“You lose your bearings, you lose everything.”

Richard Côté stares into space with a stunned expression as the sound of the garbage truck fades away as it pulls away from the piece of land that was his home just a few minutes earlier. For him and other homeless people, this is another forced eviction and even more precariousness.

“I was starting to settle in,” sighs Richard Côté. “In the morning, I would open my little stove and make myself eggs and hot dogs.”

This Wednesday, July 17, employees of the City of Montreal arrived in the early morning accompanied by police officers, not to offer him a housing option, but with the order to dismantle the makeshift camp that he had set up along the Des Carrières bike path since March.

While he fills a trash can with his last remaining possessions, a city maintenance worker cleans the grounds of the last signs of life left by its inhabitants.

“It breaks my heart to have to do this, because he will have to relocate elsewhere, while it was a lot of work for them to set all this up,” admits the municipal employee, who prefers to remain anonymous. “It’s hard, I find it boring.”

That day, her last exchanges with Richard Côté were a simple smile, a few cigarettes and the little change she had on her.

A “question of survival”

Under a bridge in Mile End, two long-time lovers pass the time among the tarps, their plastic tent and the objects they use every day.

The lives of Nova Scotian Gemini Keiths and her partner Raphi are punctuated by eviction notices that force them to continually rebuild a new “home.”

Gemini Keiths knows what it can cost to dismantle. Since the beginning of the year alone, she and her partner have had to move twice after receiving notices from the City of Montreal. Over time, she’s learned to protect her most cherished possessions so they don’t become food for the garbage truck.

Despite her infectious zest for life, she cannot hide the anger she feels towards the people employed to dismantle her camp.

“I’m not the oppressor, and neither is the drunk guy yelling on the sidewalk,” she said. [L’oppresseur]it’s this huge group of people who own every gun in existence and can legally use them on you for no reason.”

“Safety comes in numbers”

“It’s like a family,” Keiths says of camp life. She says the community life allows people to look out for each other, especially in dire situations like overdoses.

“You end up being super close with everyone,” she said. “Even if you don’t like the person living next to you, if one day they wake up and they’re not doing well, everyone’s going to come and help them.”

The young woman struggles to explain the authorities’ approach to the camps.

“What’s better? Having one fire under control or having lots of little fires everywhere?” she asks. [Les campements]it is also a question of survival, because safety comes from being numerous.

“We need to, as a community, make sure that this person [dans la rue] is safe, she adds. It’s not about putting her under more stress by isolating her and pointing fingers at her.”

“They are having everything they had taken away.”

Sitting on his sofa in the studio he has occupied for seven months, Guylain Levasseur remembers very well those years spent on the streets and the consequences of the dismantling on human lives.

He was among the residents of the encampment that was created in the summer of 2020 along Notre-Dame Street East and whose proper functioning he supervised. By the time it was dismantled in early winter 2020, more than 120 people had created a community there.

“We had a team for the kitchen, one for maintenance, and we had recycling bins,” says Guylain Levasseur with a smile on his face.

He then recalls with great bitterness that day in December 2020 when the authorities arrived to dismantle the camp after one of the tents caught fire.

Read our article on the dismantling of the Notre-Dame camp

“I lost some stock [ce jour-là]he said. We lost all the kitchen equipment, the propane tanks, everything ended up in containers, and most people didn’t find their belongings.”

Guylain Levasseur says that on that day, many tents thrown into the trash were not even opened to recover their owner’s personal belongings.

“There was a woman sitting on the ground crying because she didn’t know where to go,” he says. “You lose your bearings, you lose everything.”

“There are people who don’t have much in life and it’s extremely hard when the only little things they have are taken away from them,” he said. “There are people who will hide and put themselves at risk of dying alone.”

A public relations officer for the City of Montreal, Camille Bégin, explains that we “assume our responsibilities and intervene to ensure urban security and social cohabitation.”

Yet the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing considers forced evictions to be “a flagrant violation of human rights and prohibited in all circumstances, including in the context of encampments.”

“In all cases, the City of Montreal is opting for a gradual and tailored approach to people, with an intervention time allowing them to relocate and contact support organizations,” assures M^me Bégin. The encampments pose security issues. For the City of Montreal, urban encampments are not a viable, safe or sustainable solution.

But for Guylain Levasseur, there is no doubt that dismantling exposes people to a greater risk of mortality.

He evokes the tragic story of Sarah, a young thirty-something homeless woman who was being dismantled “all the time”, according to him. She is said to have lost her life following an overdose while she had isolated herself to hide from view.

“Dismantling can kill […]. It discourages you, but it can even kill you, he said. If they’re already down, there’s no point in putting more on their backs, because they’re already completely down.”