provision for the Poor and Destitute, who suffer
greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in
want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands
are in want of common comforts, sir.'

'Are there no prisons?' asked Scrooge.

'Plenty of prisons,' said the gentleman, laying down
the pen again.

'And the Union workhouses?' demanded Scrooge.
'Are they still in operation?'

'They are. Still,' returned the gentleman, 'I wish
I could say they were not.'

'The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour,
then?' said Scrooge.

'Both very busy, sir.'

'Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first,
that something had occurred to stop them in their
useful course,' said Scrooge. 'I'm very glad to
hear it.'

This ran through my mind today while I was out walking over my lunchbreak. While Ebenezer Scrooge was hardly the soul of Christian charity, he might not have been too far off the right track.

Toronto's mayor, David Miller, got into hot water last week, because he wants to clear the homeless off of city property, beginning with City Hall at Nathan Philips Square. It's an admirable goal, as far as I'm concerned, and in the same lines as a man I well respect: Rudy Giuliani. In liberal New York, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth when he came out with his various zero-tolerance policies, but frankly, New York is a hard-working and affluent city, and it should reflect that. A huge part of the Toronto economy, like New York, is based on tourism. Toronto has had enough troubles over the past few years, what with SARS, blackouts, 9/11 (like everybody else) and whatever else you could throw at them, and to have vagrants begging on street corners and sleeping on the lawn at City Hall kind of sends the wrong message to families looking for a fun, safe place to spend their vacation dollars.

Miller's plan isn't to shove everyone into workhouses, or to reinstitute debtor's prisons (Heaven knows I would be there alongside most of my fellow countrymen and women, and there would be few people left to run the country!). His plan is simply to build more affordable housing, open more shelters, hire more outreach owrkers to coax people into one of the aforementioned options, and failing that - and only failing all that - jail or mental hospitals would be considered. Considered, people!

Of course, the liberal left is squawking about the usual human rights violations (I have decided that only the very poor and the criminal element actually have human rights. The rest of us are S.O.L.), and how these people shouldn't be treated like criminals or crazy people, just because they don't want to leave the streets.

Let's think about that, okay? This past week, it has averaged -25 degrees celcius in Toronto. Our already existing outreach workers have been patrolling the streets, trying to convince people to come inside. They won't. They out and out refuse. Why is that? Has anyone ever bothered to find out? Well, the outreach workers theorize that these "rough sleepers" are too troubled, or too distrusting to take the help that's offered.

My own theory is that they either want to remain untraceable, or they are mentally ill. If they wish to remain below the radar, it is probably because they have committed a crime. Therefore, putting them in prison isn't a bad thing. After all, that's what the prisons are there for. Some of them are runaways, and they need more help than anybody. We can't just leave them there. I know our system isn't great, but it has to be better than the streets. Perhaps it's our fostercare system that needs overhauling, so that these kids aren't being abused by foster parents who are just doing the duty to grab monthly checks from the government.

If they are mentally ill - and I don't mean stark raving mad; many are just messed up, or biochemically unbalanced, and would be so easy to treat - shouldn't they get help, in order to put their lives back on track? The Mental Health Act is a very gray area when it comes to detaining people against their will, but tell me what's worse: Taking an unwilling person into a health centre and helping him get through his addiction/depression/trauma/disorder, or sending the city morgue to pick his frozen body up off the lawn of City Hall before it opens for business?

During my lunchtime stroll today, I came across many who fit into that category. My office is in the corporate district, which borders the shopping district. For the more enterprising homeless man or woman, this is a perfect area for pandering, or for selling those newspapers that help give them an income and a sense of self-worth. People in this area from 9-5 are well-off, with money to spend. So the entreprenurial class of homeless come down to solicit. Fine. These guys are generally harmless, and strangely polite. I always get a "good day, ma'am" from a man outside Starbucks. But most of those guys were hiding from the cold today. The ones that were out were scary (Was that politically incorrect? Frankly, I don't give a sh*t.). One of them, as I stepped out of the Eaton Centre, began swearing at me, and looking back over his shoulder to hurl nasty remarks at me. I couldn't think what I could have done to him. Did I hit him with the door as I came out? Then, as we passed another building, he in the lead, and me trying to keep a distance behind, a lady stepped out, and he switched his focus to her. There was the man behind me on the way back to the office, who was grumbling and swearing to himself. There was the one on the corner who asked a man for spare change, and when the man said no, he became belligerent.

Canada is a socialist country (despite it's claims to the contrary), and it does more for it's poor than many other places, including the U.S. We've got the free healthcare, social housing, welfare - in fact, I can think of only Britain that goes further out of their way to accommodate. What more can we do? How much more are we expected to tolerate on our streets? Miller is standing up and offering a solution, and he's got balls to do it. I hope he follows through. Next winter probably won't be any warmer than this one has been.