A councillor for the City of Sault Ste. Marie says he’ll use his new position on the board of the organization representing Ontario municipalities to address the housing and homelessness crisis that has gripped the province.
Luke Dufour, a Ward 2 councillor and chair of the local social services board, will be acclaimed as a board member for the Association of Municipalities of Ontario (AMO) Wednesday during a conference hosted by the non-profit organization that’s being held in Ottawa this week. Dufour told SooToday Monday that he will serve as a representative for large urban caucuses in his new role on the board.
“What I’m really looking to do is to really build off all of the work that I’ve done in the last four years on housing and homelessness in our community,” said Dufour, who penned a handful of resolutions related to housing and homelessness that were presented to city council earlier this year. “I’ve advanced a number of really specific programs and initiatives to really help address many different layers of housing and homelessness crisis that we’re facing, everything from the low-income home ownership program to all the shelter expansions that we’ve done.
“I’ve been involved in quite a lot of things that have happened on the local level in Sault Ste. Marie, and I’m really looking to get more of an opportunity to play a role on the provincial side to get more exposure to what other communities are doing to really start to get ahead of this problem and be a part of the innovative solutions as they’re coming across the table, so to speak.”
Dufour says he’s looking forward to having more opportunities to have specific meetings and face time with ministers and ministries as a member of the AMO board.
“The Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing has been one that I’ve always been eager to get in front of, as they have significant legislative and financial tools that they can offer to folks who are looking to make a difference when it comes to housing and homelessness.”
Mental health and addictions is also an issue in Ontario that Dufour is looking at closely, much like the AMO is doing as a whole. The organization recently released a policy paper, An Integrated Approach to Mental Health and Addictions, in the days leading up to the AMO conference.
The policy paper lays out 15 recommendations to the Ministry of Health aimed at developing and funding an integrated provincial response to mental health and addictions challenges.
“That was one of the things that really attracted me to the AMO board, is the previous iteration of the large urban caucus has been doing a lot of policy work with the policy analysts at AMO to try to advise the provincial government on how best they can work with municipalities to tackle what is a shared problem,” said Dufour. “That paper was about an integrated approach to mental health and addictions, and was really trying to delineate the ways in which municipalities and the province can better coordinate their responses to provide a better value to taxpayers, to communities and to the clients that we all serve.”
The policy paper recognizes that the province needs to invest in frontline responses instead of relying upon law enforcement.
“We need to have a lot more mental health workers, street outreach - some of the things that you’ve seen Sault Ste. Marie try to find ways to start doing,” said Dufour, who points to the Downtown Ambassadors program and Community Wellness Bus as examples. “We need to be doing a lot more of that - provincial funding obviously makes it a lot easier for us to implement those things, so that they aren’t just going on an already stagnating property tax base.”
One of the recommendations contained in the paper calls on the province to create more supportive housing units — a living space with a mental health worker or nurse present where wraparound services are offered — and to fund “ongoing operations funding for new and existing wraparound support services in community housing and homeless shelters across the province.”
Currently, there are 10 supportive housing units in Sault Ste. Marie. Dufour doesn’t believe there’s a “single person who could argue that’s anywhere near enough.”
“We’re looking at having a need level of probably eight times that for Sault Ste. Marie to really start seeing a difference in that on-street visibility of these folks who are struggling and not getting any of the help that they need,” he said. “There were different funding envelopes opened up over the years, but unfortunately, Sault Ste. Marie was never a part of those.”
Dufour says there are many communities, especially in southern Ontario, who are “a little further ahead” in terms of existing infrastructure.
“That’s part of the gap that I’m really hoping to close by giving Sault Ste. Marie a voice and a presence on this board, because a lot of the cities that I’m sitting on this board with are cities that have gotten into those funding envelopes before and have a better head start in terms of their infrastructure that they need to tackle this problem.”
With municipal election campaigns just around the corner in Ontario, Dufour believes that people in Sault Ste. Marie need to have a broader conversation with regards to the costs involved in improving the response to the numerous challenges around housing, homelessness, mental health and addictions.
“It cuts both ways — not just financially on the upfront costs of the program, but the cost to do nothing is also really substantial, and I think most folks in our community are really seeing that," he said.