The Coldest Night of the Year

It was the evening of December 23rd, Tibb’s Eve according to the Newfoundlanders, when I met Harry. He was sitting on an overturned milk crate on the corner of Duckworth and Holloway Streets in Downtown St. John’s. I barely noticed him at first. I told myself I was Christmas shopping, but it was more that I was running out of ways to avoid Christmas shopping.

I was getting it done early that year. I generally do my Christmas shopping between 5:23 PM and 8:04 PM on December 24th. It’s easier to buy for people when you can ask yourself what they’d really want from a Petro Canada gas station. When was the last time someone thought to get you that windshield ice scraper and bag of beef jerky you’ve had your eye on?

My system had broken down though. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to get it done. It wasn’t that I couldn’t find anything in the vast quantity of stuff available on Water Street. It wasn’t that I didn’t have the money to do it. That was my entire problem. It wasn’t anything at all; at least not anything tangible enough to quantify. I was just lost in a seasonal malaise and cast adrift in a sea of commercialism and further from any kind of holiday spirit than I’d ever been.

“You look like you need a coffee,” said Harry with certainty.

I glanced up from the bench where I’d sat down. Harry was an old man. His jacket was faded and ragged, his beard wild and grey, his eyes shining brightly from beneath the brim of a faded ballcap. He was hunched forward with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped together in front of his mouth as he breathed into them to stay warm.

“Best idea I’ve heard today,” I said, chuckling to myself.

“It’s a talent,” said Harry, gesturing to the Tim Hortons across the street. “You’re buying.”

It was the worst Tim Hortons I’ve ever set foot in. The hole the rats had chewed in the baseboard had been closed off with caution tape. An official looking rat was nailing up a tiny notice that read “Closed: Order of the Public Health Inspector” while another quietly retched on the floor beside him. We didn’t stick around to see if he made it.

We sat on a bench outside a Chinese-Newfoundland fusion restaurant, home of the world famous General Tso’s beer battered cod cheeks, and picked through our coffees for bits of cholera while talking about a mixture of life, music, and nothing in particular.

Harry was a stone carver. Quite a good one too I later found out. His family was from Hopedale, but he’d been taken away from Labrador as a child. He’d grown up away from his family in St. Anthony. He didn’t go into details, he didn’t have to, he was Inuk, and there was a Moravian residential school in St. Anthony until 1974.

I finished my coffee, thanked Harry for what felt like the first real conversation I’d had in months, and headed off to quickly wrap up my Christmas shopping. I’d planned to buy him another coffee and have another chat at some point. I never got the chance.

It was two months later when he died. I’ve never heard how; never heard if anyone has heard for sure. He’d told passersby that he loved the cold because it reminded him of his childhood in Labrador and some people said the cold finally took him home that February night. Others said he just gave up. Whatever happened, his body was found frozen beside a bench near the St. John’s War Memorial.

I’m not sure exactly what made me think of his death three years later early on a July morning in Burgeo, Newfoundland. It probably had something to do with shivering uncontrollably outside the locked ferry terminal door frame while I crouched beneath my drenched sleeping bag as an inadequate form of protection against the torrential rains hammering down around me.

The morning had started out wretchedly an hour before and had not improved. I had woken up thinking that there’s nothing like a good night’s sleep and knowing that whatever I had gotten had been nothing like a good night’s sleep. The storm had rolled in just after dark and I felt like I’d spent the night in an aquarium

I hadn’t actually planned on spending the night in Burgeo at all. I’d gotten off the ferry from Ramea intending to transfer onward to the outport of Francois four hours to the east, but the ferry was in drydock for the day and my only choices would be to return to Ramea or find somewhere to stay in Burgeo.

As it happened, there was nowhere to stay in Burgeo. The nearest campground was twenty kilometers to the west at Sandbanks Provincial Park and it was fully booked anyway. The only motel room available in town was far enough outside my budget that the receptionist suggested I sleep under the wharf when I asked her if there was anything available in my price range.

I had spent the night illegally camping under the wooden decking of a public lookoff on Maiden Tea Hill. The slow process of my tent losing its battle with the storm and the constant fear that I’d hear the police dogs approaching at any moment made for a sleepless night. I wanted to tell myself I was paranoid. That Burgeo is a small town and no one would bother me, but I couldn’t help but remember being threatened with a taser in a truckstop bathroom in a case of mistaken identity in a town too small to publish population statistics. I couldn’t make the necessary leap of faith to sleep.

I was in a bleak frame of mind when the ferry terminal custodian found me wrapped in my sleeping bag outside his door like some sort of wet and morose nylon shrubbery. The custodian let me into the furnace room to dry my sleeping bag and clothes in the heat. I helped myself to an egregious amount of his paper towels to dry my hair and used enough hot water to bring the terminal’s power bill on level with the military budget of Paraguay. When I finished up I was offered a cup of steaming coffee and a heaping plate of scrambled eggs for my trouble.

Therein lies the invisible distinction. An invisible line that exists in Canadian society that subconsciously, but not unintentionally, divides us into two groups. The deserving and the undeserving. I have the privilege of being in the first group. That means that when I make a string of choices that leads to shivering outside of a ferry terminal at six o’clock in the morning I can almost invariably count on the kindness of strangers.

It goes without saying that the vast majority of humanity would like to consider themselves good people and treat others as they would want to be treated, but we generally ignore the sinister asterisk that capitalism applies to the golden rule. There’s an unspoken meritocracy that underlies any capitalist system to regulate who is forced to exist outside the umbrella of societal compassion.

The meritocracy exists to create a direct equivalency between the idealized notion of material success and personal value. It indelibly ties a person’s worth with their proximity to an archetypical model citizen drawn by Norman Rockwell in 1950. It’s not a system with a universal or even realistic metric. It’s governed by a single rule. The further you are from the white picket fence the further you are from being human.

The point is to quietly delineate who falls outside of a societal duty of care. The lesser known cousin of Murphy’s Law is Zymurgy’s Law of Volunteer Labour: People are always available for work in the past tense. Whenever the conversation turns to homelessness, most Canadians follow Zymurgy’s Law of Empathy: Everyone supports a recovery that’s already happened.

The availability of that recovery is another thing. There’s something about the concept of homelessness that can instantaneously transform otherwise reasonable, measured, and generally compassionate people into reactionary protectionists on the edge of fascism. It’s a product of the cultural McCarthyism that’s been pushing stauch individualism propaganda on Canadians for decades.

It flies in the face of every trait that Canadians have ever tried to promote about ourselves. The peacekeepers; the humanitarians; the people from a bountiful land of material wealth, boundless natural splendor, and unfaltering kindness and hospitality. How can citizens of a country that prides itself on the harshness of its climate allow their fellow Canadians to freeze to death in the streets without looking both apathetic and sociopathic? We can’t. It’s as simple as that.

The McCarthyist meritocracy is our shameful little loophole to keep our self image undented. The core principle of it is the belief that the more you have the more you’re allowed to get away with. The Atlantic Canadian news outlet Saltwire ran a surprisingly thorough and genuine eulogy to Harry after he died. He was well enough known in St. John’s that most everyone who had spent time downtown had spoken to him at one point or another and there was no shortage of stories to go around. Yet, for every anecdote, the one facet of his life that the paper couldn’t get enough of was the fact that he’d struggled with alcohol addiction.

We’re going to ignore the fact that weaving someone’s criminal record into their eulogy is usually one of the faster ways to get punched in a church and instead examine the wider context of this a little. It’s a factor that seems doubly hypocritical in St. John’s. The city’s focal point is arguably George Street; two blocks dedicated to nothing else except binge drinking and public urination. A fifteen dollar cover charge apparently is what it takes to indemnify a person against being remembered for trying to fistfight a cardboard cutout of Buddy the Puffin.

The way the homeless are demonized for substance use is possibly the most egregious double standard between the privileged deserving and the undeserving. Now, I’m not arguing in favour of addiction, but rural Canada tends to treat alcoholism as a perfectly acceptable weekend activity. As long as we’ve got parts of the country where the only culture is the drug culture I don’t think there’s any legitimate moral argument to single out a particular demographic.

The pretense of one is a key part of Canada’s cultural response to homelessness. A response that doesn’t actually have anything to do with addressing homelessness. Other countries, like Finland, have proven that homelessness is actually as simple a problem to solve as you’d think, unsurprisingly the solution is housing people, and that it’s actually much cheaper to treat that problem at the root.

A trickier problem is how to keep an invested workforce when the minimum wage is half of a living wage and the top one percent continues to exacerbate a cost of living crisis through their insupportable greed. The minimum wage in most of Canada is barely half of the living wage. Forty-seven percent of Canadians live paycheque to paycheque and twenty percent have no savings at all.

The fear of homelessness is perhaps the greatest tool in the capitalist’s arsenal against a restless proletariat. It’s one half of a commercialized carrot and stick that keeps the wheels of greed rolling forward. It’s also exceedingly easy to crystallize fear without recourse into contempt. The myth that homelessness is a moral failing rather than a socioeconomic crime against humanity provides a lovely little carrot to motivate those who haven’t yet fallen.

That only leaves one loose end left to be tied up in this lovely little bundle of fear and loathing. What do you do with all the grimy people living in tents in your public parks and depressing all the tourists? The easiest thing to do is lie. When that fails, the city councils try to legislate homelessness out of sight. The cosmetic aspect of homelessness is the only one that Canadian politicians are actually reliably willing to legislate away.

They do that with violence. They do that by sending in the police to beat a few people and take what little they have for the crime of not having more to take. They leave at the end of the raid and go on Twitter and declare the day a rousing success and the people who they’ve just brutalized have lost their tents and sleeping bags and are even more homeless than they were before.

If there’s any retaliation at all it’s cited as proof that homeless encampments are devastatingly dangerous to the general public and the Vancouver or Halifax or Toronto or Saskatoon or St. John’s Chief of Police goes on the evening news and asks for another three million dollar budget increase. The City Council immediately votes to reallocate that money from public housing and supplies the department with riot gear and robotic machine gun dogs and short range tactical nuclear weaponry and the entire cycle repeats itself six months later.

It’s textbook insanity. It’s horrific in practice and it’s unthinkable to imagine the predictable outcome if we stay desensitized and allow the violence to continue escalating. Fortunately, the breadcrumb trail that led us here can lead us back out again.

The crumbling road that led us here began in the 1980s with what I’ve taken to calling Rex Murphy’s Law: Anything that can go wrong with social welfare was mandated to do so by the Mulroney Government.

The Canadian government used to invest quite heavily in affordable housing. Over twenty percent, 31,000 in total, of the housing units built in Canada in 1972 were socialised housing. That number fell to six percent and 9,000 units by 1987 following cuts from Brian Mulroney and his merry band of hatchet men. His final budget in 1993 terminated funding altogether.

It has never been restored and by 2010 social housing accounted for less than one percent of Canada’s new housing supply yearly. The poorest fifty percent of Canadians, including those who need access to socialized housing, has gotten significantly poorer in that time as well. The total wealth transfer in Canada since 1985 has moved more than twenty five percent of all wealth in Canada to the richest five percent of Canadians.

So the road out is pretty much as simple as the road here. First off, build it and they will come; or at the very least they will survive the winter. In the meantime, there were over 1.3 million empty housing units in Canada at the time of the 2021 census; many kept empty by corporate landlords to drive up rental rates. The seizure of these properties as socialized housing and reparations for a wounded middle class would increase supply, lower demand, bring down prices, and save thousands of lives

It’s not rocket science, it’s not even a baking soda volcano, and that makes it all the more unconscionable that it’s still a problem. That being said, I’m going to take a short break from cynicism and say I think public opinion might be starting to change for the better.

This story began at Christmas and it ends there too, unfortunately not with three ghosts showing Galen Weston Jr his own grave, but there’s always next year. My first Christmas back in the Annapolis Valley I was determined to reconnect with some sort of Christmas spirit. I found myself wandering alone around Bridgetown’s Festival of Lights.

I’d been in the cold for hours and was beginning to lose any hope of finding whatever I’d come looking for when I saw the town’s giving tree. It stood on the corner of Queen and Granville Streets and was decorated with a stunning array of items. Cans of soup, children’s coats, winter gloves, neatly wrapped bags of cookies tied up in little bows. A note at the bottom urged anyone to take whatever they needed.

There it was. The Spirit of Christmas was alive and well between a plywood candy cane and a styrofoam reindeer. I popped into the variety store for a pair of socks to hang on the tree and thought to myself that Santa Clause looks an awful lot like another man with a fondness for red and a penchant for giving things away. I felt rejuvenated. I headed home to leave out a bowl of borscht and a glass of milk for whoever should happen to show up that night.