Council expected to confront homelessness plans in budget debates Friday

After spending much of Thursday listening to dozens of people from across Regina pushing for cash to back a plan to end homelessness in the city, at least one city councillor wants to do just that.

When debate gets going on Friday, Councillor Dan LeBlanc said he expects to move a motion to try to get to functional zero homelessness in Regina. If that fails, LeBlanc said he’ll propose what he called a “cascade” of different motions as required.

“Can’t we at least do something? You know, we had a tent encampment blow up two days ago. Should those folks go back? Yes or no,” said LeBlanc.

Something is better than nothing, said LeBlanc.

“You do what you can and, frankly, homeless folks need us to do something because things are quite dire and next week is meant to be -40 C again,” he said.

The reason city administration gave for not including the plan to end homelessness when the draft budget was released was that it would be too expensive. Its estimates put the operating cost for 2023 at $24.5 million and capital costs at $98 million to house and support 488 people, which is the number of homeless people counted in the last point-in-time count in Regina.

LeBlanc disputes that number, calling it “profoundly absurd”. He said capital costs aren’t needed, there are more than enough vacant spaces in Regina. He also said other organizations have estimated such services per person, per year at about $35,000 instead of the city estimation of $50,000.

The councillor believes the goal could be hit with about $16 million, which he said is less than 20 per cent of what’s been put forward.

“I’m interested to find out … where that number came from and relatedly why that number is so high – was it accidental, was it intentional to inflate that number and scare us off,” said LeBlanc.
It’s all about priorities, said LeBlanc.

“When we continually say we have all sorts of money for stadiums, all sorts of money for police, but then it comes time to get folks from tents into homes, to stop fentanyl overdoses, (the response is) ‘sorry we spent it all.’ That’s a real issue of human dignity,” he explained.

At the end of the day, LeBlanc said the conversation about affordability misses the mark.

“There’s both a benefit, humanity-wise, to not have homeless folks, and also it’s nice to not stumble on people having overdoses in parks, there’s a real quality of life benefit to housed folks to not have to see social collapse every time they walk out their door.”

Monday night there was a lot of discussion across council over a piece of the budget that amounted to about $60,000, and LeBlanc said there being that much talk over so little wasn’t a good signal for his motion worth much more than that. But he said, if that’s the case, then the motion in June shouldn’t have passed either.

Most of the delegates who spoke on Thursday were speaking on the homelessness issue and LeBlanc thinks many will stick around for the debates on Friday, which could affect how councillors vote.

“This issue activates people in way that corporate tax bases or road work doesn’t. I think people are fed up with inaction on the issue … and I think it is at a minimum we’re going to have, I think, the most serious discussion about whether homeless people are important and we should do something about it that Regina’s had certainly since the 2018 plan to end homelessness,” said LeBlanc.