Montreal shopping mall playing 'Baby Shark' song to prevent unhoused from loitering

A shopping mall and office complex in downtown Montreal is being criticized for using the popular children's song "Baby Shark" to discourage unhoused people from loitering in its emergency exit stairwells.

At the mall Thursday morning, the catchy children's song — versions of which have been viewed and streamed hundreds of millions of times online — was being broadcast from speakers in at least one of the stairwells, on loop and at various speeds.

Complexe Desjardins, named after financial services company Desjardins, which owns the mall and the towers that sit above it, has been playing the music for one year in the stairwells to respond to "security issues" involving people experiencing homelessness, spokesperson Jean-Benoît Turcotti said Thursday.

Since that time, the company has "noticed an improvement," he said in an email.

But one advocate for the homeless says it is "cruel and unusual" to play a song on repeat, purposefully to irritate people.

Far from helping address the root causes of the problem, the mall is shifting the issue to a different location, Sam Watts, CEO of Welcome Hall Mission, which offers services to homeless people, said in an interview.

"It isn't possible to resolve the complexities of homelessness by using juvenile tactics that are conceived to exclude people," he said. "You don't solve a problem by displacing a problem."

Watts said he recognizes that merchants and other people are concerned by the increasing visibility of homelessness, but "the answer isn't to do things that are going to further make people who are vulnerable even more vulnerable."

Turcotti said Desjardins is sensitive to homeless issues and has hired two social workers to "ensure a dialogue" with the vulnerable people who visit the mall. "Our aim is not to coerce, but to support these people," he said.

David Chapman, executive director of shelter Resilience Montreal, also disapproves of the practice, saying it is inhumane to annoy vulnerable people to the point that they move elsewhere. Chapman said he suspects the company likely grew exasperated, as the presence of homeless people has noticeably increased in the downtown area in the past few years.

The problem ultimately stems from a lack of shelter options for unhoused people in the city, Chapman said. "In the last 10 years in Canada, there's been a movement away from funding homeless day shelters and night shelters and we're beginning to see the consequences of that."

Montreal is not the only city using "Baby Shark" to clear people from property. Media reports say that in 2023 a clothing store owner in Nanaimo, B.C., played the song to deter people from sleeping in front of his shop. In 2019, officials in West Palm Beach, Florida, began blasting the song on a continuous loop throughout the night to keep people from sleeping on the patio of a city-owned rental banquet facility.

In recent years, Montreal, Toronto and other Canadian cities have introduced park benches with multiple armrests, making it more difficult for people to lie down in public spaces — an example of what is sometimes dubbed "anti-homeless design." In 2013, the City of Abbotsford, B.C., dumped chicken manure on a site where unhoused people gathered and slept, in a bid to keep them away. 

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 28, 2024.

— With files from The Associated Press