Miss Homeless Wins Free Apartment For One Year
Belgium judges have crowned Therese Van Belle as this years Miss Homeless:
Ten women battled it out in the final over the weekend – which aimed to bring attention to the plight of the country’s homeless.
Contestants had to make it through all five parts of the pageant, including a talk where judges assessed their “will to get themselves out of a difficult situation.”
Therese Van Belle, 58, won the crown and will now be able to stay in a rent-free flat for a year.
Organiser Aline Duportail told the Austrian Times: “It was about the contestants’ inner strength and determination to get themselves out of their old life and on a new path.”
“This is certainly a very good way to boost the contestants’ self-confidence.”
Yes, I’m sure the nine runner-ups will be way more confident tonight as they lay their head down on a milk carton and go to sleep in a dumpster.
Many of you might not believe that exploiting homeless women in order to bring awareness to a homeless problem that these same organizers are probably responsible for creating, is a good idea, but The Mayor sure does.
I look at the problem Toronto has with its homeless and I ask myself how is it that billions have been spent trying to combat homelessness, yet there are homeless people on every street corner in Toronto? You would think that with all the programs, all the free housing, all the benefits, and the decades of trying to help the homeless, that the problem would have disappeared by now, but yet it hasn’t. Why?
Well, at last count, there were 5000 homeless people in Toronto (3600 in homeless shelters, only 800 on the street). According to the City’s own statistics, the City of Toronto spent $161 million on various programs to help the homeless, or $31,000 per homeless person per year.
That’s a lot of ching. You would think that if each homeless person received $31,000.00 per year that the problem would vanish, but I’m afraid it’s not that easy.
If you just up and gave away all that money, what would happen to all the homeless industry jobs? The administrators, organizers, custodians, secretaries, directors, executives, superintendents, functionaries, and various bureaucrats would be out of a job, and that would create potential homelessness.
In the 1990’s the socialist government of Bob Rae opened up the doors to Ontario’s mental health institutions and let the mentally ill out, claiming against common sense that you can’t hold a person in an institution just because they’re mentally ill. The mentally ill have the right to be exploited, I guess. The streets of Toronto flooded with the diseased minds, and the Homeless Industry™ was born. More jobs for friends, and friends of friends, and like-minded people. Hurray!
Now it’s simply a rinse and repeat story. “We need more money for the Homeless Epidemic™.” In other words, my bro Johnny needs a cushy job.
And that’s the reason why I’m glad when someone says they want to bring attention to the plight of the homeless. So do I, I want everyone to know who’s responsible for a majority of it.
October 14th, 2009 at 8:20 am
The B.C government returned the mental patients to the loving arms of their families in the early 1980’s. Unfortunately, the families were unable or unwilling to cope with extreme mental illness, and they all ended up on the streets of Vancouver and Kamloops.
It’s a disgrace the MSM barely touched on, a few articles way back, then nothing about it for twenty years. The now closed and bulldozed mental institutions no longer exist,except as high end condos, and new patients have nowhere to go, so add to the crop of “homeless”.
The amount of money spent on each person would keep most people in relative luxury, but I’m sure the majority of spending is ,as always, on the staff that run the programs.
It’s another problem no one really wants a solution to, as all those cushy taxpayer-funded jobs would disappear.
I worked construction in downtown Vancouver in the 1980’s, just when they were closing all the mental facilities in the Province, and I saw the misery of the poor bastards cut loose to try life on their own,when half of them were so schizophrenic and psychotic they didn’t know which planet they were on. It was like something out of Dickens, when he described the bedlam of the insane asylums of the nineteenth century.
Succeeding governments, all of whom maintain they are the “Party of the little people”, the “Party that cares about the less fortunate”, have done bugger all to alleviate the problem, except to found and grow more little kingdoms to look to the “plight of the homeless”, and do little more than collect their nice paycheques.
The homeless, most of whom are mentally ill, are the “untouchables” of our society, and until our Country births a Mother Teresa or Albert Schweitzer, nothing practical will ever be done to clear up this situation. The solution, rebuilding and staffing mental institutions, is too costly for Olympic-spending spree Premiers like our Gordon Campbell, and it would probably be seen an retrogressive, by our ever progressive politicians, all of whom care mightily about the less fortunate in our society, as long as they stay the hell out of THEIR neighbourhoods.
Good post,Mayor. I’m pleased to see other Countries have politicians who are as shitheaded as our own.
Misery loves company.
October 15th, 2009 at 5:02 pm
TY, Dmorris.
EXACTLY the same thing happened here in Toronto as it did in BC, with EXACTLY the same results.
History has a habit of repeating itself.