Toronto Stinks

The parlour pinks who can afford not to have reality squatting, begging and pissing upon their well-trimmed lawns in front of their stylishly renovated Edwardian townhouses in the Annex will have every idea what Joe Warmington is talking about. They just don't care, as long as they don't have to suffer along with the plebs:

Tomorrow they count the homeless.

It's another amazing chapter in an already pathetic pattern of not being able to get a handle on this horrible blight we all know is a national disgrace. Have you been to a city park in recent years? Do you like the smell of urine?

It has become a dirty, disgusting city. The looks on the faces of our tourists say all you need to know about the possibility of them coming back to the garbage dump that is not in Michigan but sits right atop Lake Ontario.

Perhaps they should put the anti-smoking crowd in charge of dealing with the homeless. They have been successful at ensuring there's not many indoor spots to smoke anymore. They have been so effective, you can't have a cigarette near the entrance of buildings.

But it seems to be okay to urinate outside an entrance. And defecate, sleep and snore.

....

During my years Scrawlin I took dozens of pictures of homeless people asleep on grates, doorways, in the parks or harassing the hardworking citizens or tourists for money.

And yet here they are in 2006 at City Hall looking at us taxpayers with a straight face and saying they are going out tomorrow to do a homeless census.

Some on council are terrified they won't find enough to justify their wasteful money-pit spending. That could be one positive aspect of supporting the count.

But I see this as another phony make-work project. We already know there is a problem but we don't have the strength to deal with it.

You always get what you're willing to pay for. The city fathers are not actively ignoring the homeless problem and its deleterious effects on the city; they are encouraging it, because it gives them a problem they can always pretend to be solving while shaking down the taxpayer and other governments to pay for it.

Never mind that this strategy renders sections of the city increasingly unfit for human habitation, or lowers visitors' and residents' opinion of the city.

The progressives get to be seen to care about the plight of the homeless through programs that do nothing to solve or even reduce the problem to manageable levels. And being seen to care, they keep their client groups mollified and the votes coming in at election time.

The city government and the activists feed off each other in a mutually parasitic relationship; the city gets to look good by distributing largesse, and the activists get to look even better by fighting city hall and winning.

As for the homeless? The genuine bums laugh cynically over their muscatel at the whole mess while the mentally ill sink further into delusion and despair.

And so the game goes on.