People are living in tents on the street because they have nowhere else safe to go. By making homelessness visible, encampments expose our failure to act.

People in Canada have every right to be angry about the tent encampments popping up across this country.

But no one should be angry at the people living in them.

As federal Housing Minister Sean Fraser said recently, responding to my new report on encampments, “I think it’s a generational moral failure that there are people who are sleeping without a roof over their head in a country as wealthy as Canada.”

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People experiencing homelessness are living in tents on the street because they have nowhere else safe to go. They are exposed to the cold, to violence, and to aggression from the state. Encampments expose our failure to act on homelessness by making it visible.

In turn, many of us are blaming encampment residents — who are bearing the brunt of decades of Canada’s housing crisis — for not having anywhere to live.

Those who think the solution is to break up encampments want to push these problems out of sight. Where they can ignore the uncomfortable reality of human suffering and of our failure to act. Others think they can simply impose solutions without actually consulting anyone who has experienced homelessness. These top-down approaches do not work.

© Ottawa Citizen