Workers helping the homeless in Montreal feel powerless as crisis deepens

A homeless encampment of tents are seen near the highway in the west end of Montreal on Tuesday, Dec. 10, 2024. (The Canadian Press/Christinne Muschi)

Social workers on the front lines of homelessness in Montreal say they feel increasingly powerless as more people find themselves forced to live in tents during the winter.

Stéphanie Lareau has worked with homeless people in the city for the past 20 years. Normally, the tents begin to disappear by December, she said. But this year is different.

“This is going to be the first year for me that there are so many of them, and that there aren't many places to go. By August, I was calling shelters and they were full every day. That never used to happen before,” said Lareau.

As temperatures drop in Montreal, homeless shelters are overcrowded and warming stations — furnished with chairs, not beds — are at capacity. Unhoused people wander around subway stations, while others sleep standing up in 24-hour restaurants. Many are pitching tents to survive the winter.

The situation has already proved deadly. On Dec. 15, a 55-year-old homeless man was found dead in a Montreal park. Authorities believe he may have died of hypothermia.

Alison Meighen-Maclean, who has worked with homeless people for the past decade at the regional health authority in east-end Montreal, said people urgently need roofs over their heads. The warming stations officials set up this year are not addressing the need because they are only designed to keep people indoors for a short period of time, she said.

In early December, the Quebec government said it had housed 1,000 of the province's homeless people — a population that stood at about 10,000, as of 2022. A new count of unhoused people in Quebec is scheduled for January 2025.

Lionel Carmant, Quebec's minister of social services, said organizations supporting homeless people were behind the apparent reduction. He also credited a government program that provides mental health services while helping people find housing.

For Meighen-Maclean, the housing and homelessness crises are tied together.

“In today's market, it's getting back into the [housing] market once you've been rejected that's very difficult,” she said, explaining that many are homeless for the first time. Some, she said, had been getting by on social assistance and were evicted or lost their job.

"Everybody who works with the homeless is feeling a lot of powerlessness on a daily basis," she said.

Lareau said homelessness ballooned during the COVID-19 pandemic, adding that the portrait of homelessness has changed. In some cases, seniors are being renovicted from their apartments, she said.

“Sometimes they don't really know the laws or their rights, so they get a bit screwed,” she said.

A renoviction occurs when a landlord cites the need for major renovations as the reason behind an eviction.

Carmant noted the government has increased funding for tackling homelessness, from a five-year budget of $280 million to $410 million.

“This year, we added another $15 million, and with federal investment, it's going to be another $25 million for the next two years. We've improved the plan several times, both in terms of emergency measures and housing supports,” he said in an interview.

Carmant also said he wants to see more supportive housing in the coming years.

“We talk a lot about shelters, but we have a lot of people who are still in shelters after 12, 18, 24 months,” he said, adding the goal is to give people support once they leave a shelter so they don’t return to the street.

“When they're ready to be more independent, we put them in what we call supportive housing, where they have their own kitchen … there are no common spaces, it's really like an apartment," he said.

Laurie Mercure, head of the concurrent disorders, addictions and homelessness department at the east-end Montreal health authority, welcomes the promising programs. However, she said too many people are falling through the cracks — especially seniors who need apartments adapted for their needs, couples and those with pets, all of whom face additional barriers to getting housed.

Meighen-Maclean, Mercure and Lareau all said that community organizations and intervention workers are building trust with unhoused people so that they are open to accepting help, even if it means getting someone a health insurance card, which for some is their sole piece of identification.

Sending nurses into the field also makes a difference. “I think we can prevent a person's condition from deteriorating by going into their environment. It doesn't matter if it's a shelter or a camp, with nursing care we can perhaps avoid hospitalization or a trip to the emergency room,” Meighen-Maclean said.

One of the goals, she said, is to accompany the person to services, so they can access care just like Quebecers who aren’t on the street. “We're seeing improvements in access to services. But it's not perfect. There's still work to be done,” she said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 22, 2024.

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