Shelters have been filled to capacity in cold snap
Old Royal Vic site helps ease the crunch, but some holdouts still opt for the streets
Greg Jones is used to sleeping outside in the winter. On most nights, he’ll find a dry spot to lay his blankets, snuggle up with his dog Nero and nod off.
He says he’ll brave up to -20 C in the elements.
“With a dog and the right gear, it’s doable,” Jones said. “But when it gets real bad, you survive through short jaunts between warm places.”
Last weekend, as a squall battered Montreal with wind and snow, Jones and his canine sidekick slept in a 24-hour restaurant.
“You have to find a spot where they’ll look the other way. For me, it’s the 11 o’clock shift at that restaurant,” he said. “The manager pretends he’s doing us a favour and that he shouldn’t be letting my dog in, but at the end of the night he always makes a chicken sandwich for Nero.”
Jones said that though many, like him, are reluctant to use the city’s shelter system, Montreal’s latest cold snap is changing people’s minds.
“We’re in touch with a lot of the other shelters and we’re all filled to capacity,” said Melissa Bellerose, director of communications for the Old Brewery Mission. “We don’t want to have to open up our cafeteria for people to sleep, so it’s a good thing we have the emergency shelter at the old Royal Victoria (Hospital).”
Last Thursday, the city announced the launch of an emergency shelter at the old Royal Victoria site on des Pins Ave. Bellerose said the first night saw 30 people use the shelter; that number doubled to 60 the following evening, and she suspects that all 80 beds were used each night during the storm.
Unlike most shelters, the Royal Victoria site allows people to bring in their animals, which is often a reason homeless men and women choose to brave the elements.
There are 957 overnight shelter spots available in the city, up 68 from last year. Shelters are increasingly focusing their resources on helping people find long-term housing but there are still thousands of homeless on the streets every day.
The Old Brewery Mission also runs a shuttle service that pairs a driver and an outreach worker who pick up vulnerable people downtown and bring them somewhere warm.
Matthew Pearce, the Old Brewery Mission’s president, said workers are hustling around the clock to make sure no one is left out in the cold. Increasingly, the shelter has to send people to the hospital for frostbite and respiratory problems.
“Our people are working exhaustively because they know how dangerous it is out there,” said Pearce.
When temperatures sink below -27 C, the risk of people freezing to death is real, according to Dr. David Kaiser.
“A night where it’s -15 C, -20 C with a bit of wind can be a really dangerous thing,” said Kaiser, who works at the Centre intégré universitaire de santé et de services sociaux Centre-Sud.
“Services for the homeless are essential. On some nights, it’s cold enough for someone to lose toes or an ear out there. And in a city like Montreal, that’s unacceptable.”
The CIUSSS acts as a nerve centre for the effort to keep homeless men and women safe, co-ordinating access to health care and social services with the shelters, the city and police. Given the extreme drops in temperature over the last few winters, the groups have worked closer than ever before, Kaiser said.
Last year, the cost of keeping its shelter open all night nearly emptied the coffers at St. Michael’s Mission. But if you ask George Greene, who runs the downtown mission, it was worth every penny.
The year before the overnight warming centre opened, 13 of the shelter’s clients died on the streets. That stopped when the mission’s warming centre opened its doors for itinerant people and their animals.
A fresh round of fundraising and some last-minute donations managed to keep the place going for another winter. Even so, people continue to slip through the cracks.
“It’s getting pretty bad out there. We had two cases of frostbite just last week,” said Zack Ingles, the operations manager at the Open Door shelter on Parc Ave. “But still, you have a few people holding out and sleeping on the streets.”
At the Open Door, where Jones works the front desk, people scurried in from the cold on Monday. Jones helped set them up with a warm shower and dry clothes. When he’s done volunteering, Jones will bundle up, dress Nero in thick, dog-sized clothes and brave the cold once again.
“We’re tough, but we have to rely on each other,” he said, patting Nero’s head. “The cold stings. It really does.” ccurtis@postmedia.com twitter.com/titocurtis