City Prepares for a Cold, Deadly Night on the Streets of Montreal
City Prepares for a Cold, Deadly Night on the Streets of Montreal
With an Arctic chill settling over the city, there are still hundreds who'll sleep outside.
As a deadly cold settled over Montreal Friday, Michel Chabot holed up in a flimsy tent under the Ville Marie Expressway.
He's done what he can to make the place liveable: converting a Coleman barbecue into a space heater, patching up the tent's holes with blankets and reinforcing the patches with tape to keep rats out. Should the rats eat their way back into Chabot's hut, he's got a wooden bat at the ready. That’s if the rats don’t freeze to death.
"I don't want to bonk them over the head but if it comes to it, I will," said Chabot, a 59-year-old homeless man. "I should get through the night okay. I have enough propane to keep the barbecue going for a week and I'll be wrapped like a mummy when the sun goes down."
Chabot takes his misfortune in stride but he's under no illusions about the dangers that lie ahead. If he runs out of propane or the flame goes out while he's asleep, he could die. If his tent catches fire, he will almost certainly die. But out there, on the streets, the odds of him making it through the night might actually be worse.
There are some 1,600 emergency beds across Montreal and the city added another 100 to deal with the polar vortex descending on Southern Quebec this weekend. To give you an idea of how hard the inflation and renter’s crisis has hit this city’s unhoused population, there were just under 900 emergency beds three winters ago.
But even the extra beds, Chabot figures he'll probably be turned aside if he ventures towards a shelter. One expert says Chabot's concerns are well founded.
"I'm trying to get as many people as I can to abandon their tent or hut for the night and get inside," said David Chapman, who manages the Resilience Montreal Shelter on Atwater Ave. "But if there are 1,600 spots and over 3,000 homeless, people will be roughing tonight. When I asked one client why he wasn't going to try to find a spot, he told me he'd rather sleep in his tent than wait in line for two hours before being allowed inside a warming centre.
"It's hard to argue with that."
Chapman says about half of the people who sleep outside near Resilience Montreal won’t flock to an emergency shelter.
A source in Mayor Valerie Plante's office said there were still 40 spots available at the downtown YMCA last night. People can even bring their dogs as the city has set up a kennel at the emergency shelter.
“We’re doing everything we possibly can,” said the source, who is not authorized to speak publicly on these matters. “We care, we want to do everything we can to get people through this.”
But Friday night will push the shelter system to its breaking point. Temperatures could drop to 42 below zero with the windchill, dramatically increasing the chance of a freezing death or maiming by frostbite. And as much as the crisis has brought out the best in this city, there's been plenty of cruelty on display as well.
"One of our clients nearly froze to death last night because a bus driver wouldn't let him in out of the cold," said Marcy Robichaud, an outreach worker at Resilience. "He was afraid for his life and someone in a position to help turned him away. Some people would just rather pretend there's no problem. They don't want to see the mentally ill, they don't want to see the addicts, they'd just rather not think about it."
Police have specialized units on patrol overnight, exclusively keeping an eye on the city's unhoused population, according to Constable Julien Levesque, a spokesperson for the Montreal police. Levesque would not say how many officers will be deployed to this end.
"For reasons of security, we don't reveal our numbers. Beyond the specialized units, our stations are also on alert if any additional help is needed," Levesque said. "That's just protocol when the extreme cold hits."
The extreme cold is testing Montreal’s oft-critized response to the public health crisis of homelessness. In a scathing report published last spring, the city’s ombudsman called its response little more than an “expensive stopgap” designed to keep people from dying instead of finding permanent housing solutions. The ombudsman, Nadine Mailloux, called out the city’s “flagrant lack of planning” for predictable emergencies like the arrival of winter each year.
Of course, homelessness presents a huge jurisdictional challenge for shelters. Because it falls under the mandate of Quebec’s health and social services minister, homelessness requires the city of Montreal to go to Quebec City — hat in hand — in hopes of securing enough cash to get through another year. And since housing is a federal jurisdiction, it often takes three levels of government to be on the same page in order to attack the problem.
Homelessness represents the tiniest fraction of the city budget. Plante was re-elected in 2021 on a promise to double homelessness spending from $3 million to $6 million, which is laudable. The city’s police department, on the other hand, saw a $63 million budget increase in this year’s budget. And though Quebec set-aside over $280 million to fight homelessness over the next four years, people like Michel Chabot feel like those extra dollars aren’t trickling down to him.
The other day, he spent his last $80 on a pair of boots and it’s hard living outside when he has emphysema.
“I’ve lived in three homeless encampments over the past 10 months,” he said. “I can’t find an apartment, can’t afford one and there were times where I considered taking my own life to end this misery. When the cops swoop down on your encampment, take everything you have left in this world and throw it in a dumpster, it’s hard to get much lower than that.”
Chabot wound up on the streets a year ago after a series of tragic events in his life. His daughter died of cancer and his son killed himself after a car wreck left him paralyzed.
“He did the deed on his birthday,” Chabot said. “After what I’ve seen out here, I can finally understand where his head was at when he did that. I miss my children dearly. The only photos I had left of them were thrown out when the police cleared our encampment last year.
“Things aren’t all bad. I plan on getting back in an apartment as soon as I can. I still have my sense of humour, thank God, and I don’t drink anymore, don’t do any drugs, I smoke one joint a week and have a lot of kind people checking in on me.”
Before leaving the propane heated tent, I turned back and asked Chabot if I could get him anything before night fell.
“A place inside,” he said.
Until you’ve slept outside at -24, one can blot out just how close we are to survival in this climate. The difference betwen life and death is a sleeping bag and a dog. I met an
unhoused unfortunate whose sole heat source was a bag of cat food. The food attracted feral cats to his blue-tarp yurt.
What’s wrong with us, that we think
this is okay?