Robyn Urback’s column on homeless encampments captures something important: many Canadians are frightened, frustrated, and exhausted by what they see in their parks and neighbourhoods.
- Parents are anxious about encampments near daycares.
- Workers feel unsafe.
- Residents are losing faith in cities that seem unable to uphold basic norms.
These concerns aren’t imaginary; they reflect real conditions on the ground.
But where Urback’s diagnosis resonates, her conclusions misfire.
The uncomfortable truth
The column treats tents as the cause of disorder rather than the visible footprint of a much deeper failure — a failure of systems, not of people.
Encampments did not appear because activists romanticized them, or because people prefer tents to shelters. They appeared because the supports designed to prevent homelessness — shelter capacity, income adequacy, mental-health care, addictions treatment, affordable housing — have eroded to the point where a tent is, for many, the least unsafe option available.
That is the uncomfortable truth her analysis overlooks.
The safety concerns are real — but they are not the root cause
Urback’s daycare example is heartbreaking. Nobody wants toddlers next to unpredictable behaviour, needles, or shouting. Nobody wants parks to feel unsafe or unwelcoming.
But these situations do not arise because cities are too compassionate. They arise because the upstream systems meant to absorb crisis have ceased to function.
- When shelters are full, violent, or inaccessible…
- When ODSP and OW rates pay a third of market rent…
- When supportive housing waitlists run into years…
- When mental-health treatment is available only after months of waiting…
The tent is not a refusal of shelter — it is evidence that shelter, as currently designed, cannot meet people’s needs.
Enforcement may move tents. It cannot create the capacity the system lacks.
“Refusal” is not defiance — it’s survival
Urback questions why someone who refuses shelter twice would accept it a third time.
To her, this signals obstinacy; to anyone who has worked in poverty systems, it signals trauma management.
People refuse shelter when those shelters are:
- unsafe,
- violent,
- triggering,
- inaccessible,
- incompatible with disabilities,
- or structured in ways that require losing partners, pets, or belongings.
Nobody “chooses” a tent. They choose the least dangerous available option.
The problem is not the choice — it’s the available options.
Order must be built, not demanded
Urback rightly notes that people crave basic order. They want parks without needles. They want playgrounds without yelling.
But order is not restored by clearing encampments. Order comes from predictable, adequate, supportive systems:
- safe and sufficient shelters,
- affordable rooming houses,
- income supports that reflect real rents,
- real mental-health and addictions pathways,
- stable, deeply affordable housing.
Clearing tents without building capacity is not order — it’s optics.
Encampments are not normal — but they are rational
On one point, Urback is absolutely right: tents in parks are not normal and should not be accepted as such. They are dangerous for everyone involved.
But to say “encampments must go” without addressing why they exist is to confuse symptom for cause.
Encampments appear when:
- income doesn’t cover rent,
- shelters cannot absorb demand,
- treatment systems fail,
- and housing markets shut out the bottom third of income earners.
The decay Urback sees in parks begins in budgets, regulations, and program designs, not in activist slogans. The people in encampments are not children of a lesser God. Our capacity to resent them is the same human capacity to resent those who are doing less well than us.
We must be vigilant to guard against this destructive human impulse and we must advocate to others who have become resentful of the less fortunate.
The public’s concerns deserve respect — and better analysis
People who fear for their children, their parks, or their neighbourhoods are not cruel. They are responding to visible evidence of a system collapsing in slow motion. Urback voices that fear clearly.
But fear on its own cannot produce good policy. Fear tells us something is wrong. It does not tell us what to fix.
If we want fewer tents, we need fewer reasons for tents to exist.
We can clear encampments every week, but until:
- OW and ODSP incomes are adequate,
- shelters are safe and scaled to demand,
- rooming houses are legalized and properly regulated,
- addiction and mental-health supports are real,
- and supportive housing is built rather than promised,
the tents will return, because the conditions that produce them will remain unchanged.
A final word: two truths at once
Truth #1:
Public spaces must be safe. Daycares cannot operate beside unmanaged encampments. Parks are not substitutes for housing.
Truth #2:
Encampments are not caused by permissiveness. They are caused by the collapse of the systems that are supposed to prevent them.
A humane policy response holds both truths together.
Enforcement alone cannot solve a problem created by decades of erosion in income supports, housing policies, and mental-health systems. And compassion alone cannot substitute for safety or order.
Encampments are a crisis. But they are a crisis that reveals, not a crisis that causes. If we want the tents gone, we must repair the systems that failed long before the tents appeared.
Everything else is rearranging the scenery.
A related post: From favelas to encampments: Why some settlements stay and others are cleared