Residents of tent city say the province has turned its back on them, and it’s getting unsafe

I’m not sure. I went to the washroom, there was a person or two here and when I came back it was, it was lit up. It didn’t take long at all. Somebody called the fire department right away. When I was coming down there behind the trees, I heard the fire trucks. So I ran past this and stepped outside there on the road and just flagged the truck in to let them know where it was, ’cause it’s kind of inside and it was a bit dark, but I could see that side burning. But on the road you couldn’t see. So take a picture of this right here. That’s a cup that I almost could have had a coffee with here, but it just broke. No coffee here. Thank goodness no one was hurt, but there’s been plenty of brushes that have happened in the past. We know propane is dangerous. The only thing more dangerous is to leave people without heat. So we do our best to mitigate risks. But these things happen. We’ve been asking government to turn electricity and power back on at the colonial building in Bannerman for months and they’ve refused to. So when we chalk it up at its baseline, government, both municipal and provincial, have failed to meet the needs of people of 10 city. It is what it is. Fire takes all, but I might just put a tarp over it. And what about do what I can to keep the elements out in the rain, out the wind? Did you lose anything else in the fire? Well, everything was stored on that side of the body you see there, melting on the ground. Foods, my bag IDs, whatever. I had a bit of dog food there. That’s all gone. And this originally started as a protest. What is this now? Oh, this is still 100% of protest. And sometimes it’s a really obvious in your face protest when we’re telling Hutton and Abbot and Brain to get their stuff together. But it’s also just a pure and simple act of resistance. When people walk past and they see tents and they’re telling their children that there are people who don’t have their basic needs met in a city where there’s incredible wealth, that is an act of resistance. Just get us out of here, you know, so I can wake up. I can get a job. So I’m not worried about people coming in, bashing tents in, yelling, honking horns, dragging people out of tents and fires and trying to keep warm and trying to stay fed. I can’t get a job if I can’t sleep. And I’m here to work and everybody wants to work. If you ask anybody if they want a job, the first people, everybody will say yes, we’ll pick up garbage, we’ll do anything. There’s a lot the government can be doing. Hadn’t been in his position for a while now and we’re not seeing any adequate moves forward. This has to be a balance of individual complex needs and public health and safety and there’s obviously some safety concerns there. This weekend we have taken extraordinary measures in in opening up the hotel for an example. Is that staffed up? That will be options available? There’s options in the housing continuum for these people right now. We do provide wrap around supports daily to the individuals that are down there. And so it will be a balance of public safety and the individual complex needs that need to be met on the housing continuum. And we it was troubling to hear about the fire the weekend and I’ve asked the ministers to look at the safety component of this in more detail.