Scenes from a Humanitarian Crisis
Scenes from a Humanitarian Crisis
Fear haunts the streets of Montreal as emergency homeless funding is set to expire.
It was the first day of the rest of Shane Hughes’ life.
He packed his clothes into garbage bags, gave away his tent and moved out of the encampment under Highway 136. After living outside for most of the pandemic, Shane’s girlfriend Lydia found them an apartment on the western edge of Montreal.
He’d tried to get off the streets before, but Shane swore things would be different this time.
Shane would find work, and Lydia had already applied for a job at a café in Cabot Square. She was determined to get her kids back from youth protection. Everyone at the homeless shelter they frequented was rooting for them.
Shane’s friend Nico, who also lived under the elevated highway, was glad to inherit a tent and happier still to see his comrade moving on to a better place. A few weeks earlier, Nico’s dog Tommy had to chase away an axe-wielding stranger who attacked the camp.
This, Shane said, was no way to live.
I remember that day vividly. It was a sweltering afternoon in July of last year and the sun shone through an opening in the overpass. Cicadas screeched over the whoosh of the highway. Tears streamed down Lydia’s face when she met Shane outside the shelter. “We’re going home, baby!” he screamed.
It was the happiest I’d ever seen Shane in the five years I’ve known him. As far back as I could remember, he had either slept rough or been in jail. But that day felt like a new beginning.
Six months later, he was back in prison.
***
Shane’s story is the story of homelessness in Montreal.
Those in power — from city hall, to the National Assembly, to Parliament Hill — are aware of the public health crisis but continue to rely on the same band aid solutions they know won’t work.
That’s what Montreal’s ombudsman, Nadine Mailloux, wrote in a scathing report published last month. Mailloux criticized the city’s response to homelessness as little more than an “expensive stopgap” designed to keep people from dying instead of addressing the root causes of the crisis.
“(There is) a humanitarian crisis at the very heart of our city — real, homeless people suffering intolerable human distress,” Mailloux wrote. The ombudsman called out Montreal’s “flagrant lack of planning” in response to predictable emergencies like the arrival of winter each year.
“The report is dead on,” said one senior official, who works with Mayor Valérie Plante.
In this regard, Quebec’s government needs to shoulder its portion of the blame as well. Homelessness falls under the Ministry of Health and Social Services, but the province has repeatedly ignored calls for help from the mayor’s office, according to the report and sources at city hall.
Things are only getting worse.
Every shelter worker I’ve spoken to says there are hundreds (and possibly over 1,000) more people on the streets of Montreal now than when the Coalition Avenir Québec government took power in 2018. Sources in Ottawa say the millions in emergency COVID funding that was used to create emergency housing in downtown hotels could expire before the end of this year.
Three sources say Mayor Valérie Plante met with First Nations chiefs from across Quebec last month, and implored them to pressure the federal government to renew its funding for Projet Autochtones du Québec 2 (PAQ 2), an emergency shelter for unhoused Indigenous people.
They say it was strongly implied that the shelter could close this year, sending dozens more people out into the street. It’d be a huge blow, considering the city had just shut down two emergency overnight shelters that served unhoused Indigenous people in Cabot Square and the Plateau-Mont-Royal district.
“Will the federal COVID funds be repurposed to help the homeless long term? We don’t know,” said Josefina Blanco, the Montreal city councillor in charge of homelessness. “We need the federal and provincial government to be at the negotiating table with us. We need a massive investment to fight homelessness.”
Sam Watts was instrumental in setting up an emergency shelter at the old Hotel Dieu hospital in the Plateau Mont-Royal district last year. After three people froze to death on the streets of Montreal last winter, it’s not an exaggeration to say Watts’ mission saved lives. But provincial funding for Hotel Dieu is set to expire at the end of the month, and Watts is in the dark about what happens next.
“When you’re operating something as complex as a homeless shelter, you need a lot more than 30 days of runway in order to figure things out,” said Watts, the CEO of Welcome Hall Mission. “Things like employees, scheduling, meals and everything around the running of a shelter, you need to be able to plan that. It’s really been frustrating to not have much of a window into (the government’s) decision making.
“This isn’t a huge problem for us, we’re an organization that’s been around since 1892. But if you’re a smaller organization, it could be disastrous.”
Last year, the provincial government announced a five-year, $280 million plan to attack homelessness in Quebec. Its budget includes rent subsidies for youth aging out of the foster care system as well as addiction treatment centres and prisons. It also earmarked $10 million for women stuck on the street.
James Hughes, who runs the Old Brewery Mission, called it the largest investment Quebec has ever made to fight homelessness. But he added that it still isn’t enough. Meanwhile, the city has doubled its annual homelessness budget from $3 million to $6 million.
If any of this is making an impact, it’s hard to see.
At the Welcome Hall Mission, some 2,500 people a week use the free grocery store every week compared to 2,000 before the pandemic. Watts says that number might reach 3,000 or 3,500 within the next few months.
“Inflation might be around 6 per cent for the average Canadian but that’s much higher if you’re experiencing poverty and spending most of your money on rent and food,” Watts said.
“I’m an optimist but that’s not the easiest thing to be these days.”
***
Stéphane sauntered down the middle of Ste-Catherine Street, unfazed by the early morning traffic.
He spotted a sweeper truck and raised his palms toward it, as though commanding the vehicle to stop. The sweeper slowed down.
“You have a cigarette?” he asked the driver.
The driver shook his head.
“You’re fucken fired!” he said, playfully dismissing the truck with a waive.
Stéphane doesn’t have a fixed address or a cozy place to lay his head every night but this corner is his. There’s no mistaking it. If you’re driving downtown along Ste-Catherine at rush hour, you’ll see him standing outside the Resilience Montreal day shelter with at least 100 of his peers.
“Some of us haven’t eaten since yesterday afternoon,” he said. “Some people don’t have a safe place to go at night. They eat when the shelter is open. When it closes, they’re on their own.”
People begin staking out a spot in the shelter's breakfast line around 7 a.m., about an hour before Resilience Montreal opens. A couple that sleeps under a nearby fire escape they rigged with a tarp ceiling and cardboard floor stood at the head of the queue, ready to enjoy their French toast and fried ham fresh off the pan. The sweet, savoury smell of sugar and fat wafted out the building’s side door, as if softening the hard edges west of downtown.
Since the city shut down an emergency warming tent in nearby Cabot Square in April, the line has gotten longer. The tent served everyone, but it was especially helpful for the neighbourhood’s unhoused Indigenous population. Women who might otherwise stay with abusive partners had a safe place to nap and a meal to fill their bellies overnight.
Now that the warming tent is gone, they’ll have to improvise.
“My friends have started going east (to Berri Street) at night and it’s rough out east,” says Marlene, who did not want her real name published. She came from Cree territory to visit her friends at Cabot Square this week. “The ones who left for the shelter on Berri Street have had a rough time. There are harder drugs out there; more people, more dealers, more crime, more violence. When you spend enough time at Berri, you’re not the same.”
If everything feels like it’s in a state of flux on the streets it’s because it is. In the ombudsman’s damning report, Mailloux described Montreal’s response to homelessness as “seasonal” and “temporary.” The crisis, she writes, requires access to permanent resources.
Organizations like Resilience Montreal have to apply and re-apply for grants every year, making it impossible for workers to implement long term strategies for their clients. They can help secure an apartment for maybe a half-dozen people every month but it rarely comes with the kind of support folks need to keep a roof over their head.
Which brings us to the emergency tent. It was a reliable source of food and shelter in an area where hundreds of people sleep outside every night. Now that it’s gone, the people who need it are left scrambling for some other safe space.
The city is working with Resilience Montreal to buy a building to house a permanent overnight shelter but that could take months or years. Sources in city hall say one of the few suitable buildings, in neighbouring Westmount, is a long shot.
“Westmount would hold a referendum to determine whether they’ll allow a homeless shelter in their neighbourhood and I’m not holding my breath on that,” one of the mayor’s advisors said. “The money to buy the building is there, the real challenge is just convincing people not to oppose it. I don’t know if we can do that.”
Marlene sat with two friends in Cabot Square as night fell over the city last Wednesday. It was quieter than usual without the emergency tent. Even so, the park was bursting with that early summer glow; street preachers handed out pamphlets, couples picnicked and unhoused residents watched the sun sink behind the office buildings above Atwater métro.
“Jesus Christ loves you,” a man said, as he offered directions to his Bible group.
Without the tent, Cabot Square appears less crowded. But to Marlene’s friends, who frequent a nearby women’s day shelter, those appearances can be deceiving. They say that despite the absence of the warming centre, Montreal’s crisis of homelessness is still as bad as it ever was. It’s just less visible now.
It took lobbying from local Indigenous leaders, Innu Senator Michèle Audette, and a substantial cash donation from Mohawks in Kahnawake, to get the warming tent up and running last year.
They fought to have an overnight warming centre downtown after an Innu man was found dead outside a homeless shelter on Parc Ave. in Janurary 2021. The man, Raphael Andre, couldn’t sleep at the shelter because an outbreak of COVID-19 forced it to shut down. Desperate for a warm place to spend a few hours, he sought refuge in a portable toilet. That was where he spent his final hours.
With Andre’s death sparking national outrage, the city of Montreal went into problem solving mode; setting up emergency beds in a soccer stadium and allowing for a warming tent in Cabot Square. It was run by Indigenous street workers and the nearby Mohawk community of Kahnawake provided security guards and food. They called it the Raphael Andre Memorial Tent and it stayed open long after the snow melted.
“There has been an overwhelming increase in homelessness since the pandemic began two years ago,” said a source close to Mayor Plante. “I can’t give you exact numbers but it’s not unreasonable to guess that it jumped from maybe 3,000 people sleeping outside every night to 4,000 or more. Shelters everywhere are struggling to keep up.
“The tent wasn’t supposed to stay for so long but people clearly needed it.”
Even so, every step of the way, there was pressure from the city to shut the project down. For one thing, it seemed to draw unhoused people from across the city to Cabot Square. More people in the park led to more 911 calls, more fighting and a nightly reminder for residents in the nearby luxury condos that homelessness is a fixture west of downtown.
The widespread anger over Andre’s death was short-lived. As the public discourse moved on, advocates west of downtown lost what little leverage they had. Soon it was back to business as usual in the laneways and street corners around Cabot Square.
On an unseasonably cold evening in November last year, Elisapee Pootoogook was shooed out of Atwater métro and sent into the night. The 61-year-old didn’t have anywhere to sleep so she crawled into an unfinished condo building across from Cabot Square.
Authorities found her dead the next morning.
***
Back in the breakfast line at Resilience, people have started asking about acquiring tents and other camping gear to get them through the summer.
“We’re not explicitly encouraging people to camp out but there aren’t a lot of options left,” said David Chapman, who manages Resilience Montreal. “Since the tent closed we’re trying to direct people towards other resources.”
To that end, outreach worker Ronnie Laporte posts an updated list of shelters at Resilience’s front door every week.
“The problem is, people call the shelters and find out they’re all booked up for the night,” said Laporte, who used to work security at the warming centre. “It’s hard not to feel like we’re abandoning them. I mean, we’ll always do our best but we don’t get to make the rules.”
Failing a spot in one of the downtown hotels requisitioned by the city during the pandemic, many of the unhoused people who frequent Resilience seem resigned to sleeping rough. There are about 30 people in the camp under the overpass on Atwater Ave. But their presence isn’t always tolerated.
“Grace” used to sleep in the encampment, but one afternoon 18 months ago, she returned to her tent only to find it had been bulldozed by a cleanup crew working for Quebec’s Transport Ministry. Since then, she’s managed to find a studio apartment through the Chez Doris women’s centre.
Most nights, people knock on her window to ask if they can crash. Most nights, Grace obliges.
“I know what it is to be out there,” she said. “I can’t always say yes, I can’t always have people over. Sometimes I just need to sleep and I don’t want trouble with my landlord. But when you’ve been a woman sleeping rough, you can’t say no to other women looking for somewhere safe.”
It was on the breakfast line last week that I bumped into Shane for the first time since he was locked up. When our eyes met, Shane pulled me in for a hug.
“Spent five months inside Bordeaux,” he said.
“I hear it’s a real shithole,” I replied.
“It ain’t so bad,” Shane said. “I think I caught COVID but the other inmates told me to shut up or we’d all be locked down 23 hours a day. They’d rather take their chances with the virus than quarantine.”
When Shane and Lydia made it off the streets last year, there was a good chance things wouldn’t work out.
Both Shane and Lydia have a history of substance abuse and trauma. They’ve survived years of violence that began in their childhood and followed them into street life. The pain they carry makes it harder for them to regulate emotions. It also activates the part of their brains that perceives danger, placing them in a near constant state of high alert.
When you put two people in crisis under the same roof without any mental health support, it rarely ends well. By Shane’s account, Lydia relapsed and they started to fight. One night it got physical, someone called the cops and pretty soon Shane was back inside.
Ultimately, the responsibility for intimate partner violence falls on the person who perpetrated it. There’s no equivocating there. But when we don’t address the factors that contribute to that sort of abuse, it’ll just keep happening.
“It’s not enough to get somebody a set of keys to an apartment,” Watts said. “Surround them with support systems so that they’re back in a continuum of care. To help someone get back into housing, you need three key things: the person, a rent supplement and you need an apartment available. It’s so tricky to get all three things at the same time, it’s almost like winning the lottery.
“The other magical piece is a sort of wraparound service to help the person maintain that apartment, maintain their mental health and stay off the street long term. If you don’t have that support, those three key things fall apart. The other problem is, you’re working with three levels of government and it’s always a challenge to line them up.
“You’ve got to get health and social services, which is provincial, to talk to housing, which is federal and they have to coordinate with the city. Try getting them on the same page. Not easy. And then, even if they’re all in agreement, the machinery of government is slow moving.”
***
Shane isn’t making excuses for himself.
He knows he fucked up and that he’s too old to be running the streets at all hours of the night. After being released from Bordeaux last month, he vowed that this time, it would be different.
“I’m going to the YMCA later this week for job training, I’m staying with my mom, I’m not talking to my ex, I’ve gotta get my life back on track,” he said. “I ain’t got no fight left in me. That’s the old Shane. Even the cops know to leave me alone.”
As far back as I can remember, Shane has been saying some version of this. And every time I hear the words, I believe he’s trying to change. I still do.
There is goodness in him. I remember once seeing someone steal from an elderly homeless lady, only to see Shane grab the thief and berate him until he gave the old woman her money back. Had it come to blows, Shane would have had his work cut out for him. Considering he’s just a few inches over five feet and weighs maybe 130 pounds, Shane’s intensity is often his only weapon against much larger assailants.
But I also know he struggles to keep that rage in check. And when I ask him where he thinks it comes from, Shane alludes to a troubled youth in the foster care system and some bad memories from his time in the army. That’s usually where the conversation dies.
Throughout all this, he shows moments of razor sharp self-awareness.
“Chris, remember when I said I ain’t got no fight left in me?” he asked.
“Yeah?”
“I don’t know if that’s true. Maybe I got some left.”
This story was edited by Diane Yeung.
Publisher’s note…
Hey gang,
It’s your pal Chris. Things got a little hot after Ukraine, with a drawn out move from the country back to the city and a little munchkin that hasn’t been sleeping. Add to that, a public debate over Bill 96 that earned me a death threat and I was about ready to start fist-fighting strangers from the Internet. So I took a few weeks to gather myself.
This project has been a dream. In less than two years, we’ve won a national journalism award, a medal from the National Assembly and two nominations at the Canadian Association of Journalists Awards (we did not win but congrats to the brilliant reporters who did).
Anyhow, we’re back and though I may take a few weeks before the end of the summer, The Rover will keep getting that sweet sweet journalism directly to your inbox on the regular. Coming up: an interview with Montreal Gazette’s new editor in chief, Bert Archer.
Shining a light on important issues that are so often ignored - thank you again so much for your good work. I can only hope those in authority are actually paying attention, and hopefully those of us that can will make some noise thanks to this.
♥️