While many neighborhood merchants were sounding the alarm, the mayoress of Montreal recently presented the action plan for the Village in the Ville-Marie borough. After listening to the mayor and taking note of the recommendations, I must honestly say that the result is very disappointing. A few months after the city’s ombudsman criticized elected officials for continuing with the same approach that they know is ineffective in dealing with homelessness, I would have expected that we would be offered a change of course and not more mitigation measures. A few months after the mission of the Union of Quebec Municipalities to Finland led by Mayor Bruno Marchand, who refuses to see homelessness as inevitable, I would have expected the Mayor to have something else for us say that to learn to live with and present homelessness as normal due to the proximity of the city center.
I must also say that the portrait of the situation bears witness to social hypocrisy. To present the heavy social problems shoveled for decades in this district as the “social problems of the Village”, is to present the situation as if they emanate from the Village, whereas they affect it because of measures taken by the municipal administrations. successive. Having seen for more than a quarter of a century as editor all the revitalization projects for the borough’s micro-neighbourhoods and the City’s interventions to deal with the social problems of the street, it is clear in my mind that their increase in the Village is directly linked to the settlement towards the east of all the margins of the street with the revitalization of the Faubourg Saint-Laurent, then of the Quartier des spectacles.
Several researchers have documented this process. Police repression was consciously used by the authorities of the time to “clean up” the former Red Light. I remember all too well the police interventions in Émilie-Gamelin at the end of the 1990s to expel the young people from the street who were sent back to the Village. They had then taken up residence in Beaudry metro park and Campbell park.
I also remember the insane street prostitution diversion project proposed by the City in 1999-2000 to rid other neighborhoods of the phenomenon by concentrating it “in the Centre-Sud”. The City had to back down in the face of the outcry of the population, but it remained deaf to the citizen’s concern to see a large concentration of resources gradually settling in the neighborhood for “street clienteles”. It does not take Papineau’s head to understand that, if we set up resources around the Village for all street clients, including two supervised injection sites, we are preparing a merry storm. But when you have big revitalization projects worth hundreds of millions of dollars, you find it completely normal to settle these people further east and you say to yourself that gays are tolerant, marginal and that the Village is not is not a neighborhood for families. So it’s less of a problem to settle these problems there.
Our community is familiar with these “clean-up” operations carried out by municipal governments over the decades. It was precisely the crackdown leading up to the Olympics that caused gay establishments to migrate to what is now the Village. When the Mayor talks about the struggles waged by our communities, it is certainly embarrassing to remember that it is often against the municipal administration and its police department that they have been waged. The City recognizes the existence of systemic discrimination, it questions its propensity to ask our communities to live with what would be intolerable in other neighborhoods. Beyond the declarations of love of our elected officials for the Village, we can only note that it is the last pole of the borough to wait for a revitalization project.
For decades, both community organizations and researchers have been asking that we no longer be content with opening shelters or day centres, having teams of street workers, but that we offer supervised housing to those who want to get off the streets. In order to be able to intervene effectively, it is necessary to stabilize people and create the conditions for follow-up. This inevitably involves providing a roof. The experience of Finland, which Mayor Marchand went to study this winter, is convincing in this respect.
More than 60 years after the Quiet Revolution, it is high time that our governments stop relying on Christian charity and community organizations to address these social issues. It is pathetic that we still rely on these resources which, despite all their goodwill, are insufficient and above all not equipped for psychosocial follow-up over the years. Many will say that such a change of direction will take years to produce effects and that results are needed in the short term. I have heard this argument for at least 25 years. And from short-term actions to mitigation measures, this is where we are. Perhaps it would be different if we had changed course 25 years ago.