DYING OUTSIDE
In La Ronge, being homeless can kill you.
Devin Bernatchez will never forget the last time he saw his cousin.
It was a chilly afternoon in late December 2014. Bernatchez, then 34, was driving down the streets of downtown La Ronge.
Kevin Richie — who’d lost his job and battle with addictions less than five years earlier — was making the same journey by foot with a group of other homeless men.
Richie, also 34 at the time, was easy to pick out of a crowd; he had a distinctive gait because his toes had been amputated in his late 20s after he’d trekked barefoot through the snow.
Bernatchez pulled over and offered Richie a ride to the Scattered Site Outreach Program. The organization was hosting a Christmas meal for the town’s most vulnerable, and Richie wanted to be part of it.
“I’ll always remember the conversation I had with him is that he wanted to get a job, he wanted to do good things,” Bernatchez says. “I could see the determination that he wanted to do better.” Richie never got the chance. By all accounts, the former lumberyard worker from Lac La Ronge Indian Band had a jovial evening at the Scattered Site Christmas dinner. Workers there cajoled him into sitting on Santa’s knee for a picture, despite his protestations that he didn’t want to sit on a man’s lap.
Then evening came, and Scattered Site closed for the night.
The next time Richie was seen he was dead, frozen in a shack on the side of the highway. Bernatchez was told alcohol poisoning took his life before the cold did.
Richie was not the first homeless person in La Ronge to die that way. Workers at Scattered Site say that, on average, three of their clients die outside at night each year — some from exposure, some from drug overdoses, alcohol poisoning or untreated illnesses.
“That’s a lot of people to lose in your community,” says Jackie Ballantyne, a community outreach worker with Scattered Site. “If this was, say, a small community down south, if you’d lost that many people, you’d think what the hell’s going on? Why does this continue?”
Bernatchez knows Richie’s addictions led to his death, but he can’t help wondering if his cousin’s fate would have been different if Scattered Site — or any place in the town of roughly 3,000 people — had provided overnight shelter for the homeless at the time.
Bernatchez wasn’t the only one with those thoughts. Less than a month after Richie’s death, Scattered Site started a temporary overnight program.
“We got very disturbed at losing people each winter,” says Rob MacKenzie, former chair of the North Sask Special Needs group that oversees Scattered Site. “One person freezing to death is one person far, far too many and we recognized that problem and felt that it was absolutely essential that we try to do something about it.”
Scattered Site launched a community fundraiser and collected $13,000, which allowed it to hire staff to open five nights a week from mid-January until the end of March 2015.
The aging Scattered Site building did not meet building code requirements for beds to be set up, nor could the centre have afforded them if they were allowed. Men and women curled up on couches or sat in metal chairs, heads resting on plastic tables.
When money for the overnight operation ran out, Scattered Site returned to its normal daytimeonly hours. Because of the high number of people who relied on the extended service — more than 20 — Scattered Site was able to write a compelling grant application for federal money. In November, Ottawa awarded $80,000 so the shelter could be staffed seven nights a week over the winter. MacKenzie was “ecstatic.” “It would have been really tough to go into November and say ‘Well, the lake’s freezing and so are people and we can’t provide anything,’ ” he says.
Scattered Site re-launched its extended hours program in midNovember and purchased 10 loungers for clients to sleep in at night — they’re cheaper than beds and technically allowed.
Ninety people have spent at least one night in those loungers in the last six months. The shelter has capacity for 10, but will house more on the coldest nights. Most who seek shelter are men, and only one identified as non-aboriginal. Many are from the Lac La Ronge Indian Band, but others hail from Peter Ballantyne Cree Nation, Montreal Lake Cree Nation, Hatchet Lake Denesuline Nation and other northern communities. The clients range in age from 19 to 62.
All could be looking for other sleeping arrangements soon. Money for the extended hours program has dried up again. It runs for the last time tonight.
Spring has arrived in La Ronge, but people continue to seek overnight shelter at Scattered Site.
Temperatures still dip below zero when the sun sets, and the lake remains covered in ice.
On one of the last nights the centre is open, two men arrived before the doors opened at 10 p.m. There was never enough money for Scattered Site to run 24 hours a day, so clients have to find other ways to stay warm during evenings and on weekends when there’s no daytime program.
One man in a tattered, oversized coat rubbed his shaking hands together to warm them. Another rocked back and forth on a pair of crutches, his large rubber boots scuffing the ground. As they fidgeted, the motion-sensor light above the shelter flickered on and off, occasionally illuminating the unassuming Scattered Site entrance, which is accessed from an alley off the town’s main downtown road.
When outreach worker Jackie Ballantyne arrived and pushed her key into the lock, they rushed into the warmth.
“You guys need to use extra blankets tonight because our fuel has all run out,” she told them as she bustled to the kitchen to make dinner.
It was the latest hiccup in a rough week; days earlier, the building shifted so much that the door jammed shut. Staff had to pry it open with a crowbar to let people in.
As Ballantyne buttered bread for sandwiches, Scattered Site filled up. A half-dozen men milled around the main room, watching TV and talking as a staff member deftly moved tables to the side and turned loungers into structures resembling beds.
Regan McKenzie, a regular at Scattered Site, said he’d sleep in the bush when Scattered Site was no longer open at night.
Surviving in spring is manageable, but McKenzie said he hopes the centre reopens next fall.
“Winter is different,” he mumbled. “People pass on.”
McKenzie spoke from experience. Last winter, before Scattered Site offered extended hours, one of his friends, whom he declined to name, had too much to drink and tried to get into the centre at night. The doors were locked. The man passed out and froze to death.
“It’s hard to talk about,” McKenzie said. “He’s there now.”
He inclined his head upward and it was unclear whether he was referring to heaven or a collection of paper feathers on the wall above him. Each feather bears the name of a Scattered Site client who died since the organization opened in 2007. Twenty-seven feathers adorn the wall, including one with Richie’s name and two that were added this winter.
Ballantyne said there have been more losses than feathers.
Homelessness in La Ronge has been a problem for as long as most people can remember, and it appears to be increasing, say politicians and those who work with the town’s most vulnerable people.
“We live in a community with some social issues, and some of what’s refreshing about it is they’re not under the carpet, they’re right out there, and so it’s no secret that we have a population that experiences various forms of homelessness,” says Carla Frohaug, chair of North Sask Special Needs.
Northern residents agree homelessness there is different than in the south. There’s more poverty, higher unemployment, less access to mental health and addictions services and less affordable housing. A significant number of people relying on Scattered Site services are part of a transient homeless population — they may be couch surfing, with roofs over their heads one night, but not the next.
A lack of affordable housing means many people are often crammed into a single home. NDP MLA Doyle Vermette, who represents the northern riding of Cumberland, says he’s heard of houses with so many people that they sleep in shifts so that beds, couches and patches of floor can be shared.
“It’s getting worse, not better,” he says.
While the homelessness “crisis” is present across northern Saskatchewan, Vermette says it’s felt most acutely in La Ronge because the town — the largest in northern Saskatchewan — is a gathering place for vulnerable people across the north.
A year ago, Vermette presented a petition to the legislature asking for funding to build a permanent 24-hour homeless shelter in La Ronge. No action was ever taken.
“How many people do we have to lose before governments and people respond?” Vermette asks. “We need something, a better shelter, a place where they can have a bed.”
Frohaug says a big part of the problem is jurisdictional: La Ronge bumps up against Lac La Ronge Indian Band reserve land, which can complicate things when looking for money.
“On-reserve and federal funds and off-reserve provincial support are right across the street from each other,” she says. “Those are significant barriers to serving the population that we’re trying to serve here.”
There’s agreement among those working with the town’s vulnerable people that all levels of government need to pitch in if La Ronge is ever to build a permanent 24- hour emergency shelter that would have luxuries—like beds and a sprinkler system—not present at Scattered Site.
“It’s very important, very needed for the community,” says La Ronge Mayor Thomas Sierzycki.
“The municipality will do everything in our power, whether it’s tax levies, making sure that we can supply land if there is a shelter that we will be built ... But, as a municipality, we’re very limited in what financial ability we do have, and (in) a community of our size, budgets are very tight.”
In an emailed statement, Saskatchewan Ministry of Social Services spokesperson Leya Moore said the government is in touch with leadership at Scattered Site and is aware that “a significant majority of the individuals they provide services to fall under federal government responsibility.”
She said the provincial government can play a role by connecting individuals to other human service providers, including the federal government, and that anyone in La Ronge can go to a provincial income assistance office to request emergency accommodation, which could consist of a night in a local hotel. The province’s practice is to provide emergency accommodation for one night, even for people who would typically be federally funded.
Georgina Jolibois, NDP MP for northern Saskatchewan, says groups in La Ronge may have more luck seeking federal funds for a 24hour shelter and that opportunities are greater now than they were under the Conservative government. The Liberal government’s budget, released last month, pledged $57.9 million to tackle homelessness this fiscal year.
Jolibois said she hopes her constituents in La Ronge — where the need is among the greatest in the country — get some of that.
The cost to build a 24-hour emergency shelter would likely be in the ballpark of $1 million, says Ron Woytowich, executive director of La Ronge’s Kikinahk Friendship Centre. He’s in the process of finding funds to make it happen.
The shelter would benefit the whole community, he says. Businesses wouldn’t have to worry about homeless people seeking refuge in their entranceways, and fewer homeless people would end up in jail cells and hospital emergency rooms, ultimately saving governments money.
Plus, the benefit for vulnerable people would be significant. Woytowich, like other leaders in the community, is adamant the need for shelter continues even after winter ends.
“Everybody thinks, ‘Oh, it’s not so bad because it’s summer,’ but it rains big time here and everything else, and we have bears in town,” he says.
A 24-hour emergency shelter won’t eradicate homelessness in La Ronge, but Lac La Ronge Indian Band Chief Tammy Cook-Searson says it would go a long way to help people who want to turn their lives around and become contributing members of society.
“If you don’t feel safe, if you don’t have a good night’s rest, if you don’t have a good meal, then you’re not able to deal with the inner issues that you need to deal with and are causing the addictions in your life,” she notes.
Bernatchez wishes his cousin had that opportunity.
After Richie’s death, Bernatchez went to the shack where his cousin died and collected his belongings. Among his clothes and some sleeping things, he found scribbled notes outlining Richie’s goals. The “proud man” had wanted to get sober and become a carpenter.
“Homelessness took that away from him,” Bernatchez says sadly. “He succumbed at an early age and probably shouldn’t have been a homeless person. He probably should have been doing something really good with his life right now.”
With the future of a 24-hour shelter in La Ronge uncertain, leaders there are hoping to at least find money to reopen Scattered Site overnight next winter.
“It’s a bit of a Band-Aid, but it’s what we can do right now,” Frohaug says.