Community organizations for homelessness in Montreal work day after day to offer resources adapted to the most marginalized people in our society.
Day centres, hot meals, cool stops during heat waves and heat stops in winter, street work, mobile services that crisscross our neighbourhoods, food banks, supervised consumption centres, social and community housing, shelters… the quality of resources in our metropolis is exceptional.
Community workers work hard all year long to ensure that the rights of people experiencing homelessness are respected. Like all of us, these people have the right to housing, to safety, to have access to appropriate health services, to enjoy public space and to exist in the city.
Organizations defend these rights and support thousands of people: they are essential for hundreds of households in our city and our neighborhoods.
While on the one hand, organizations are stretching their capacities to the maximum and showing imagination and flexibility to offer the best possible resources, on the other, inflammatory statements are fueling intolerance towards homeless populations and adding fuel to the fire of the “not in my backyard” phenomenon.
It is unacceptable for elected officials to oppose community resources that provide essential services to their own citizens. Visible homelessness is on the rise, a reality that elected officials will have to deal with in the coming years and navigate carefully.
Devastating
While eyes are turned towards the situation at Maison Benoît Labre, the same intolerance is being reproduced in several other neighbourhoods in Montreal – the closure of these resources would be devastating for people who are already marginalized.
Of course, the concerns of people who live in public spaces are valid, important and very real, but we would do well not to forget that people who inhabit public spaces are also members of our communities and should not be the target of stigmatizing and dehumanizing remarks from our political representatives.
Repeated discriminatory statements in the media fuel hatred and violence against vulnerable populations and are completely irresponsible and dangerous.
So what is the solution? There is no magic wand for homelessness, as the municipal administration has already pointed out. Homelessness is the intersection and superposition of complex issues that must be addressed upstream and urgently, all in consultation and in intersectoral and intergovernmental collaboration.
Complicated? Yes! Impossible? No! Beautiful things can come out of our collaborations: innovative ideas, surprising partnerships, improbable solutions, unsuspected solidarities and human stories filled with success.
When the municipal, provincial and community levels sit side by side and work together to find solutions, great projects emerge. We know it, we’ve already done it, together.
What we need from elected officials in Montreal right now is not more division, it’s more solidarity! That’s what we’re asking of our elected officials and our fellow citizens—let’s be united around this table and tackle the root causes of homelessness, not the people who experience it!