Recovery sits beyond the binary. It is neither permissive nor punitive. It is simply the stubborn belief that people can change, and that we owe each other the chance to do so.
The City of Toronto’s shelter system is still guided by radical policies that encourage the city to hire active drug addicts to staff their programs, push for drugs and drug kits to be provided in abstinence-based facilities and even require that all shelters with children residing in them provide drug services.
The City of Toronto shelter services department is supposed to be guided by a truly shocking “ten point plan” written by staff from Toronto Public Health.
If there is a shelter coming to your neighbourhood, in any form, it will not just be a place for people seeking something to eat and refuge from the cold — which is what well-intentioned people of all political leanings typically think of as a shelter. It will actually, if it’s following these guidelines, be a facility staffed by drug addicts who promote open drug use in the presence of children.
What you’re looking at in that Toronto piece is the logical end point of an ideology that forgot the human person. Once you moralise drug use as an identity and call it lived experience, you create a system that prefers the endorsement of active addiction to the protection of children. And when that system is wrapped in the soft language of compassion, most taxpayers never see what is being done in their name.
The fact that a major city can publish a ten-point plan that encourages shelters to hire active drug users, facilitate drug use in supposedly abstinent spaces, and even impose harm-reduction obligations on shelters housing children tells you everything about how deep the rot has gone. This is not compassion. This is abdication. It is the public sector laundering its own failure and calling the stains progress.
The irony is that everyone knows the harm-reduction orthodoxy has failed. The drug deaths, the street chaos, the human wreckage, the families breaking under the strain. Even politicians across Canada have started to recoil from what they once embraced. Yet the bureaucratic machine in Toronto rolls on, guided by a document written years ago and apparently never questioned. No one with authority has had the courage to say that ideologically staffing shelters with active users is irresponsible, dangerous and morally indefensible.
From my point of view, the absurdity becomes even starker. Solidarity does not mean standing back while harm ripples through entire neighbourhoods. And the dignity of the human person certainly does not mean outsourcing care for vulnerable children to people still in the grip of addiction. The city has mistaken permissiveness for mercy and harm reduction for hope. Neither delivers freedom.
And the public, bless them, still think a shelter is a warm building with soup, beds and a shot at getting back on your feet. They have no idea that some of these sites are being asked to supervise drug use and hire staff who are not yet free of their own addictions. It is a betrayal of trust on a spectacular scale.
We can also draw a clean line from Toronto to the UK debates. Because this is where the ideology goes if it is not challenged with clarity, courage and actual evidence. First they frame addiction as an identity, then they redefine care as enabling, then they call abstinence oppressive, then they erase recovery as a goal altogether. And before long, someone is explaining to you with a straight face that “family shelters should support safer drug use practices” around children, as the article notes, and that this is simply modern best practice.
It is not best practice. It is moral and civic negligence, dressed up in jargon, funded by taxpayers and defended by people who will never have to live next to the consequences.
Very few taxpayers know about this policy.
The City of Toronto’s shelter system is still guided by radical policies that encourage the city to hire active drug addicts to staff their programs, push for drugs and drug kits to be provided in abstinence-based facilities and even require that all shelters with children residing in them provide drug services.
The City of Toronto shelter services department is supposed to be guided by a truly shocking “ten point plan” written by staff from Toronto Public Health.
If there is a shelter coming to your neighbourhood, in any form, it will not just be a place for people seeking something to eat and refuge from the cold — which is what well-intentioned people of all political leanings typically think of as a shelter. It will actually, if it’s following these guidelines, be a facility staffed by drug addicts who promote open drug use in the presence of children.
Link: https://archive.ph/W9dAE#selection-2135.15-2165.22
What you’re looking at in that Toronto piece is the logical end point of an ideology that forgot the human person. Once you moralise drug use as an identity and call it lived experience, you create a system that prefers the endorsement of active addiction to the protection of children. And when that system is wrapped in the soft language of compassion, most taxpayers never see what is being done in their name.
The fact that a major city can publish a ten-point plan that encourages shelters to hire active drug users, facilitate drug use in supposedly abstinent spaces, and even impose harm-reduction obligations on shelters housing children tells you everything about how deep the rot has gone. This is not compassion. This is abdication. It is the public sector laundering its own failure and calling the stains progress.
The irony is that everyone knows the harm-reduction orthodoxy has failed. The drug deaths, the street chaos, the human wreckage, the families breaking under the strain. Even politicians across Canada have started to recoil from what they once embraced. Yet the bureaucratic machine in Toronto rolls on, guided by a document written years ago and apparently never questioned. No one with authority has had the courage to say that ideologically staffing shelters with active users is irresponsible, dangerous and morally indefensible.
From my point of view, the absurdity becomes even starker. Solidarity does not mean standing back while harm ripples through entire neighbourhoods. And the dignity of the human person certainly does not mean outsourcing care for vulnerable children to people still in the grip of addiction. The city has mistaken permissiveness for mercy and harm reduction for hope. Neither delivers freedom.
And the public, bless them, still think a shelter is a warm building with soup, beds and a shot at getting back on your feet. They have no idea that some of these sites are being asked to supervise drug use and hire staff who are not yet free of their own addictions. It is a betrayal of trust on a spectacular scale.
We can also draw a clean line from Toronto to the UK debates. Because this is where the ideology goes if it is not challenged with clarity, courage and actual evidence. First they frame addiction as an identity, then they redefine care as enabling, then they call abstinence oppressive, then they erase recovery as a goal altogether. And before long, someone is explaining to you with a straight face that “family shelters should support safer drug use practices” around children, as the article notes, and that this is simply modern best practice.
It is not best practice. It is moral and civic negligence, dressed up in jargon, funded by taxpayers and defended by people who will never have to live next to the consequences.