“Not in my backyard”? My eye

In Montreal, we find more and more homeless people who are more and more mentally ill, more and more intoxicated by increasingly strong street drugs.

Result: human suffering in the open.

Result (bis): increasingly tense interactions between the homeless and their neighbors, residents and traders, for example.

In this context, do you know what surprises (and delights) me when we talk about homelessness issues?

The generally calm tone of the discussion.

The elected officials are empathetic. Valérie Plante pleads for sustainable state aid for housing. Denis Coderre, before her, was angry about anti-homeless measures in street furniture. In the political class, I don’t hear any talk of stigmatization.

Same story in the media: we are careful not to stigmatize. See this file in The dutyMonday¹. That of Nathalie Collard in The PressTuesday².

When we talk about it, we give voice to social workers, we explain the complexity of homelessness, with its ingredients of trauma, access to housing, drug addiction, etc.

Even among citizens affected by the brutally unpleasant sides of homelessness, there is restraint. In the McGill ghetto, where itinerant Inuit appeared overnight, you have to look long and hard to find citizens making inflammatory statements…

Overnight, these residents of the south of the Plateau began to rub shoulders with the pokiest of poques. The same goes for traders. It comes with a lot of incivility that ends up getting on your nerves.

When I talk about empathy towards the homeless, my meeting with Josée-Anne Choquette comes to mind³. On February 13, 2020, she was attacked with a stick by a homeless person losing contact with reality, near the Beaubien metro station. It was a case that caused a stir in Montreal.

His assailant, a homeless man suffering from psychosis, was arrested shortly after. He was also found not criminally responsible, as he should be. Interned in psychiatry, he was however discharged very quickly.

Seven months after the attack, Josée-Anne embodied this calm tone in the discussion on homelessness that I described above. She was shocked to see him released from the hospital so quickly. But she worried about the supervision he would receive.

I quote her: “I know that prison is not an appropriate place for someone like him, because he will not receive care there. »

I emphasize here that I had watched the videotape of the attack. Out of nowhere, the young man rushed to hit Josée-Anne Choquette in the head with a stick, like a power hitter going for a home run in baseball…

Josée-Anne never saw it coming and if she is not dead or in a vegetative state today, it is only because the itinerant slipped on the fresh snow a second before the impact of the stick on the head of the young mother.

And despite that, despite the fact that Josée-Anne came close to death that evening, she did not give in to reactionary instincts, she was not in a revanchist speech like “lock all these people up… there ! “.

Her speech, and the tone of her speech, reflected the general discourse on homelessness in 2023. She made things clear.

Which brings me to the problems in what has been described as “crack alley” in downtown Montreal.⁴, in the little rue Berger. The Cactus organization opened a supervised injection center, a harm reduction service⁵ which reduces overdose deaths.

But the tenants of an adjacent building are at their wits’ end: they live all day long with incivility of all kinds from people who frequent this injection site.

I quote the text of The Press on the residents’ press conference: “They leave behind dirty syringes, excrement and other trash in addition to being noisy and threatening residents who dare to ask them to leave their building…”

Because homeless drug addicts also enter the building to squat there. They are sometimes aggressive. One resident was even attacked with an iron bar.

Despite everything, the tone of their statements remains remarkably conciliatory, given the circumstances, if I trust the reports of the press conference.

I quote Guy Robert, president of the non-profit organization which manages the building: “We are not against injection sites, it is an essential service. The service is not well provided and the situation has become intolerable. »

I add that the problems have lasted for seven years…

And that residents expressed their grievances in a good neighborly committee. They suggest that the Cactus site be open 24/7, rather than just 12 hours.

They suggest that the premises be larger, to prevent homeless people from consuming in the street, next to the site.

In short, these people sort things out.

But for the big boss of Cactus, residents tired of being insulted by homeless people by walking in their excrement, in addition to sometimes being attacked, they should shut up.

I quote Jean-François Mary⁶, the CEO of Cactus: “There is “not in my backyard” everywhere. It shows the stigmatization suffered by this clientele, no one wants to have these people nearby…”

And at Duty⁷ : “It is an abandonment of the attempt to live together. »

Jean-François Mary falls into laughable demagoguery. Faced with his crude shortcuts, we say to ourselves that Mr. Mary would make a good candidate for the Conservative Party of Quebec…

Because you can be empathetic towards the homeless AND not want to be attacked (physically or verbally) by homeless people when you take out the trash or when you step over someone sleeping on the stairs of your building.

We can be in favor of the principle of an injection center AND expect that the people who go there will be subject to a minimum attempt at supervision, precisely so that “living together” is not one-way.

And if we don’t care at all about the experience of citizens who live with the very serious problems of homelessness – I’m talking about you, Jean-François Mary – all we’re going to create is a reservoir voters who will end up demanding a strong method to “clean up” the problem.