By Cecilia Nasmith/Today’s Northumberland
In debates over a daytime warming room at Cobourg council this week, Mayor Lucas Cleveland said one of his key motivators was to get homeless people out of Victoria Hall – which he said was being used as a de facto warming centre.
“It’s unacceptable to use our great hall, our great lady, as a warming room,” Cleveland stated.
“I am looking to remove criminal activity occurring in Victoria Hall outside of Victoria Hall.”
His list included smoke alarms going off, people publicly intoxicated or drugged, windows broken and copper pipes removed.
And looking at it from another angle, he continued, “our most vulnerable are on display. That is not appropriate.
“At the end of the day, it’s getting to the point where it’s becoming unsafe,” he said.
“I would like to suggest as a corporation we have to look at liability, we have to look at insurance, we have to look at being an employer of choice. At this point I don’t want to wait until the worst-case scenario happens in one of our municipal buildings.
“We seem to be sliding down the slope of the normalization of criminal behaviour, and it has to stop.”
Councillor Adam Bureau said that having a daytime warming room does not necessarily mean people will leave Victoria Hall.
“What would move the people from here to there without breaking any human-rights code or anything like that?” Bureau asked.
“The Cobourg Police would have somewhere to move people to, who are under the influence, who are intoxicated in our lobby,” the mayor replied.
For that matter, he continued, there’s no law that says there have to be benches in Victoria Hall. All they have to allow is for people to come in and be in that space. Should those people be disruptive, they can be asked to leave.
“I am not trying to solve homelessness, I am not trying to solve the mental health crisis, I am not trying to solve the economic crisis. All we are trying to do is protect our staff, protect our public and protect this building from criminal activity, period,” Cleveland reiterated.
