Oh boy, do you have a day or two?
There are a lot of things that need to be done. Obviously, funding is a huge priority. The agencies are starved. They're being forced to cut services at the very time that demand is increasing. The quality of service is deteriorating. There are stories of inadequate nutrition in feeding programs just because there's not enough money and not enough food available from food banks to provide adequate nutrition. There are stories from the shelter system of endemic bed bugs, where they're literally eating people alive as they sleep.
As the pressure on the agencies increases, the standards are deteriorating and the quality of service being provided to people is deteriorating. Just using Sketch as an example, which is the one that's closest to me, as I mentioned, we had to cut at least $80,000 in our current year's budget, and we'll probably have to cut more next year. It means that we cannot run the program we used to run to give bursaries to street-involved youth to allow them to get back to school, to pay for tools, or textbooks, or relocation. So there are probably a dozen youth who will not be able to move on because of those cuts. We've also had to cut staff, which also will impact their ability to move on with their lives. That's replicated in virtually every agency.
What we're seeing is that people are hitting a wall and they're not able to move forward because the agencies can no longer provide the kind of service that they used to. There are agencies that literally are teetering on the edge of insolvency.