Portrait of a riding divided
N.D.G.-Westmount grapples with income inequality, social ills
Beyond the quaint bookstores and all-day breakfast joints that line Sherbrooke St. W., there’s a neighbourhood that’s suffering.
Families living one paycheque at a time — sharing a crusty motel room while they linger on a waiting list for social housing — young people contemplating suicide with alarming regularity, intravenous drug users who struggle to find appropriate health care.
This is the Notre-Dame-deGrâce that Sara wades through every week in her role as a case worker with Head and Hands, a local non-profit organization.
This is the reality that simmers below a seemingly tranquil surface, betraying a need for action.
“There is an overwhelming demand for (street workers),” said Sara, who did not want her full name published due to the confidential nature of her work. “Our program fills a substantial need in our community that would otherwise go unmet.”
In a typical four-month period, she’ll meet with 300 clients — often they are at-risk youth or immigrant families unaware of their rights in a new country. Some call on her to act as an advocate to stand up to abusive landlords, others need suicide prevention counselling, and many just need access to a food bank.
Soon, Head and Hands will hire a second street worker to seek out the neighbourhood’s most vulnerable people and connect them with resources they need to stay afloat. But by Sara’s reckoning, one more worker might not be enough. She estimates that four people doing her job still wouldn’t meet the demands of a neighbourhood plagued with the social ills that come with poverty.
And yet, in the very same neighbourhood, people are thriving.
The riding, which serves as a study in extremes with its poor and wealthy residents, pits two vastly different candidates against each other ahead of next Monday’s federal election. Seeking his third mandate, Liberal MP Marc Garneau boasts a unique set of skills. The plain-spoken candidate is a retired military officer, engineer, former university administrator and — in case you were wondering — the first Canadian in outer space.
James Hughes is running for the New Democratic Party in the western Montreal riding and serves as sort of the perfect foil for Garneau. Whereas the Liberal MP’s experience lies in fields that require an obsessive degree of precision, Hughes’ career is based around something far more difficult to break into a science: fighting homelessness.
For years, Hughes ran the Old Brewery Mission, where he was on the front lines of a struggle against poverty that only seemed to intensify over time. Between 1995 and 2005, the mission had to triple the amount of beds it uses to house the city’s itinerant population.
Both candidates are keenly aware that, perhaps more than any other issue, poverty is a problem in urgent need of a solution in their riding and in Montreal as a whole. Garneau says the Westmount part of the electoral district’s name — which evokes the image of manicured lawns and luxury sedans — is misleading.
“The notion that this is a wealthy riding is one I’ve spent years trying to dispel,” said Garneau, who was first elected in 2008 in WestmountVille Marie. The riding boundaries were redrawn for this election.
“Poverty and homelessness are real problems here and, on a personal level, it deeply affects me. I’ve been so fortunate in my life and I believe that when someone has almost nothing left, when they have drug addiction problems, when they have mental health problems, the only thing that we can ensure and we must ensure that they do not lose, is their dignity as human beings,” he said, emotion creeping into his voice for the first time in the interview.
Despite (or perhaps because of ) his well-documented success as both an astronaut and a technocrat, the MP speaks with a very matterof-fact, wooden sort of cadence.
But Garneau seems to have honed this accountant-like efficiency in his approach to working with community groups. During an interview with the Montreal Gazette, he effortlessly rattled off a list of organizations he works with in and around the riding, recalling volunteers’ names, the dates of fundraisers or town hall meetings and specific policy points that apply to their needs.
He speaks of federal grants he helped the St-Raymond community centre secure to hire students for their summer programs and personally fundraising with Head and Hands.
“I was involved in a fundraiser where I got dunked in the pool if somebody threw the baseball properly,” Garneau says. "With St- Raymond’s, you realize that if there’s no summer program, there’s no place for single mothers to drop their kids off before they go to work. ...
“Being an MP is about federal policy but it’s about knowing your constituents. That’s what I’ve tried to do.”
Pivoting back to campaign mode, Garneau spoke of the 2,300 people in N.D.G. stuck on a waiting list for social housing. As part of a $20 billion campaign promise, the Liberals have vowed to build 25,000 social housing units in Canada by 2020 and Garneau says N.D.G. will get its share.
Hughes agrees that social housing could go a long way to alleviating some of the poverty in town but he contends that the Liberals are in no position to make promises to the poor. He says former Liberal Finance Minister Paul Martin made substantive cuts to social housing in 1995 and the system has yet to recover.
“Paul Martin eliminated affordable housing as a priority,” said Hughes. “For a great deal of politicians, the cost-cutting and austerity measures they use are paid for by the working poor and homeless.”
The NDP says it would make a massive investment in social housing, vowing to build 10,000 new units across Canada and maintain the existing stock through renovation programs.
During the 2011 Orange Crush, Garneau barely held on to his seat as upstart NDP candidates swept ridings across Quebec. And with the redrawn boundaries that place a much larger portion of the riding in working-class and poverty stricken parts of N.D.G., the New Democrats see the riding as one they could snatch from the Liberals.
Perhaps that explains why so many candidates — former Gazette journalist Sue Montgomery and city councillor Peter McQueen were among eight NDP hopefuls — competed in the party’s N.D.G.— Westmount nomination race. Highlighting the importance the New Democrats have placed on winning the riding, former United Nations ambassador Stephen Lewis was in Montreal for a rally Tuesday where he endorsed Hughes’s candidacy.
But as momentum shifts back toward the Liberals in the closing days of the campaign, polls suggest Garneau is building a healthy lead over his NDP rival with the Tories not truly factoring in the contest. Conservative Party candidate Richard Sagala did not return calls from the Gazette for this article.
There are obviously a bevy of issues that extend far beyond poverty in N.D.G. — public transit, small businesses, affordable housing come to mind — but for many residents, the struggle to climb out of poverty is a real and urgent problem.
“Things are perhaps better now than they were in the past but there’s still about one in four people in N. D. G — and this includes a lot of children — who live below the poverty line,” said Maleka Alaiba, the fundraising coordinator at Head and Hands.
“We reach clients who are so marginalized that they wouldn’t necessarily walk through our doors. ... There are (thousands) who use our services and still we have to turn people aside.”
For a great deal of politicians, the cost-cutting and austerity measures they use are paid for by the working poor and homeless.