… because you might get something that you didn’t ever really want.

Case in point for the Ward 29 (Toronto Danforth) councillor, right-of-centre opposition notable and former deputy mayor: Staff Report EX20.1 on the May 5, 2008 Executive Committee Agenda, “Enhancing Streets to Homes Service to Address the Needs of People who are Street Involved, Including Those Who Panhandle.”

This report is a direct answer to Ootes’ request, made at Executive Committee last year, that the city please do something about panhandlers asking for coin in the city’s downtown core. Ootes argued that panhandlers ought be kept from those areas, and he was joined by various downtown business owners who said the same thing.

Enter Phil Brown, Toronto’s top shelter bureaucrat, with a solution that’s a little more… in keeping with the culture at City Hall. The bottom line: spend about $5 million more a year to help a population of 400 or so people who panhandle - most of whom, as it turns out, are desperately poor men, on average 38 years old, and who have been on the streets for as long as 20 years taking in about $25 a day.  There will be no area bans on panhandling that doesn’t break any other laws, no public relations pushes to urge people not to give coins to panhandlers. Just some help, through an expanded Streets to Home program.

Ootes, as you might imagine, was less than ecstatic. Reached at home Friday after the press briefing to which he did not seem to have been invited, the councillor admitted that, absent a working fax machine, he hadn’t been able to peruse the report. But on hearing the gist of it, he said:

“Throw more money at it that’s going to solve our problems? I don’t think so. I’m all for the Streets to Home program. I think it’s been effective in many instances, but this report focusses on the so-called legal panhandlers which are the passive ones. It doesn’t address the illegal ones because they leave that for the police to deal with it. I don’t know what this is going to do to solve the problem other than spending more money. I think what is needed is for people to stop giving to panhandlers and the mayor needs to say that: stop giving to panhandlers.”