Disrupting Bad Faith Arguments for Good

Engage Barrie
Sep 3
3 min read

On point as always, contributing member Jennifer van Gennip originally posted this on her website at https://www.jennifervangennip.com/rants/disrupting-bad-faith-arguments-for-good, and we asked for a repost here. Visit DisruptForGood.ca to read more of her "rants" (her words), and sign up for her newsletter.

Posted by Jennifer van Gennip, Contributing Member

When it comes to homelessness, politicians and community leaders often toss out quick one-liners. On the surface, they sound like common sense. But look closer and you’ll see they’re actually logical fallacies — cheap shots that keep us from real solutions.

That’s part of what makes them so slippery: they sound reasonable, so they can be hard to counter on the spot. Calling them out might not change the mind of the person saying them, but it can help everyone else watching see the holes in the argument.

I love those memes of football referees calling out false logic. If public debate had referees, here’s what they’d be throwing flags on in a few of the housing and homelessness conversations happening in my area just in the last week:

Image of a referee with his arms out, making a call.
Text: ILLEGAL USE OF A STRAWMAN ARGUMENT - Attempted deflection of an opponent's argument to a point they weren't defending. Play is no good. — Image from https://jpellegrino.com/teaching/reflogic.html

Quote No.1:

“If you don’t want help, don’t want support, this isn’t the place for you. Go somewhere else.” – Mayor of Barrie (multiple times, most recently in this article.)

Ref Call: Category Error

Treating two things as if they belong in the same category when they don’t, like offering chairs in a room staffed by security guards when what’s needed is housing, and then saying people who turn down the chairs don’t want help.

Ref Call: Oversimplification

Ignoring barriers like waitlists, eligibility, safety, or trauma. Reduces a complex crisis to a lazy blame game.

Quote No.2:

“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach him to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” - Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, but more recently, invoked by someone in the comment section to justify not providing housing to people who are homeless.

Ref Call: False Analogy

This person is comparing two things that aren’t actually parallel in the way the argument depends on. The analogy assumes the “learner” already has tools. In reality, you can’t learn to fish without a rod, bait, and access to a body of water. Housing is the fishing rod here — the tool people need to get started — not the fish itself.

Quote No.3:

“The vulnerable are the law-abiding taxpayers watching their town devolve into a slum.” - Mayor of Midland, commenting on a resident’s post about a person sleeping outside being vulnerable and in need of support.

Ref Call: Category Error

The Mayor is redefining vulnerable here to mean annoyed taxpayers rather than people experiencing homelessness, poverty, or systemic marginalization. Vulnerable is a category of social risk, but he is shifting it to a completely different category.

Ref Call: Red Herring

Red Herrings are diversions that attempt to distract from what is actually being debated.

In the full comment, the Mayor shifts attention from people who lack housing to the “drug use, drug dealing, sexual violence, and property crime” that happens in encampments… still in reference to one man sleeping in a hammock outside.

Quote No.4:

“The Housing First positioning is a mantra that is destined to fail.” - Local former Warden and Mayor in a pretty problematic post on social media.

Ref Call: Oversimplification/False Cause

This statement suggests failure is inevitable because of the model, when in reality, outcomes depend on funding, staffing, and implementation. Housing First doesn’t fail on principle. It fails when programs are underfunded or under-supported. Blaming the model itself is like saying a car is faulty because no one put gas in the tank.

Instead of recycling bad faith arguments, let’s call it like it is: there are two ways to end homelessness - prevent it from happening in the first place, and give housing and support to people who don’t have any.

All effective solutions fit in this framework. That’s how we win.

In the meantime, let’s think critically regarding soundbites about homelessness and help others do the same by calling these out when we see them.

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