The stuff you actually notice

Ask people in this district what makes their street feel safe, and you mostly hear the same things: the burnt-out streetlight on the walk home. The crossing where cars don't stop. The sidewalk that ends. The bylaw complaint nobody answered.

Small things. Fixable things. And the difference between a street that feels like yours and one that doesn't.

What I'd push for:

  • A lighting audit of King's Town's actual walking routes, not just arterials
  • Crossings prioritized by where people cross, not by traffic counts
  • Sidewalk gaps mapped and closed on a published schedule
  • Property standards enforcement that works for tenants, not only for complaints about tenants
  • Response times published, so "we'll look into it" has a deadline

September 30

The consumption and treatment service at 661 Montreal Street closes on September 30th. A HART Hub opens October 1st under AMHS-KFLA with about $6.3 million a year in provincial funding.

The HART Hub brings real things — treatment beds, mental health supports, case management. It also doesn't include supervised consumption, safer supply, or needle exchange. That's not a criticism of the people running it. It's the funding model the province set.

So: some services continue, some stop, and the people who used the ones that stop don't disappear on October 1st. They'll be on the same streets. That's not a prediction. It's arithmetic.

Council has funded $500,000 for shelter operations through March 2027 and kept 24 low-barrier beds. That's a bridge, not a plan.

The plan is the next Council's job. It starts twenty-six days before you vote.

What I actually know about this

I run POET. Four of us at the core and 38 volunteers. Last winter we worked through −18°C on protocols we wrote ourselves because nobody else had.

About 175 check-ins a month. Between 25 and 35 people a month connected to services — services that already existed, that they couldn't reach on their own.

I log all of it. Not for a report. Because if you don't write it down, it didn't happen, and you can't fix what you can't count.

I'm not offering theory here. I'm telling you I've been on that block at 2 a.m. in February and I know precisely which parts of the system fail and at what hour.

Homelessness, addiction and mental health are one problem

They're not three files with three budgets. They're three faces of the same thing, and every time Kingston treats them separately, someone falls between them.

And here's the part for people who think this is a money question

Displacement doesn't save money. It spends it twice.

Move an encampment and it reappears somewhere else in a week. Every cycle costs staff time, police time, paramedic calls, emergency department visits, and cleanup. Then the next cycle costs it again — and the people involved are further from stable than when it started.

That's not compassion versus cost. It's spending twice to end up further behind. The next Council should put real numbers beside every option — including the cost of doing nothing, which is never zero — and publish them. I'll be asking for exactly that.

What I am pushing for and will continue pushing for

  • A transition plan for October 1st with named responsibilities and public reporting
  • Outreach capacity funded as infrastructure, not as annual crisis grants
  • The City's own data published — encampment counts, service connections, outcomes
  • Coordination that doesn't require a crisis to convene
  • Costing every option against the cost of doing nothing, which is never zero

Move an encampment and it reappears somewhere else in a week. That's not compassion versus cost. That's spending twice to end up further behind.