Roaming | Pitching your tent in Montreal for good?

The makeshift homeless encampments that have been springing up in Montreal for a few years could become much more difficult for authorities to dislodge.

This is what a judgment rendered last week by the Superior Court of Ontario suggests, which is likely to have impacts across the country.

The judge rendered his decision following a request from the municipality of Waterloo, which wanted to evict a group of about fifty homeless people living in a vacant lot belonging to it.

The magistrate’s answer is clear: you cannot.

If a city is unable to provide enough shelter for its homeless people, it cannot prevent them from pitching tents, he says in a nutshell. Evicting them violates several rights guaranteed by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Places in shelters are lacking in Waterloo, but also in Montreal, Quebec and in several other cities in the province, as demonstrated by the commotion caused by the weather of the last few days.

After this week’s polar cold spell, a hot summer is shaping up on the ground (and in the courts).

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Montreal is “concerned” by the judgment rendered in Ontario. The City has instructed its lawyers to study the repercussions of this decision in the metropolis, I was confirmed at the office of Mayor Valérie Plante.

This concern is completely understandable.

In recent years, camps have sprung up – and been dismantled – in several neighborhoods. Last June, a group of a dozen homeless people spent a month on land belonging to the Ministry of Transport, along rue Notre-Dame Est, before being chased away.

It was at least the third time in three years that a “dismantling” operation had taken place in this sector.

I spoke to several experts who believe that the Ontario judgment could be used in Quebec. Especially since it confirms – with more force – decisions already made in recent years in British Columbia.

One of the important elements of the judgment is that it specifies that the homeless do not have to accept de facto to be housed in any shelter.

Several establishments refuse to welcome people who are drunk or on drugs, couples or even pet owners, for example. As a result, homeless people who fall into these categories often feel better – or rather less badly – ​​in a makeshift camp, with their peers.

According to the Ontario judgment, “truly accessible” places must be offered in shelters so that the authorities can dismantle a camp. In other words, places where the homeless do not fear for their physical safety, a right guaranteed by the Charter.

These places were not available in Waterloo and they are not always available in Montreal either.

There are approximately 1,600 beds in emergency shelters in the metropolis, for a homeless population of more than 3,100 people, undoubtedly largely underestimated.

Many homeless people do not fit into any box, even when a place is available on paper. This leaves many left behind for whom makeshift camping sometimes becomes the only solution.

“People will be able to say: I have the right to my plan B, and my plan B, in this case, is the organization of a camp”, illustrates Lucie Lamarche, professor of the legal sciences department of the UQAM.

As in Waterloo, groups representing the homeless could turn to the courts in Montreal to challenge the dismantling of future camps located on vacant land. Their chances of success seem good, according to Professor Christine Vézina, from the Faculty of Law at Laval University, co-responsible for the Study Group on Rights and Freedoms.

“It’s a safe bet that in the event of a challenge, the Superior Court would reach a conclusion similar to that of Ontario [et, précédemment, de la Cour d’appel de Colombie-Britannique] she told me.

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If Montreal is currently studying the legal ramifications of the Ontario decision, the City also emphasizes that makeshift camps are in no way a “solution” to homelessness. This judgment demonstrates even more “the urgency of accelerating the creation of social housing”, it is argued in the office of the mayor.

The urgency is there, indeed, and the needs are gigantic.

The Plante administration is currently preparing its housing demands for Quebec in view of the next provincial budget. They will be full-bodied.

The “great minimum”, I am told, would be to be able to create 300 new social housing units each year for itinerant populations.

We are talking here about a type of housing adapted, for example, to drug addicts, women victims of violence or those suffering from mental disorders. Not to mention the investments required to finance the specialized services that come with it.

The demands made in Quebec will be calculated in tens of millions of dollars. And we are only talking here about those of the City of Montreal.

At the provincial level, the Union of Municipalities has just created a committee specifically dedicated to the issue of homelessness, chaired by the mayor of Quebec, Bruno Marchand. Over the next few months, it will quantify the financial contribution of cities to deal with the homelessness crisis.

The amount also promises to be astronomical.

Both the provincial and the federal will be called upon to release funds to create social housing of all kinds, and it is time they really answered the call.

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The homelessness crisis is no longer in doubt in Montreal. The distress is everywhere in the street and the metro, clearly visible, but the situation is also beginning to disrupt the lives of residents in several central neighborhoods.

Tuesday, I wrote a chronicle on the decrepitude of the sector around the Berri-UQAM station. Dozens of citizens have written to me to express their feeling of insecurity and to denounce what they perceive as deplorable inaction by the municipal authorities.

Anxiety is growing in other neighborhoods like Mercier-Est, Old Montreal, Milton Parc…

The challenge for the Plante administration will be enormous over the next few months. It will have to do more for the itinerant populations, with still insufficient means, and cajole more the citizens of its central neighborhoods, many of whom are thinking of leaving the island of Montreal for less gray pastures.

Big contract.