Last summer, volunteers spent $400 a week delivering water to approximately 150  homeless people living in Belle Park and vicinity. Four weeks into the heat wave, the city responded and dropped off cases of water at a hub on Montreal Street but refused to move  it further.  Today, volunteers act as the city’s unpaid, uninsured logistics department, manually delivering water every day for the people who are unable to carry all their daily water back to their site.

Access to clean water is a  municipal responsibility, a basic human right,  not one that should fall to volunteers.

Furthermore, it’s an environmental nightmare.  It is estimated that 30 cases  of 24 bottles are needed each day in the summer.  That  would  amount to 21,600 individual plastic bottles in June and a total of 66,240 bottles for June, July and August.  

The waste often gets blamed on encampment residents who trying to survive the heat or on the volunteers distributing water and food.   Many Kingston citizens  are frustrated by conditions in Belle Park and want the encampment cleared.However, the problem it's largely a consequence of the city's lack of water distribution system and no weekly garbage collection.

A practical solution already exists.  The city owns a 1,400-litre Mobile Water Buggy that costs just $5.22 to fill. It could be parked at Belle Park during the Feed the People daily lunch program's operating hours (11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.). This  humane treatment of Kingston's ill, vulnerable citizens will give them access to fresh water and both waste and taxpayer costs will be significantly reduced.   

Please write Kingston’s city councillors, insisting that every citizen in our city is entitled to clean drinking water and weekly garbage collection. 

Read the  complete  OP-ED article by Melissa Reid: "How Kingston Manufactures a Plastic Crisis to Fuel Stigma".

 Please help raise awareness by posting this article on social media and mailing people you know asking them to sign this petition!