KINSELLA: Mentally ill abandoned on the streets of our cities

It isn’t just Toronto.

But Toronto, where most of the county’s news media are headquartered, is receiving most of the news coverage, of course. And Toronto seems like a scene out of Stanley Kubrick’s dystopian Clockwork Orange, these days.

The New York Times has noticed, gingerly reporting that “fears of crime and violence have been rising in Toronto.” So too the BBC, which blandly observed that “violence has unnerved some in Toronto.”

Writers like the Sun’s Joe Warmington and the Star’s Rosie DiManno have been more specific. Those two, and others in the Toronto media, have documented the explosion in violence on Toronto’s streets and transit system.

Here’s just a short summary:

A woman murdered with a pickaxe at the High Park subway station. Another woman set on fire at the Kipling station, and she later dies. A mob of teenage girls — who apparently did not really know each other, and met online — allegedly murdered a homeless man for a bottle of booze near the Royal York Hotel and Union Station.

An 89-year-old woman murdered in broad daylight, at the corner of King and Yonge Sts., one of the busiest intersections in Canada, allegedly by a man who did not know her. A 23-year-old woman stabbed repeatedly in the head on a Spadina streetcar, mid-afternoon. A 16-year-old boy stabbed at Old Mill Station and rushed to hospital.

Transit employees swarmed by teens and beaten, and shot at. People shoved off platforms into the path of oncoming trains. Robberies, rapes, assaults.

As my colleague Warmington wrote: “It’s a real-life nightmare. It’s out of control.” DiManno: “A city in profound decline.”

Except it’s not just happening in Toronto. It’s happening across the country, particularly in our biggest cities. A man stabbed to death outside a shelter in Vancouver. In Montreal, police getting called 15,000 times every year to deal with homeless-related violence and crime and incidents.

Some years ago, this writer was invited to the United States to meet with senior officials in Washington at HUD, the Department of Housing and Urban Development. One man I met with knew a lot about Canada. He regarded me.

“You Canadians are about to make the same mistake we Americans have made,” he said.

What is that, I asked.

“You are about to dump thousands of over-medicated, or under-medicated, mentally-ill people onto your streets, all in the name of granting them rights and liberty,” he said. “Except it’s not liberty or rights. It’s abandoning them. And, once you do it, you won’t be able to get that genie back into the bottle.”

He was right, of course. Post-Charter, that is precisely what we did. And now our streets increasingly resemble a scene from the aforementioned Clockwork Orange, albeit on a smaller scale.

Why? Because, across Canada, governments have shut down scores of psychiatric hospitals. We have jettisoned the moral duty we owe those fellow citizens who desperately need psychiatric help. People who were protected, and helped, in psychiatric hospitals.

We’ve dropped them into the back alleys.

New York City’s energetic new mayor, Eric Adams, is pushing forward with policies that will legally require rehousing many of the mentally ill in his city.

Says Adams: “For too long, there has been a grey area where policy, law, and accountability have not been clear, and this has allowed people in need to slip through the cracks. This culture of uncertainty has led to untold suffering and deep frustration. It cannot continue.”

We need to do likewise — because what we are doing now is clearly not working, either.

And, while the usual suspects will predictably call Adam’s approach cruel and unlawful, well, ask them this: what can be more cruel and unlawful than leaving a deeply mentally-ill person to survive on the cold streets of our biggest cities?

Because that is what we are doing, right now. And people are dying and getting hurt — more every day. Not just the homeless, and not just in Toronto.

Everywhere, every day.