I live in London, Ontario, a medium-sized city about a two-hour drive out of Toronto. Yes, it's a hike to Regis College, but London is my home town. I grew up here. And although as a younger man I had an urge to leave for greener pastures, as a hopefully more mature man I've come to realize that there indeed is no place like home. There's no other place anywhere that has the parks in which I used to play, the streets upon which I learned to drive, the local library which I frequented as a child. But like many cities in Canada and the United States, my city has a major problem, and that problem is that many within the community have been deprived of homes. People in many cases who have lived here their entire lives, but no longer can afford to live under a roof but rather must live on the streets. This is product of bad policy. Our federal, provincial, and municipal governments have allowed housing to become primarily about investment and money-making for the already affluent rather than a basic human right that should be accessible to all. Even more urgently, people are dying as a result of being deprived access to housing—at a rate of about one death per week. Such a situation is appalling, especially given that functional zero homelessness has been achieved in Medicine Hat, Alberta—thus proving that this is a possibility in Canada—and that indeed London itself just last year was the first Canadian city to achieve functional zero veteran homelessness. There are solutions. We just need the political and more importantly moral will to implement them.
Over the past two weeks, a coalition of frontline works and community members calling themselves "The Forgotten 519" ("519" being the primary telephone area code in the London region) demanded immediate action on the housing crisis from the City of London. At first, they were told that the situation was too complicated, that this isn't how it's done, etc. Then, one frontline worker and activist, Dan Oudshoorn, went on a hunger strike literally on City Hall's lawn. Within four days, the City, the Forgotten 519, and other aid agencies were able to negotiate new protocols and strategies for addressing homelessness in the city. These won't end homelessness, as these new protocols and strategies do not address the core issue of permanent housing—but they hopefully will reduce the number of people dying on the streets, and I'd personally call that a big win.
That is all preamble to what I want to talk about in this post, however. I had the honour last Tuesday of attending the rally which launched Oudshoorn's hunger strike. What struck me was the religious content of the rally. There were three speakers, apart from the person who gave an initial land acknowledgement and Oudshoorn himself. One led us in an Anishinabee prayer; one was an iman from an area mosque; and one was a staff member from a local United Church (Canada's largest Protestant denomination). Perhaps the content isn't entirely surprising, given that Oudshoorn has himself published a three-volume work entitled Paul and the Uprising of the Dead (Cascade, 2020); he is a man who is at the very least sensitive to the significance of religion and spirituality for our contemporary world. But as I stood there, I was impressed by the extent that this rally embodied the best of what both religion and interfaith interaction has to offer. Each of these speakers was motivated at least in part by their own faith tradition, and that motivation led them to fight and speak on the behalf of the city's most vulnerable.
Upon reflection, I was very much reminded of similar interfaith and ecumenical solidarity during—for instance—the US civil rights and the South African anti-apartheid movements. And perhaps ultimately there's a reason that the most ardent opponents of what is broadly called "social justice" (which really is just the belief that everyone deserves full human dignity in both theory and practice) tend also to oppose both interfaith and ecumenical work. They understand the power that is unleashed when people of all faiths (and all ethnicities, and all genders, and all...) come together to demand positive change...and fearing that power, they seek to keep people apart.
Leaving these thoughts aside however, I would like to close out this post by not only congratulating The Forgotten 519 on successfully achieving their goals on behalf of the city's most vulnerable, but also thanking them for what they are doing for our community.
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