“There is no place to go”: homeless camps all the way to Mont-Laurier

Camps in the woods, overflowing shelters and seniors living in their cars: homelessness is spreading from Saint-Jérôme to Mont-Laurier, in the Laurentians.

• Read also: Homelessness in the Laurentians: he is thinking of pitching his tent after the closure of a homeless shelter

• Read also: With homelessness and drugs, “things are degenerating” in the Village

• Read also: “We have to leave”: another itinerant camp dismantled in Montreal

“There are elderly people who live in their cars in the Walmart parking lot, I didn’t see that five years ago,” says Rachel Lapierre, president of the Saint-Jérôme Humanitarian Book.

It had 106 homeless people waiting for services this fall, four times more than before.

With a prison, three transition centers and the mental health clinic, Saint-Jérôme is a “tipping point” for homelessness.

But we also see tents in the woods further north in the vast territory of Pays-d’en-Haut.

In Saint-Agathe, Dominique Lapierre knows that there are some, near the stream. He frequents the La Croisée shelter, which will close its doors on April 30 and which, every evening, was packed to the brim..

• Listen to the exchange between Julie Grenier and Richard Martineau via QUB :

To Mont-Laurier

“We have camps,” confirms Michel Bolduc, general director of Maison Lyse-Beauchamp, a harm reduction organization located in Mont-Laurier.

The night shelter welcomes people from the surrounding area, but also those from Sainte-Anne-du-Lac and Rivière-Rouge who have mental health problems and who cannot find space elsewhere.

In Mont-Laurier, three or four people sometimes sleep in the heat center, due to lack of space in the 10 beds in the adjacent emergency accommodation.​

“It’s for warming up, not for sleeping. They sleep there because there is no place to go,” explains Mr. Bolduc.

A jump of 109%

In total, 464 people were experiencing visible homelessness in the Laurentians, according to the most recent count from the Quebec government, on October 11, 2022.

This is an increase of 109% compared to 2018, the largest after Outaouais.

In this tourist region where many moved during the pandemic, inflation is particularly felt, underlines Pierre Parizeau-Legault, professor in the department of nursing at the Laurentides campus of the University of Quebec in Outaouais.

“There is little housing, there is even less safe and affordable housing,” laments the researcher whose work focuses, among other things, on intervention in homelessness.