A small group of Regina citizens upset about a council decision to reject a proposed homeless shelter, have submitted a petition to City Hall to ban all NIMBY statements from being presented to council.A motion for the shelter failed to pass in a vote of 6-5 on June 13. It would have been located on the corner of Albert St. and Dewdney Ave. — a site chosen after a three-year search.The petition group said the shelter failed because of "NIMBYs" which stands for “Not In My Back Yard.” The petition calls for a ban on “NIMBY” speech at all City of Regina meetings.The group has said the chair of any meeting should decide what comments are deemed “NIMBY” and cut speakers off who share those views.Citizen Florence Stratton told reporters, “According to the Ontario Human Rights Commission, ‘NIMBY-ism’ is quote ‘a human rights issue,’”She added, “It happens when people hold negative attitudes or stereotypes of both the people who live in affordable housing or use emergency shelters.”Stratton said “NIMBYism is a form of discrimination," just like racism.“I imagine if someone stood in City Council and said, ‘I don’t want a black person next door to me,’ they could be cut off,” she explained.“Really if you’re saying you don’t want a shelter — or you don’t want low income housing — you’re saying you don’t want indigenous people next door to me. I don’t want poor people next to me. So I just assume the same kind of principle would work.”Although the petition will be distributed to members of city council in accordance with policy, the City of Regina told CTV News that “No further action will be contemplated at this time unless directed otherwise by council.”Council debated the shelter for seven hours on June 13. Acknowledgement of immediate need for a permanent shelter space to address homelessness was weighed against the wishes of businesses and property owners who opposed a shelter in their neighbourhood over concerns for safety and economic impacts.Resident Dustin Plett said, “I think it’s disappointing that council would consider to put a facility like this that will strain the neighbourhood inside one of the most vulnerable neighbourhoods that is already strained in Regina, I think that’s absurd."Ward 3 Coun. Andrew Stevens voted in favour of the shelter slated for his riding.“I think we look collectively like a bunch of morons. Administration went, they did good work, they put before us a recommendation, we brought that from executive, we had time to think about it, and then we spent however long on it when it could have been thirty minutes,” Stevens said.Mayor Sandra Masters, who is seeking re-election, said, “I think that the ideal situation is that you have some level of distance from residential and that you are situated in a place that has a bit of a buffer zone. It may or may not exist but to say that nothing else exists I don’t think is true."The project would have needed $7.5 million from all three levels of government, including $3 million from the Saskatchewan Housing Corporation and $1.5 million from the city’s social development reserve.Ward 6 Coun. Dan LeBlanc expressed disappointment to the media following the decision.“For some of my colleagues, [it is] a dramatic and cowardly retreat from past commitments we made and past commitments we ought to continue to make given that 92 people died of homelessness last year,” LeBlanc said.With that, LeBlanc announced that he plans to seek re-election in November.Regina singer-songwriter Andrea Soesbergen led a delegation in favour of the proposed location.“No matter where you put it, people are going to be impacted. At the end of the day, it’s got to go somewhere. It’s important and people are ready to acknowledge that it’s needed but people just don’t want it near them. At some point, we gotta just bite the bullet and do it,” Soesbergen said.The location already had a temporary shelter lease set to expire July 2025. Council decided to not purchase the space and will continue searching for a better location. Administration was directed to provide a status report by Oct. 9.
