Cathy Crowe's blog

What's a homeless life worth?

CathyCrowe — Tue, 24 Jan 2017 18:45:01 +0000

‎If over 3,000 people sign a petition to a mayor asking him to save homeless lives, does he hear?

If hundreds of intelligent and passionate citizens plead to their city councillor to do the same, do they hear?

Apparently not. That's been the experience in Toronto.

The petition in question asked Mayor John Tory to open one or both of the federal armouries for emergency shelter.

Open the federal armouries for shelter

CathyCrowe — Tue, 13 Dec 2016 03:00:29 +0000

Winter always brings a heightened sense of urgency for Toronto's homeless yet few useful solutions. This year, the evidence that we need more emergency shelters has never been stronger.

While we wait, seemingly forever, for a national housing program to be announced homelessness has only worsened.

Across Canada people have been abandoned outside. In Toronto, hundreds, maybe a thousand people are forced to live outside in parks, ravines, under bridges and on city sidewalks. The situation meets the World Health Organization definition of a humanitarian disaster.

Let's walk the talk and actually build some housing

CathyCrowe — Sun, 27 Nov 2016 18:15:25 +0000

On November 22, National Housing Day, the federal government released on Facebook its 60 page, six-month consultation report outlining what Canadians said they want to see in a national housing strategy. The process itself was modern and utilized a hashtag (#LetsTalkHousing) social media, a web portal, stakeholder meetings and roundtables to gather their findings. In total approximately 9,000 people participated in the survey or submitted ideas.

I cannot glean one new piece of information from it.

It regurgitated facts that are well known to the government: "Close to 35,000 Canadians will experience some form of homelessness on any given night."

Eighteen years ago, we declared homelessness a national disaster

CathyCrowe — Sat, 08 Oct 2016 15:35:33 +0000

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Eighteen years is a long time. I woke up this morning to realize that 18 years ago, on October 8, 1998 the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee launched its State of Emergency Declaration declaring homelessness a national disaster. Today, the entire country awaits a national housing program to alleviate the disaster.

You don't have to go to Rio to witness a public health catastrophe

CathyCrowe — Thu, 11 Aug 2016 14:48:49 +0000

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You don't have to go to Rio to witness contaminated water, food shortages and opportunistic diseases and infections.

We have it all here in Canada. According to research by the Council of Canadians, there were at least 1,838 drinking water advisories in Canada as of January 2015. Of these, 169 were in 126 First Nation communities.

This is what NIMBY sounds like

CathyCrowe — Tue, 28 Jun 2016 15:03:26 +0000

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NIMBY, the acronym for "Not In My Backyard," refers to people's objections to an unwanted development coming to their neighbourhood.

I call it discrimination. It's a vile form of speaking and acting fuelled by ignorance, fear and hate. NIMBY has been used for years against people of colour, people with disabilities, people with mental health issues, the LGBTQ community, various religious groups and people who are homeless.

To solve Canada's housing crisis language matters

CathyCrowe — Sun, 29 May 2016 00:46:06 +0000

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I began to use the term street nurse around 1990 as a political term more than anything. It says to people: "Look, here in Canada, homelessness has become so serious that an entire nursing specialty called street nursing has developed."

Spotlight on homeless deaths

CathyCrowe — Sat, 30 Apr 2016 15:13:22 +0000

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We didn’t need to see the Hollywood film Spotlight to know that investigative journalism makes a difference in the court of public opinion and social policy. Spotlight is the 2016 Oscar-winning film that chronicles the Boston Globe’s Spotlight team, which exposed the conspiracy between the Boston Archdiocese, lawyers and government officials to hide the extensive pedophilia by Catholic priests.

The dark side of Toronto's shelter conditions

CathyCrowe — Sat, 05 Mar 2016 21:09:35 +0000

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Secrecy around homeless deaths is grotesque because so many are preventable

CathyCrowe — Sun, 21 Feb 2016 22:07:46 +0000

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Faces on Places: A Grotesque Tour of Toronto by Terry Murray (Anansi Press, 2006) is one of my favourite books about this city. It’s a handsome pocketbook, a guide to Toronto’s old buildings and the stone menagerie that inhabit them. Did you know that gargoyles, griffins, winged lions, angels, gods and goddesses, kings and queens, deer and polar bears have been watching over Toronto for more than a century?

My six wishes for 2016 for housing and homelessness

CathyCrowe — Sat, 02 Jan 2016 00:01:24 +0000

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Seven steps toward a national housing plan, take two: Lights, Camera, Action!

CathyCrowe — Sat, 28 Nov 2015 18:41:27 +0000

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Today, the hotspots around homelessness are atrocious: growing wait lists for affordable housing, increased numbers of people who are homeless, shelter overcrowding, people forced to live outdoors, illness and death. A national housing strategy is the primary cure.

Using a film analogy let me tell you the "Take One!" story of housing in Canada.

The homeless right to vote and home

CathyCrowe — Sun, 27 Sep 2015 18:54:05 +0000

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The homeless have the right to vote and to a home.

According to Elections Canada and the lawyers who argued for the government and against the Council of Canadians and Canadian Federation of Students in their Charter Challenge in the Fair Elections Act case, if you are homeless, no worries, you can still vote in this federal election.

Join our call for a national housing strategy

CathyCrowe — Sun, 16 Aug 2015 17:10:24 +0000

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I've been a Street Nurse for 26 years. This summer I joined with the much younger and impressive Nurse Practitioner Jessica Hales to write an appeal to the nation. It's an appeal called: Join the Call for a National Housing Strategy.

Here it is:

Ten years later: Does Maclean's still think homelessness is 'Canada's gangrene'?

CathyCrowe — Mon, 10 Aug 2015 04:36:43 +0000

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Does Maclean's still think homelessness is 'Canada's Gangrene?'

Tonight my Twitter feed showed me the 12 election issues that Canada's 'national' Maclean's magazine deemed important to name and cover in the 2015 federal election. In case you haven't seen them, they are: terrorism, defence spending, truth and reconciliation, jobs, crime, democratic reform, marijuana (?), climate, coalitions, pensions, taxes, childcare. Good, I agree with many of these.

Vote for the cure. Vote for housing.

CathyCrowe — Fri, 19 Jun 2015 20:25:58 +0000

The following is the text from Cathy Crowe's graduand address to the University of Windsor nursing and kinetics class of 2015. Cathy received an honourary degree to recognize her extraordinary career.

You might be surprised to learn that my nursing activism began during the Cold War years, 30 years ago when I was a nursing student at Ryerson. A very open-minded pathophysiology teacher allowed me to do my patho paper on the medical effects of nuclear war. It's why I use the term "hotspots" to describe what I see as a street nurse. Not radioactive hotspots but social welfare hotspots.

Where have all the nurses gone?

CathyCrowe — Mon, 11 May 2015 12:32:09 +0000

"Where have all the flowers gone?" This refrain from the popular anti-war song haunts me during this Nursing Week 2015.

Have you ever wondered, "Where have all the nurses gone?" In our hospitals, our long-term care facilities, and our communities? I do, all the time.

Since the 1980s federal and provincial funding and policy shifts, driven by neoliberalism, have resulted in the privatization and corporatization of health care. That translates into the de-skilling of nursing work, the replacement of registered nurse (RN) positions with less costly workers, contracting out to the lowest cost nursing provider, more part-time work and in the worse case scenario registered nurses applying to work in grocery stores and coffee shops or to receive welfare.

Budgets ignore the housing disaster but so do advocacy groups

CathyCrowe — Sat, 25 Apr 2015 17:47:07 +0000

As Citizens for Public Justice wrote in their response to the federal budget this week: "Budgets are about choices. They let us know what our political leaders think is important."

They also reveal to us what our non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and many unions think is important. In their responses I mostly read platitudes: "We commend the government," "We are pleased to hear," "We welcome the commitment," "We are encouraged to see."

Spring is like a global refresh button, unless you are homeless.

CathyCrowe — Sat, 28 Mar 2015 20:18:41 +0000

Spring brings the promise of warmth, more sunlight, new growth and new projects or ideas. We may witness or take part in religious and spiritual celebrations of life and renewal. Spring can be like a global refresh button.

No room at the inn: How ageism and sexism drive health care for elderly women

CathyCrowe — Sun, 08 Feb 2015 23:47:59 +0000

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"No room at the inn" could easily be the title of an article I would write, as a street nurse, about overcrowded homeless shelters and people forced to sleep outside in dangerous situations or in church basements across the country. "No room at the inn" could also be about the intentional withdrawal of government funding to life-saving social programs such as shelters or the federal government's non-funding of the upstream solution -- a national housing program.

Death on the streets of Canada

CathyCrowe — Fri, 09 Jan 2015 06:13:35 +0000

We literally saw death on the streets of Canada this week in Toronto. In a 48-hour period two homeless men died. On Monday, January 5, a man in his fifties, whose identity has not yet been released, was found in the west end of the city in an abandoned van. On Tuesday January 6, a man now identified as Shabbir Jaffa was found in a bus shelter at the busy intersection of Yonge and Dundas.

Socks are not enough: Social justice lies upstream from charity

CathyCrowe — Thu, 11 Dec 2014 03:42:05 +0000

There is a parable called Upstream Downstream that has guided me in my work as a street nurse. It's about visiting health care workers in a developing country. Standing by a riverbed they suddenly see bodies floating down the river. Frantically, they start pulling the bodies out and begin resuscitation. When they look up they see a continual flow of bodies down the river. They call for help and keep pulling the bodies onto the riverbank and apply CPR. Finally, one of them asks: "Who or what is upstream pushing the bodies into the river?"