{"id":16365,"date":"2021-02-24T09:00:35","date_gmt":"2021-02-24T14:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress-537697-2997182.cloudwaysapps.com\/?p=16365"},"modified":"2022-10-09T06:33:03","modified_gmt":"2022-10-09T10:33:03","slug":"montreal-homeless-man-freezes-to-death-trying-to-seek-shelter-from-cold","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress-537697-2997182.cloudwaysapps.com\/montreal-homeless-man-freezes-to-death-trying-to-seek-shelter-from-cold\/","title":{"rendered":"Montreal Homeless Man Freezes to Death Trying to Seek Shelter from Cold"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>

In Quebec, it\u2019s no longer legal to be outside after 8pm. As part of efforts to control the coronavirus pandemic, Premier Fran\u00e7ois Legault imposed a curfew. Anyone found outside after hours could be fined $1,500 or more.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe want people [who are homeless] to stay inside, and there are enough places available,\u201d said Legault, almost offhandedly.<\/p>\n

Those who work with Montreal\u2019s estimated 3,100 homeless people weren\u2019t buying it.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re telling everyone to go home, and with homeless people, you\u2019re like, \u2018find a shelter, good luck,\u201d said Nakuset, director of the Native Women\u2019s Shelter of Montreal, who has worked with homeless Montrealers for two decades. \u201cWe know there\u2019s not enough space.\u201d<\/p>\n

Several city shelters have had to reduce overnight capacity due to physical distancing. Although the city has set up several hundred beds in requisitioned hotels, advocates for homeless people say beds alone aren\u2019t sufficient, especially in a pandemic.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were told not to hand out blankets, because that would be unsafe,\u201d said veteran outreach worker David Chapman. \u201cWithout blankets, people are hunched up together — is that any safer? We have to meet people where they\u2019re at.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are all sorts of reasons why people aren\u2019t going to go to shelters,\u201d said Em Steinkalek, a young outreach worker who works with youth involved in prostitution. \u201cPeople could fear shelters because they\u2019re abuse survivors, because they\u2019re worried about the virus, because they have mental health concerns, because they don\u2019t speak the language or because they have an animal. We could lose more lives than we save.\u201d<\/p>\n

Less than a week later, the frozen, lifeless body of Rapha\u00ebl Andr\u00e9, 51, was found inside a portable toilet.<\/h4>\n

A homeless Indigenous man, Andr\u00e9 had wandered out of the Open Door shelter around 9:30 pm on Jan. 16. Open Door had been forced to curtail its hours after a coronavirus outbreak and a plumbing issue. (The shelter\u2019s director, M\u00e9lodie Racine, said she still doesn\u2019t understand why it was allowed to reopen partially. Public health authorities restored its 24-hour status after Andr\u00e9\u2019s death).<\/p>\n

While he was a habitu\u00e9 of Projets Autochtones du Qu\u00e9bec (PAQ), a shelter serving Indigenous people that’s a 20-minute walk away, Andr\u00e9 didn\u2019t go there. For reasons that aren\u2019t clear, he walked into a portable toilet a few hundred meters from the Open Door. The next morning, his body was found inside.<\/p>\n

PAQ director Heather Johnston describes Andr\u00e9 as \u201ca quiet man with a lot of friends\u201d who was always welcome at PAQ. \u201cThere was a bed here for him that night,\u201d she said. \u201cHe knew where to go, but he didn\u2019t make it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018It\u2019s Getting Hard to Keep Track of the Deaths\u2019<\/h3>\n

Andr\u00e9 is far from the only homeless person to recently die on the streets of Montreal. Less than a week after Andr\u00e9\u2019s passing, a young woman named Amanda died of an apparent drug overdose.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s getting hard to keep track of all the deaths,\u201d said Chapman, project coordinator at Resilience Montreal.<\/p>\n

\"homeless

This embroidered memorial near The Open Door pays homage to homeless Indigenous people who have died on Montreal\u2019s streets in recent years.<\/p><\/div>\n

According to Resilience, at least 14 homeless Montrealers have died outdoors since December 2018. The city of Montreal added another 115 beds in a converted community centre the week after Andr\u00e9\u2019s death, but Chapman said beds in different parts of the city aren\u2019t necessarily interchangeable.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople aren\u2019t willing to travel across the city and be in an enormous structure with 300 other people. You can try to twist their arms but… it would be nice if we could just keep them alive.\u201d<\/p>\n

It Takes a Village to Build a Tent<\/h3>\n

When Mich\u00e8le Audette learned about Rapha\u00ebl Andr\u00e9\u2019s death, she took it personally.<\/p>\n

Audette, an academic, is a member of the Innu nation, like Andr\u00e9. She knows the dead man\u2019s extended family and spent part of her childhood in Schefferville, the nearest town to Andr\u00e9\u2019s remote home village, Matimekosh-Lac John.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s been a lot of talk about the death of one of our Innu brothers, who was somebody\u2019s cousin, somebody\u2019s brother, somebody\u2019s friend,\u201d Audette wrote on Facebook. \u201cI asked [my partner] if we couldn\u2019t just pitch a shaputuan [traditional tent] in downtown Montreal.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nakuset had been pushing a similar project for years. When Audette contacted her, she was all in. They began meeting with city and provincial officials to iron out complex logistics and liability arrangements.<\/p>\n

A crowdfunding campaign raised $14,000 in a few days. Mary and Barton Goodleaf, restaurateurs from the Mohawk community of Kahnawake, donated $25,000. Another Mohawk couple stopped by and offered to donate 50 hot meals.<\/p>\n

The nearby Resilience day shelter became a staging area. P\u00e9n\u00e9lope and Nathalie Guay, codirectors of a support centre for Indigenous people in Quebec City, \u201clent\u201d 10 staff members to the project. A colleague of the Goodleafs, a Mohawk man who had experienced homelessness himself, volunteered to work security.<\/p>\n

On Feb. 2, Nathalie Guay and four colleagues made the three-hour trip from Quebec City in a blizzard to get the light and heat turned on.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat can I say?\u201d said Nakuset. \u201cNative women get stuff done!\u201d<\/h4>\n
\"Rapha\u00ebl

The Rapha\u00ebl Andr\u00e9 Memorial Tent provides 16 people at a time with a warm place to eat, sleep and hang out.<\/p><\/div>\n

On a February evening, the windows of the tent shone as cheerfully as a log cabin in a painting. It was early and not particularly cold; a few people wandered in for snacks. Most of the 16 lounge chairs were still empty.<\/p>\n

The outreach workers chatted in their first language, Innu-aimun. Jenny Hervieux, an early childhood educator who grew up in the Innu community of Pessamit, served as the consensus spokesperson for the Quebec City crew. She empathized with the alienation that many Indigenous people from remote communities, like Andr\u00e9, feel when they arrive in the city.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe come here to study or just to have a change of air, and we can\u2019t get housing, because of discrimination or because it\u2019s just too expensive. Before you know it, you have no food,\u201d she said. \u201cI came to Quebec City on my own with young kids, I knew no one and I didn\u2019t even know where to start.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know [Andr\u00e9\u2019s] family, but we had some friends in common,\u201d she added. \u201cHe\u2019s Innu, I\u2019m Innu, we\u2019re one family. It hurts.\u201d<\/p>\n

The next day, before heading back to Quebec City, Hervieux, Guay and their colleagues attended a dedication ceremony for the Rapha\u00ebl Andr\u00e9 memorial tent.<\/h4>\n

Audette was there along with Nakuset, Mohawk and Innu elders, city officials, Quebec minister for Indigenous affairs Ian Lafreni\u00e8re, and Grand Chief Ghislain Picard of the Assembly of First Nations of Quebec and Labrador, who is also Innu. Dozens of people gathered around a small woodstove, burning sage and spruce and stamping their boots in the bitter cold<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019d like the tragic fate of our brother to be a wakeup call for us all,\u201d Picard said. \u201cRapha\u00ebl is our messenger.\u201d<\/p>\n

A messenger of what, exactly, is the question.<\/em><\/h4>\n

In the weeks since Andr\u00e9\u2019s death, a court order has exempted homeless people from the curfew. The City of Montreal recently announced its intention to fund the tent until at least March 31. It has also opened seven other warming centres with another on the way providing a total, physically distanced capacity of 900, according to city spokesperson Linda Boutin.<\/p>\n

However, no one is under the impression that the tents, or the end of the curfew, are long-term solutions for the lack of sufficient safe housing for homeless Indigenous people.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople who are against the curfew have leveraged Rapha\u00ebl\u2019s death to say how bad the curfew is. But if Rapha\u00ebl had a home, he would never have been out there,\u201d said Heather Johnston.<\/p>\n

Nakuset, like Picard, sees Andr\u00e9\u2019s death as an opportunity for a wide-ranging dialogue on supportive housing that hasn\u2019t yet happened.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe need more supportive housing where people can have their own space, create a community and get solid grounding,\u201d she said. \u201cWe need to help people get over that first huge obstacle and build a life. Families [in Indigenous communities] don\u2019t send their loved ones to the city to die in a portable toilet.\u201d<\/p>\n

She described the tent, and the connections it has created, as a snowball rolling down a hill. \u201cI\u2019m hopeful that thanks to these warrior women, we\u2019ll be able to get something good out of a tragedy.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Quebec, it\u2019s no longer legal to be outside after 8pm. As part of efforts to control the coronavirus pandemic, Premier Fran\u00e7ois Legault imposed a curfew. Anyone found outside after hours could be fined $1,500 or more. \u201cWe want people … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":16366,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[591,617,14097,475,796],"tags":[1044,13939,16082,9659,253,16143,832,515,7721,508,797,16142],"coauthors":[16144],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-537697-2997182.cloudwaysapps.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16365"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-537697-2997182.cloudwaysapps.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-537697-2997182.cloudwaysapps.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-537697-2997182.cloudwaysapps.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-537697-2997182.cloudwaysapps.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16365"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-537697-2997182.cloudwaysapps.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16365\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21452,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-537697-2997182.cloudwaysapps.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16365\/revisions\/21452"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-537697-2997182.cloudwaysapps.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16366"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-537697-2997182.cloudwaysapps.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16365"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-537697-2997182.cloudwaysapps.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16365"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-537697-2997182.cloudwaysapps.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16365"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-537697-2997182.cloudwaysapps.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=16365"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}