On September 9, Barrie Mayor Alex Nuttall stood before reporters and declared a “state of emergency.” The emergency was not about climate disasters, a sudden outbreak of violence, or a collapse of basic infrastructure. It was about tents. It was about the presence of homeless people in public view.

With his sweeping announcement about lawlessness, disease, and fires, Nuttall framed homelessness itself as a crisis for the city – not because of the suffering endured by those without shelter, but because their existence had become inconvenient for residents, businesses, and politicians.

The declaration of emergency in Barrie is the culmination of years of hostility toward homeless people, a hostility embedded in policy, rhetoric, and municipal governance. Far from being a city caught off guard by a crisis it could not control, Barrie has actively manufactured this emergency by neglecting solutions, scapegoating its poorest residents, and attempting to criminalize basic acts of compassion.

Barrie’s actions represent one of the most blatant examples in Ontario, and perhaps in Canada, of a municipality weaponizing its powers to punish the poor rather than house them.

Barrie has an emergency, but it isn’t the encampments – it is the collapse of empathy within our city.

Scapegoating violence

One of Mayor Nuttall’s key justifications for declaring a “state of emergency” was the double homicide connected to a homeless encampment in Barrie. In August 2025, police arrested Robert Ladouceur, 52, who now faces charges of first- and second-degree murder in the deaths of William “Blake” Robinson and David “Kyle” Cheesequay. Both victims, along with Ladouceur, had been living in the same encampment near Anne and Victoria Streets.

The city’s response has been to collapse this specific crime into a broader narrative that equates encampments themselves with danger and lawlessness. Premier Doug Ford, who visited Barrie to “tour” an encampment, repeatedly invoked the homicides as evidence that homeless camps are “unacceptable” and unsafe for the community.

This framing does not acknowledge that the victims themselves were part of Barrie’s unhoused population – people who were failed by the city’s systems of housing, care, and protection. Instead, municipal and provincial officials turned them into symbols of disorder, and their deaths weaponized to justify sweeping crackdowns on others who are still struggling to survive.

This scapegoating is not incidental. It seems central to the strategy. By associating encampments with crime, the city casts unhoused people as inherently dangerous, justifying extraordinary powers to remove them. Yet research consistently shows that unhoused people are far more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators.

The narrative of “lawlessness” that political leaders have often invoked serves not the truth, but the optics: it reassures residents that the city is “tough on crime” while deflecting attention from the structural failures in housing and social policy that are at the root of the problem.

Banning compassion

Barrie’s hostility toward unhoused people did not begin with Nuttall’s emergency call. In May 2023, Barrie council passed a motion that reframed compassion itself as a problem to be solved. The motion prohibited money, food, tarps, and tents from being given to unhoused residents at intersections, streets, and highway ramps. And signs were erected on city off-ramps urging residents not to give directly to panhandlers. 

On paper, this was cast as an effort to enhance public safety, but in practice, it was an unconstitutional attempt to cut off the thin lifelines that many unhoused people rely on to survive day to day.

Federal Housing Advocate Marie-Josée Houle condemned the proposal as a violation of international human rights standards. Tim Richter of the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness called it “an assault on basic human decency.”

Facing public backlash, the city ultimately rescinded the proposal. The backlash was so widespread that even CanadaHelps, the country’s largest online giving platform representing more than 80,000 charities, publicly rebuked Barrie’s ‘Say NO to Panhandling’ campaign after the City directed residents to its website.

But the damage was done. These efforts revealed Barrie’s instinctual response to homelessness: to criminalize visibility, punish survival, and sever the small acts of solidarity that allow unhoused people to endure.

Compassion itself was treated as the threat.

Displacement as policy

The emergency declaration revealed what Barrie has long wanted: not to solve homelessness, but to export it. Nuttall has been explicit that part of the city’s strategy is to “repatriate” unhoused people to their “home communities.” Translation: if you are poor, unhoused, and without family support, you are not welcome here. Barrie’s solution is banishment. 

This approach is not only cruel, but also counterproductive. Encampments, while imperfect, provide stability, community, and a point of contact for outreach workers. Sweeping them scatters people across different cities and jurisdictions, making it harder for social workers to find and support them. It deepens trauma, destroys personal belongings, and pushes people into more precarious and unsafe situations. The city claims this protects public safety, but it does so by endangering the very people most at risk.

It is telling what did not trigger a state of emergency in Barrie. The city did not declare an emergency when rents soared beyond affordability for low-income residents and future generations. It did not declare one when shelters hit capacity during unprecedented winters. It did not declare one when people were near freezing to death in the streets.

An emergency was declared only when tents became visible in parks, along rivers, and in the downtown core. The crisis, for city hall, was never about human suffering. It was about the optics of homelessness: what residents and visitors could see, what businesses complained about, what made middle-class voters uncomfortable. For Barrie and Mayor Nuttall, the risk to human lives is not the emergency. The visibility of poverty is.

Barrie’s policies follow a familiar pattern in Canadian municipalities: treat homelessness as a nuisance to be eradicated, not a structural crisis to be solved. This has consistently meant more policing, more bylaws, more evictions, and more fines. These are all tools that punish people for being poor rather than lifting people out of poverty with support.

The consequences are devastating. It destroys trust between unhoused residents and service providers. And it entrenches cycles of displacement, pushing people from one park, street corner, or shelter bed to the next without stability or dignity.

What real solutions look like

Barrie’s cruelty is not inevitable. Across Canada and internationally, models exist for addressing homelessness with dignity and effectiveness:

• Housing First: Prioritize permanent, supportive housing without preconditions. Studies across Canada show that Housing First reduces chronic homelessness and saves public money in the long run.

• Income supports: Raise social assistance and disability rates to levels that actually cover rent, food, and basic needs. Current Ontario Works and ODSP rates leave people destitute by design.

• Harm reduction and health services: Provide supervised consumption sites, addiction treatment, and mental health services.

• Shelter expansion with dignity: Invest in warming and cooling centres, transitional housing, and shelters that respect privacy and autonomy.

• Community solidarity: Encourage, not criminalize, acts of compassion, from food distribution to donation drives, recognizing that communities survive through mutual aid as much as formal services.

These solutions require political will and resources. What they do not require is the scapegoating, displacement, and criminalization that have defined Barrie’s approach.

An emergency of empathy

Barrie has declared a state of emergency, but the real emergency is not the presence of tents along a riverbank. It is the absence of empathy in this city. It is the entitlement of residents who demand that unhoused people vanish, rather than confronting the housing crisis that makes them vulnerable. It is the cruelty of leaders who scapegoat murders on encampments, ban acts of compassion, and call banishment “policy.”

It seems that no city in Ontario has cared less about its homeless residents. Barrie has made clear that its goal is not to house the homeless, but to criminalize them until they disappear into the shadows, into jails, or into neighbouring municipalities.

If Ontario and Canada wish to confront homelessness honestly, they must reject Barrie’s model of manufactured emergencies and punitive bylaws. The alternative is clear: invest in housing, raise incomes, expand services, and treat unhoused people as neighbours worthy of life and dignity. Anything less is not a solution. It is complicity in cruelty.