By Joe Mancini
Published December 2023
Dwight Storing has offered the KW community the wonderful gift of a movie that documents the Anna Kaljas story. The movie covers the full breadth of Anna’s remarkable life from living in a war zone to being a refugee, establishing herself in Kitchener and how she dedicated her life’s work to establishing rooming houses for those who were left out of society.
The movie about Anna comes at a time when the social housing system has literally collapsed at the bottom. How else to describe the high levels of homelessness where easily 1500 people can fairly be described as desperately surviving without consistent access to a secure home.
The fact that rents in the private market are sometimes twice the amount of a social assistance cheque just adds to the despair. The Region of Waterloo oversees 5400 units of social housing including non-profit and coop housing, where rents are controlled, but tenants rarely move from these units for obvious reasons. Rent supplements are necessary and all that were available are taken up.
All shelter spaces are full. The 230 shelter beds that the Working Centre has established in the last three years have helped to double the Region’s shelter capacity, but there are still 200 people camping and without access to shelter. There is little movement of people in our shelters as housing costs are beyond any social assistance cheque.
Underneath the despair of reduced housing options is a burgeoning drug problem. Every week, throughout Ontario, the police are breaking up drug dealing networks, but new ones quickly reconstitute. This summer, Project Odeon disrupted two fentanyl production labs, one at Smithville farm outside of Hamilton and another in Stouffville. In 2022, WRPS laid 249 charges of drug and firearm offences and seized controlled substances worth over $5,000,000.
The widespread and effective production and distribution of synthetic drugs like fentanyl and meth means that drug dealers have a ready supply in order to prey on the despair of those left out.
The despair is deep, it is structural for the individual whose internal mindset is battered without housing, without meaningful work, without the sustenance of helping relationships. Externally, feeling shunned by society, living in campsites, drugs can easily fill a void or mask over what has been lost and what has been hoped for. As connections to society weaken, behaviours no longer conform, yet as Gabor Mate states, the “ailing bodies and minds among us… (should be seen).. as living alarms directing our attention toward where our society has gone askew.”
The saddest part of Dwight’s film is the scene when Anna’s granddaughter, Stephanie Kaljas is taking down Anna’s portrait from above the fireplace as the family prepared to close down the rooming houses. After Anna died Maggie, Anna’s daughter-in-law and Peter, her son had continued Anna’s work. However, by 2018, the reality of the drug crisis was effecting all social housing projects. Even Anna’s houses were experiencing the random chaos that drugs feed. Drug seeking by those addicted can cause any number of problems at any time. The effort by the housing provider to hold control is immense. The kind of social housing that Anna had created was significantly harder to maintain not only because Maggie and Peter were ready to retire, but because the social conditions had changed substantially.
In the movie you can feel the heartbreak of the Kaljas’ by the cultural shift they experienced and the effect that the widespread availability of meth and fentanyl had on the rooming houses. These drugs can insidiously take over people’s judgement, as people succumb to the power of the drugs even though the user consciously knows the problems that they cause for themselves and loved ones. It is the inability to exert self-control that is the hallmark of addiction. It is well known that continued drug use effects brain regions that are critical to judgment, decision-making, learning and memory, and behavior control. It does not take long till the compulsive nature of addiction takes over.
Social housing, such as the rooming houses Anna created have their own challenges such as the need to provide 24/7 coverage for basic necessities to ensure there is someone available to cover plumbing, electrical, locks/keys and fire emergencies along with providing meals, medical care, laundry, cleaning and a healthy social environment. From the movie, you get the sense that the loving work of care was deeply disrupted by growing drug use that indirectly caused a mountain of new problems, making it increasingly hard to operate.
Yet it is exactly these kinds of places that are needed to help people move into recovery. The Working Centre receives many emails from family and caregivers that are similar to this note: “My niece successfully completed a 30 day recovery program and has remained sober since August. She takes a monthly sublocade and has moved past a desire for mind altering substances. But now we are looking for a local Sober Living House. If she goes back to the city that was her starting point for her drug history, I am worried that she can fall into old habits as she has no supportive friends or family there.”
There are few services/spaces for those caught in the deepest addictions. High levels of addictions bring increased health and mental health needs. These compounding issues need to be understood and addressed.
For The Working Centre we are working 24/7 providing wide reaching supports through meals, shelters, affordable housing and supportive housing. We have set up an infrastructure that is constantly reacting to the compounding issues that come up every day from plumbing to meal production and distribution to locks to fire safety. This ongoing and intensive work is being done in the midst of a drug crisis that continues to grow.
