I don't know where we're going. You know what? We're still answering the door, and that's really our simplicity. As a mission house of the Madonna House Apostolate, our thing is to be available and to answer the needs at the door, so it continues. For us, a lot of the people who are coming to us are the people who are on the street in the summer. Usually in the winter they have a house. As one person said years ago when they were doing a study on homelessness, if you have any way to get out of the Yukon in the winter, you do. You go down to Vancouver so that you can be warmer than up here.
They're coming for clothing, and we still serve kind of a boxed lunch two days a week, and people do take advantage of it. Not many, but they still will come and ask for it occasionally. And sometimes, like one man who we know fairly well, they'll come and they say, “I missed the soup kitchen”—for whatever reason, he couldn't get to the Salvation Army or he couldn't get to the weekend food kitchen—“Do you have anything?” And so it really is that.
I don't know how to help people, but one of the things we saw over the years with the people coming to the food program is that if they got a job, it might be part time, and here in the Yukon, if you get a job and you're part time and you've been on assistance, you have to pay back the assistance. If it's a man, you have to pay back the assistance. So if you get a job, the first thing is that it's not going to be, generally speaking, a very well-paying job. And then you have to pay back what you have received in assistance, and then you also lose the benefits. You lose the health benefits. You lose other things. And so I think if there was some way we could work it so people could get a job and still maintain some benefits, so that they're not out there all by themselves—it's like it's better to be receiving assistance than to get a job and be up against it. I mean, you have a lower lifestyle when you get a job. We all need jobs to feel good about ourselves. It helps us when we can do that, but every time you get a job, you're kind of penalized for getting a job.
I don't know how to work that out in the government, but that's one way of helping people to go beyond where they are.