A QUEBEC REGION IN TURMOIL
Drugs part of life in Val-d’Or, Malartic
VAL-D’OR It's just past noon on Wednesday but only a trace of daylight creeps into the back of Bar Chez Dédé.
Inside the cavernous bar, simply mentioning Quebec's provincial police force is enough to provoke its patrons.
“Are you guys talking about the (Sûreté du Québec)?” says one man, hunched over a quart-sized bottle of Bud Light. “Let me tell you, I've got those guys up my ass and not halfway.”
He rises from his stool and lumbers toward the washroom, where he points to a smashed porcelain sink. There's a cement-like substance spread across the sink's rim. On the other side of the tiny room, black tar has been smeared onto the top of every urinal and inside the lone bathroom stall, there's no lid covering the toilet tank.
Any conceivable surface on which a person could sprinkle cocaine and snort it through their nostrils has been sabotaged. The patron and bartender say the SQ forced Bar Chez Dédé to take these measures or, they claim, police would shut the establishment down.
At one point there were eight bars on the road that cuts across Malartic, but now all that's left is Chez Dédé — a watering hole that features a jukebox, two pool tables and a row of slot machines tucked into the far corner of the room.
“People get into fights here, people do drugs here, no one's denying that,” says Serge, who did not want his real name published. “But this is too much. Have you ever seen anything like this in your life?”
Malartic is just 30 kilometres west of Val-d'Or — the remote mining city at the centre of report that alleges SQ officers sexually abused indigenous women. One of the most damning accusations, levelled by Bianca Moushoom, is that officers traded her cocaine in exchange for sexual favours.
“Cocaine and alcohol aren't too hard to find if people are looking for it. A lot of people call this place Sin City,” says Tony Wawatie, an Algonquin band manager who's lived in Val-d'Or for nearly 15 years. “There was a time, during the economic boom, where downtown was packed with bars and clubs.”
For young tradesmen in the region, the gold mines in Malartic and Val-d'Or offer the promise of a small fortune in exchange for their labour. People can earn upward of $120,000 to toil away at places like Canadian Malartic — the country's largest open-pit gold mine. Many say the combination of single men being away from home who are bored and flush with cash is the perfect recipe for a drug market to thrive.
And when the market value of gold drops — as it tends to in the boom-and-bust world of resource extraction — so too does the influx
of money. But the drugs don't go away.
“Drugs aren't just a big city thing. You have crack here, you have cocaine here because there's money here,” said one former SQ officer, who spoke to the Montreal Gazette on condition of anonymity. “Val-d'Or is also the gateway to the north. The airport here is the only way to get to a lot of the isolated northern communities. So dealers use the airport as a drug smuggling pipeline.”
The extent of the problem came to light in 2010 during Operation Crayfish — when the SQ arrested more than 50 people, seized 77 firearms, $1 million in cash in a raid that took down a drug ring with ties to the Hells Angels. In court
documents made public this year, a former Val-d'Or gangster claims he regularly snorted cocaine with Michel Girouard, a judge in the Abitibi region.
Girouard and another Abitibi judge were both suspended in connection to findings revealed in Operation Crayfish investigation.
Amid last week's report alleging police abuse of indigenous women, much of the focus has been on Val-d'Or's aboriginal population and how some within it struggle to adapt to urban life. But poverty and addiction are not limited to one segment of the population.
Inside Val-d'Or's La Piaule homeless shelter, social workers, volunteers and medical professionals constantly hustle to keep up with demand. At lunchtime every day, people form a line that stretches out into the cold so they can get inside for an hour, eat a warm meal and be on their way. Some hail from nearby Algonquin and Cree territories but there are plenty of non-indigenous clients as well.
La Piaule has about 20 emergency beds on hand and with the cold months ahead, they'll be at capacity through the winter. Meanwhile, the centre runs a transition program where people work to stay sober as they live at the shelter.
“There are people who want to get clean, who want to find a job, to start anew,” says Anne-Marie Charland, La Piaule's director general. “To be a resident here, they have to want to change, to be in the process of getting clean and we have workers who help them through that. ... It takes a lot of courage to try to get out of a bad situation. That's what we see here.”
At least five of the aboriginal women who reported the alleged police abuse were clients at La Piaule, according to social worker Kim Levesque.
“Some of these women live on the street, some of them used to live on the street and they have a house and all that but they're marginalized,” said Levesque, of the indigenous clients. “Not all of them live in poverty, some have gotten themselves out of it. That's something that's worth mentioning.”
As for life on the street, Levesque says it's no different than in a big city like Montreal. Hard drugs, sex work and violence all seem to come with the territory.
“We're not here to judge. We make sure that after (our clients) get their cheques, they do some groceries before drinking, we make sure they pay their rent,” said Levesque. “Once that's taken care of, once there's food in the fridge, once there's a roof over your head, whatever you do with your money is not for me to judge. ... The point is to build trust, to listen and that over time maybe help someone get out of that life when they're ready.”
In nearby Malartic, the town of about 3,500 residents exists in the shadow of a gold mine. Crumbling stucco buildings, the steeple of a tall stone church and wooden shacks are all dwarfed by the mountain of rubble that towers over the pit.
A sign at the entrance of town warns that at 3 p.m., an explosion will reverberate under Malartic's bedrock. Bars, local stores, motels that charge monthly rent and other businesses may come and go. But for now the mine trudges forward one explosion at a time.
“When they blast the rocks apart, everything shakes,” says Serge. “It's okay, it's money for the community. That's not the problem here. It's consumption, that's the problem people have.”