Some of the most amazing political achievements have occurred because someone has set a grand goal.

Mohandas Gandhi wanted the British to quit India, and he kept his eye on this objective for decades before finally succeeding.

Martin Luther King had a dream of racial equality, which still hasn’t been fully realized, but which took a great leap forward this year with the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States.

John F. Kennedy wanted to put a man on the moon. And Vancouver’s mayor-elect, Gregor Robertson, wants to end street homelessness in our city by 2015.

Already, the cynics are scoffing.You’re going to hear statements like this: “Look at all those people sleeping in Stanley Park. They don’t want to go to a shelter, where they feel it's dangerous.” Or, “Doesn’t Robertson know that people with schizophrenia often want to withdraw, so a crowded shelter is the last place they’re going to want to go?”

There is medication that can help people cope with psychosis. There are ways of enhancing safety in shelters, which can be a stop-gap measure to providing better housing.

Let’s hope that Robertson listens to his heart, which is what propelled him to make this seemingly outlandish promise in the first place. Because if Robertson pushes this objective, the bureaucracy will respond to a mayor’s desire to move an issue higher on the list of priorities.

And the B.C. Liberal government will realize that it’s going to have to provide more health services, more treatment, more housing options, and offer more dignity to the poor or else it will be annihilated in the next provincial election, just as its Vancouver farm team, the NPA, was destroyed in the civic election.

Robertson might not meet his objective by 2015; Martin Luther King didn’t live to see his dream achieved either. But by focusing on the goal, Robertson will bring it closer to reality than if nobody ever tried.

I’ve interviewed too many politicians in the past who are all brains and no heart. Or mostly brains and not much heart. That’s because if you show too much compassion in politics, there’s a chance you’ll get ground up by the cynics in the media and by the Machiavellian strategists who only want to win.

Robertson can expect to be called naïve, foolish, lacking pragmatism, and all the other epithets that are thrown at idealists. When this happens, Robertson should remember Gandhi’s famous line: “First they laugh at you, then they ignore you, then they fight you, then you win.”

Here’s another one: “Where there is love, there is life.”

What has happened in Vancouver in the past 15 years is a disgrace. Some of this should be laid at the feet of former prime minister Jean Chretien and his then-finance minister Paul Martin for ending national standards for welfare in the 1995 budget. This precipitated the provinces’ race to the bottom to reduce benefits for our neediest citizens.

The NDP started it in B.C. by trying to deny welfare benefits to people who hadn’t lived in B.C. for three months. The B.C. Liberals continued in this fashion by cutting benefits for employable single moms when their kids turned three, and by denying welfare to young people who haven’t been independent of their parents for two years.

All sorts of other barriers were created to make it more difficult for people to obtain social assistance, including putting frightening signs in welfare offices and reducing the number of locations where people can get help.

It hasn't helped that Premier Gordon Campbell has refused to show his face at a homeless shelter, a soup kitchen, or a food bank in his seven years in office.

During the Chretien years, the feds also got out of the social-housing business, compounding the problem of homelessness. And the B.C. government privatized debt collection to the point where quadriplegics with student debts who can’t work now have to worry about the possibility of being hounded by collection agents.

We need politicians to get mad about this. We need politicians who still listen to their hearts and feel it’s outrageous that there are more than 1,500 people living in the streets of Vancouver.

Robertson has made a good start, and the voters responded by giving him a strong mandate.

Let’s hope his idealism is contagious. Because if his caucus members open their hearts and grab onto this goal as their top priority, they could go down in Vancouver history as heroes for addressing the most compelling issue of our time.

But more importantly, they'll save lives. Vancouver was once a humane city, but we've lost our way in recent years in part because we've elected too many politicians who only operate from the neck up. It doesn't have to be this way.