Tues May 26: Owen Sound Area News, Events & Editorial
News and updates involving BWDSB, Owen Sound & North Grey Union Public Library, Brightshores Health System, Bruce County Museum & Cultural Centre, Grey County Paramedics, and more
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EDITORIAL: A City Talking Past Itself on Homelessness
The conversation about homelessness in Owen Sound has hardened into camps, and the camps are talking past each other.
One side sees the downtown and says: addiction, disorder, needles, theft, garbage. The other side sees the downtown and says: poverty, trauma, displacement, people with nowhere to go.
Both are looking at the same sidewalk. Both are seeing something real. But neither side is hearing the other, and the people living all of this — on the sidewalk, on the next block, behind the counter trying to keep a business going — are paying the price.
The opioid crisis is part of this story, and pretending otherwise serves no one. Grey Bruce has lived through years of overdose deaths, and the visible drug use downtown is not a perception problem invented by unsympathetic neighbours. It is a public health emergency that has been allowed to grind on for more than a decade, with treatment beds, withdrawal management and supportive housing nowhere near the scale the problem demands.
People who are using in public are, almost without exception, people the system has already failed — repeatedly — long before they arrived on a downtown bench.
But the opioid crisis is not the whole story, and treating every unhoused person as an addiction case is its own kind of distortion.
Rents in Owen Sound have climbed sharply over the past five years. Grocery bills, hydro bills and insurance premiums have climbed with them. People working full-time — in service and retail, in healthcare and education, in the trades — are finding that a paycheque, even two, no longer reliably covers a roof. A job loss, a relationship breakdown, a health scare can move a household from precarious to unhoused in a matter of weeks.
There is also a jurisdictional reality that complicates every demand for action. The City of Owen Sound does not run shelters, fund supportive housing, or deliver mental health and addictions services. Those sit with Grey County, with the province, and with Ottawa.
City Council can endorse provincial housing proposals. It can pass a bylaw. It can ask staff to send a postcard about garbage. It cannot, on its own, build the treatment spaces, the supervised consumption capacity, or the deeply affordable units that would dramatically change what we see downtown.
That has not stopped the anger from arriving at City Hall, and it should not. City Hall is the door behind which choices get made about bylaw enforcement, downtown coordination, public washrooms, waste collection, winter warming, and how the City uses what limited social-service influence it does have at the County table.
Naming the upstream jurisdictional problem is honest. Using it as a shield is not. There is still much that can be done.
The risk in the meantime is that we let visibility do our thinking for us. A person on a sidewalk is not a diagnosis. A grocery cart in an alcove is not a confession. The downtown we are looking at is the product of an opioid crisis the province has not met, a housing market the country has not fixed, an income floor that has not kept up with the cost of staying alive, and a frontline of police, bylaw officers, outreach workers and emergency room staff who have been asked to absorb all of it.
None of that is the fault of the person sleeping in the doorway.
The community has, to its credit, kept trying to be part of the conversation anyway. More than 100 people gave up an evening last July to sit in the Harmony Centre for the City's downtown safety meeting. They generated roughly 60 ideas. The City Manager called it a constructive step. And then — what? Council reviewed the outcomes in September.
There has been no public follow-up meeting. There was no published action plan tied to the ideas in the room. The community-led action work that residents heard about during the City’s Vision 2050 process has not, to our knowledge, materialized.
In the meantime, the City has narrowed the channels through which the public can be heard. In April, council voted 6–2 to approve a new committee structure for 2027 that removes public members entirely from the committee responsible for the budget, internal operations and union mandates — work that will now be done by council alone, in a 9 a.m. meeting on the first Tuesday of each month.
The same restructuring created a new "working group" model that can include public members but is not bound by the City's procedural bylaw, meaning no formal agenda, no minutes, no livestream and no quorum.
Last fall, a resident attempting to raise questions about a $400,000 fire truck purchase — questions he said had already gone unanswered through other channels — was timed out under the three-minute speaking limit council adopted in 2024, replacing the previous five-minute allowance. Under the procedural bylaw, council is not required to respond to questions raised during what is now called Public Forum, and on that night, it did not.
(In April, the Mayor explicitly broke “his own three-minute rule” to invite a second speaker from an outside advocacy group back to the microphone — a courtesy not extended to the resident questioning the fire truck purchase, nor to others before him.)
The City keeps telling residents to engage so things can get better. Then it chooses, decision by decision, to make being heard more difficult— and conditional.
That is the part of this story that should worry everyone, whichever camp you sit in.
A community that is asked to engage and then handed silence eventually learns not to bother.
The two sides downtown are not going to agree on everything, and they do not need to. But they will not agree on anything if the only conversations happening are the angry ones in the comments section and quiet ones inside City Hall.
Owen Sound's mayor and council, Grey County council, MPP Paul Vickers and MP Alex Ruff all have phones, inboxes and offices. None of them can solve this alone. None of them are without leverage, either.
This is the ground on which Suzanne Sloan writes today. Her letter is not a policy brief. It is older and simpler than that — a story about a Winnipeg house in the 1930s, a sixteen-year-old girl named Beatrice, and the seventeen people her mother counted one cold night, asleep on the basement floor.
It is also a warning. That the line between housed and unhoused is thinner than we like to admit. That economies do turn. And that history has a way of asking the same question of each generation that walks past it.
We publish it not to settle the argument, but because the conversation has to keep going — at kitchen tables, in church basements, in council chambers and in print. The people on our sidewalks cannot afford for it to stop.
Neither can the parents walking their kids past those sidewalks, the business owners trying to keep their doors open, the workers one paycheque from precarity, or the neighbours who simply want a downtown they recognize and can enjoy.
This city belongs to all of us.
Public Notice
Grey County to Close Portion of Grey Road 40 for Emergency Culvert Replacement: The road will be closed between Grey Road 7 and Grey Road 13 for approximately five weeks beginning on May 27 - Grey County
Road Closure from June 1 to Oct 30: Normanby Bentinck Townline from Grey Road 3 to 10th Sideroad, Bridge will be closed with no through access - Grey County
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Today’s edition includes a look ahead at the Wheel & Ride Safety Festival in the River District this weekend, highlights and key decisions from the last Bruce County Council meeting, details on a travelling exhibit from the Meaford Museum, recognition for a local educator, and a lot more.
Miranda Miller
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