North Bay round table aims to fix downtown poverty, addiction issues

Some weighty topics were up for discussion at a big meeting in North Bay Wednesday.

About 50 people from community organizations met with the city to talk about issues in the downtown, including addiction, homelessness, mental health, discarded needles, and poverty.

North Bay Councillor Dave Mendicino was one of the community leaders at the meeting, and he said the problems facing North Bay's downtown aren't different from what other cities are seeing.

It just hit the downtown like like a ton of bricks- Dave Mendicino

And it's a problem that the council elected in 2018 vowed to address.

"One of the biggest issues that we saw was the downtown and how mental health and addiction had kind of taken over the downtown," Mendicino said. "But it just seemed to be magnified over the years."

"It just seemed to be getting more and more complex and it seemed like this summer the spring and summer it just hit the downtown like a ton of bricks."

Mendicino highlighted the number of break-ins that have recently occurred in the downtown, and attributes those to mental health and addiction issues.

"But it's a city-wide issue, it just manifests itself in the downtown," he said. "We really saw it early on last winter, and the nice weather hit in the spring...call it May 1st, it just seemed to get magnified even more."

Round table a step in the right direction

Mendicino said Mayor Al Macdonald's idea to get together health professionals and law enforcement with community leaders was a step in the right direction to solve a complex issue.

"We know that there's funding available from the federal and provincial governments, that they have made mental health and addiction a funding priority," he said. "So the message from our funding partners is 'we want to see a community based plan put together by all of all the providers.'"

The round table is expected to collect all the feedback and start developing a community-based plan. He expects the group to convene before the end of 2019 to hear the outcomes.

Before that, Mendicino is trying to get people to realize that stigmatizing the distraught is not the answer.

"These individuals that you see on the street, they're not dangerous, they're just someone that has a mental health and addiction issue," he said.

"They're someone's father, mother, brother or sister...usually they have suffered trauma in their early years or so sometimes later years. But there's reasons why they're there."

"You have to destigmatize it because it's a disease. It's no different than someone who gets cancer," he added. "They've got all the medical treatment in the world available at their disposal because they treat it as a disease. Mental health and addiction needs to be treated the same way."