More than 4,200 homeless encampments have been dismantled in the country’s five largest cities since the start of the year, data compiled by The duty. From Edmonton to Toronto and Montreal, thousands of homeless people find themselves forced to constantly move to cities where shelters are at maximum capacity.
Since 2021, 12,879 camps for people experiencing homelessness have been dismantled by law enforcement and municipal employees in the 5 most populous cities in the country, show data provided by them in response to questions from the Duty.
This phenomenon has grown in several metropolises, including Montreal, but it is in Edmonton, the second largest city in Alberta, that this increase has been most marked in the country. The City has thus dismantled 4,605 encampments deemed “high risk” since 2021, almost as many as in Toronto, which has a population 2.5 times larger.
“Encampments are a city-wide problem and represent a symptom of the shortage of safe, adequate and affordable housing and capacity issues in shelters,” explains the City of Edmonton by email. She says the number of people experiencing homelessness in the city doubled during the pandemic to 3,119 in September, according to an online registry. Of the lot, 57% are Indigenous, even though they represent less than 6% of this city’s residents.
According to the City, the dismantling of camps on its territory is necessary for reasons of public safety, in particular to prevent fires. However, faced with the lack of places in Edmonton’s shelters, many homeless people only move further each time the police come to dismantle and throw away their makeshift accommodation and part of their belongings, further precarious their lives. situation, deplores lawyer Chris Wiebe.
The latter works for the Coalition for Justice and Human Rights (CJHR), which launched legal action against the City of Edmonton at the end of August in the hope of making the dismantling of encampments illegal when the shelters reserved for them are at maximum of their capacity.
“The shelters are full or there are legitimate reasons why people decide to stay in camps rather than in shelters”, in particular because they are not adapted to the needs of families or because of the presence vermin, notes Mr. Wiebe. Judgments handed down in recent years in cities in Ontario and British Columbia have also recognized that dismantling homeless encampments without having enough solutions to offer them goes against their fundamental rights.
The City of Edmonton declined our interview request.
Toronto in “crisis”
Toronto, for its part, is “by far” the Canadian city with the greatest number of shelter places per capita to accommodate homeless people, said the spokesperson for the Canadian metropolis, Lindsay Broadhead, in an interview. However, the number of beds available in these resources is not increasing as quickly as the number of homeless people, which has exceeded 10,000 in recent months in Toronto, or as many as in Quebec as a whole.
The number of makeshift camps is growing in the country’s metropolis to reach 259, spread across 72 parks and green spaces. The City also reports 1,410 camps whose tents have been “removed or abandoned” since the beginning of the year, these camps going against some of its regulations surrounding the use of municipal parks and the public space, indicates the City by email.
However, there too, the shelters are overflowing. There are 200 refusals per day “because there are no beds available”, indicates Lindsay Broadhead. “That’s why we’re talking about a crisis. There are more people coming to the city, there is financial pressure [en raison du coût élevé des loyers] and there are fewer places for people to go,” she adds.
The City of Toronto therefore tries, as much as possible, to offer access to housing to homeless people who are in encampments, but housing is scarce. “We lack resources,” adds Mme Broadhead, who calls on the Ontario government and Ottawa to allow the City to have more funds to house the homeless.
It’s difficult to access affordable housing
In Ottawa, only around thirty dismantlings have been reported since the start of the year, even though the City has intervened in 375 encampments, a gap which can be explained by the fact that in the vast majority of cases, the homeless have been directed to shelters before dismantling is necessary. However, many homeless people return to camps shortly after being directed to shelters, notes the president and CEO of the Ottawa Mission, Peter Tilley. “It’s difficult to have access to affordable housing, so people go to sleep in camps,” he summarizes.
Adapt resources
In Montreal, as of mid-August, more than 280 camps had been dismantled since the start of the year. However, several districts do not compile information on this subject, which suggests that this number is underestimated. One thing is certain, “there is an increase in homelessness everywhere in the territory,” notes the Commissioner for People Experiencing Homelessness for the City of Montreal, Serge Lareau.
The latter also agrees that the lack of available places in shelters in the Quebec metropolis in recent years has contributed to the arrival of makeshift camps in certain parks and under viaducts. Thus, even if the City has “doubled” since the start of the pandemic the number of beds intended for the homeless, “we still need to increase the number of places in shelters,” he notes.
There is in particular a lack of shelters offering specialized services and care for people with mental health or addiction problems, notes the director of emergency services at the Old Brewery Mission, Émilie Fortier. In this context, “the vast majority [des itinérants]when there is a dismantling, they just move elsewhere” rather than going to a shelter, she specifies.
Mme Fortier also notes that what the majority of people who sleep in tents in Montreal want is affordable housing. “A person who chooses public space, their need, is not transport to a shelter. Her need is a home over which she has control. »