The Cruel Art of Dehumanization: How Parksville Turns Its Back on the Suffering
- Admin
- 23 hours ago
- 2 min read
In Parksville and the Oceanside region, an insidious weapon silences the cries of the homeless: dehumanization. It’s the quiet, vicious process that strips human beings of their dignity, reducing them to “transients,” “addicts,” or “problems” to be swept away. By labeling the unhoused as less than human—lazy choices, moral failures, or invisible nuisances—comfortable residents and indifferent leaders absolve themselves of responsibility. No need for an all-weather shelter when “those people” don’t deserve one.
This calculated cruelty works brilliantly. Call them “encampment dwellers” or blame their “lifestyle,” and suddenly, leaving fellow Canadians to freeze or become soaked to the skin living in tents, vehicles, or doorways becomes acceptable. No overnight shelter exists here in 2026, despite BC Housing funds sitting unused and repeated pleas being ignored. The result? People exposed to Vancouver Island’s relentless rain and cold grow desperately ill—pneumonia, hypothermia, infections—flooding already strained hospitals with preventable emergencies. Others die quietly, their deaths a statistic, not a tragedy.
And who bears the unbearable weight? Organizations like MANNA Homeless Society stretched to breaking with emergency food, clothing, and desperate outreach. MANNA’s volunteers scramble to fill voids left by civic failure, battling burnout while picking up the pieces of shattered lives. Hidden homeless—seniors, women, working poor—vanish into vehicles or shadows, their humanity erased to preserve Parksville’s polished facade.
This isn’t compassion fatigue; it’s willful blindness. Dehumanization lets leaders dodge accountability, NIMBY voices block solutions, and a community pretend suffering doesn’t touch them. But it does. Every untreated illness, every preventable death, erodes us all. Parksville: stop dehumanizing the vulnerable. Demand an all-weather shelter now—before more lives are sacrificed to apathy.
Robin Campbell
To support Manna Homeless Society
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Manna Homeless Society
PO Box 389
Errington BC VOR 1VO
