‘Poster boy for success’
Cocaine addict clean for 115 days and counting
Craig Boutilier was 17 when he first tried crack cocaine. This week he celebrated his 53rd birthday and 115 days of staying off the drug that saw him rack up hundreds of convictions for stealing to support his cocaine habit.
“I have no desire to use,” Boutilier said in a recent interview. “Especially crack cocaine.” Formerly scrawny, he’s put on a little weight over the winter, and said there’s nothing he misses about his old life.
“I’m glad that I’m away from my drug buddies and all the drug scenes,” Boutilier said. “I was in a terrible environment.”
It got so bad that drug dealers would know when Boutilier was being released from Burnside jail. They’d meet him with a list of items they wanted him to steal in return for crack.
“They were waiting for me,” he said. “He gives me an order and I’d do what I had to do to go get it.”
Stores Boutilier frequented had his photo on file. They got him banned from even walking in the door.
“It was getting harder because they knew who I was,” Boutilier said.
“When I was stealing, I used to go right around the clock two, three or four days.”
In December 2020, Boutilier appeared in front of Halifax provincial court Judge Amy Sakalauskas to be sentenced for two residential break and enters.
The Crown recommended four years in federal prison; his defence lawyer argued successfully for time served, with two years of probation.
“Jail is only a Band-aid that does not help with rehabilitation and we are looking for something that sticks longer in these exceptional circumstances,” Sakalauskas said at the time.
On top of his addiction, a neuropsychological assessment completed before his sentencing shows Boutilier’s general intelligence is very low, said the judge. “He is impaired in most areas of intellectual functioning including processing speed, attention, learning and memory, and executive functioning. Mr. Boutilier struggled on most activities during his assessment, even those that young children would be able to complete.”
Judge Amy – which is how Boutilier refers to her because the name Sakalauskas is tough for him to remember – wanted something better for him.
But finding a place where a person with intellectual challenges and addictions could get some help didn’t come easy.
“It was just a lot of closed doors everywhere that we went,” said Boutilier’s lawyer, Sarah White.
He used to live in a crack den in what’s she’s pretty sure was once a closet. There was a folding chair, but he didn’t always have a mattress, and the bathroom was shared.
“I think it’s fair to say that you were a nuisance in the community,” White said to Boutilier.
“It was escalating to the point where you had started going into people’s homes to take stuff.”
White worried her client was going to wind up dead on the streets.
“But you’re the poster boy for success at the moment,” she tells Boutilier.
He now lives in a one-bedroom apartment in the lower half of a home on a quiet residential street in Kentville.
Getting here wasn’t easy, White said.
Boutilier got caught breaking into another home in February 2021 and stayed in jail until last December.
“We were getting the same runaround — not getting any access to services, there’s a long wait-list for housing for placements for him to live,” White said.
She was so frustrated, she subpoenaed Boutilier’s social worker with the province’s disability support program, and said, “Fine, you come (to court and tell the judge) why there’s nothing for him.”
That’s when the spot in a Kentville small options home opened up for Boutilier. White doesn’t know why he wasn’t sent here in the first place. “I didn’t know it even existed,” she said.
One of the pillars of Canada’s Criminal Code is rehabilitation, she said. “Parliament says rehabilitation is so important because we want to have safe communities. And how do you do that? Well, it’s not by doing what we were doing to Craig for the last 30 years.”
Boutilier likes having his own room, which he’s decorated with photos of pro wrestlers. “Randy Orton and Triple H” are his favourites. “I like the story lines of what they do.”
He’s also a hockey and baseball fan, knowledgeable enough to correct his lawyer when she makes a mistake about an upcoming NHL playoff series.
Two caregivers live with Boutilier now around the clock, except when he goes to Narcotics Anonymous meetings at the nearby recreation centre.
“We promote independence and integration back into the community,” said Chris Oxner, the supervisor running the small options home.
Oxner works for New Vision, a private company that runs several of these homes in the Annapolis Valley, most of them with one or two residents.
“Basically (we’re) just giving the residents whatever they need to live their best lives, essentially,” he said.
Oxner went to fetch Boutilier in January from a hotel room rented for him at The Commons Inn by the Department of Community Services. He’d been kicked out of the Quest Regional Rehabilitation Centre in Lower Sackville for arguing with a staffer, and was already drifting back into his former life of addiction.
“It took a couple of hours, but we got him here,” Oxner said.
“He didn’t want to come at first.”
But Boutilier was breaching all his release conditions at that point, White said. “The only reason he was allowed back in the community was because the judge had said he could live at Quest.”
Boutilier’s options at that point were go back to jail, or go with Oxner.
“So, after some talking and some explaining what we do and what he could do and where he could see himself, he came back,” Oxner said. “It took a donair, too.”
That tasty bribe has proven a useful one. Boutilier gets to order a donair every couple of weeks if he completes his daily list of chores.
The staffers help Boutilier with meal preparation, grocery shopping, and go out with him when he needs some air. They organize odd jobs for him around the community, including raking leaves and stacking firewood, and get him to meetings with his addiction counsellor and parole officer.
“We monitor, we don’t hover,” Oxner said. “We give him his space and let him make his own choices.”
Oxner sees a “huge difference” in Boutilier’s confidence since January.
That comes with support, Oxner said. “He’s going to make mistakes. He’s an addict and he has a very long history and that’s not going to just go away. And he’s doing it cold turkey, too, essentially. So instead of pounding the rules to him and coming down on him, with you can’t do this and you can’t do that, there’s an understanding that, yeah you probably shouldn’t do this, but we’re not going to be mad at you. If you make a mistake, you make a mistake. We’ll work with it. We expect you to make mistakes. It’s the only way you learn, the only way you grow.”
That means if Boutilier gets agitated or starts arguing with his caregivers, “we sit down and we talk and we work through it,” Oxner said. “At the end of the day we’re here to support him any way we possibly can.”
White is clearly amazed at the progress her client has made in Kentville.
“You must have been in jail for 20 years — in and out,” she said to Boutilier. “You would not normally go for a week or two without getting arrested.”
Boutilier spent most of his time behind bars sleeping.
“There was nothing else you could do other than stand at your (cell) door and watch TV.”
Living in the small options home means freedom for Boutilier. “I can go out that door at any time.”
His caregivers are trying to teach Boutilier the skills he’ll need to eventually live on his own.
“What everyone was doing before was just pick up, arrest, throw him in jail,” White said.
When his probation ends just before Christmas, Boutilier will remain a client of the province’s disability support program, she said.
“The probation will ease up, but then it will become maintenance through work with (the disability support program),” White said. “Hopefully by that time
… we’ll see what supports that he needs. But it will be through the Department of Community Services, and not court ordered. But it doesn’t mean it’s going to end.”