According to the mayor of Montreal, the Quebec government must realize that homelessness is “exploding everywhere” in the province. In recent days, City of Montreal officials have asked the government to release resources in order to avoid tragedies as winter approaches.
It’s not just in Montreal that homelessness is exploding. It’s exploding everywhere in Quebec,” declared Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante, following a meeting of the executive committee.
All this comes at a time when, at the beginning of the week, three sectors of the encampment along Notre-Dame Street were dismantled. This Wednesday, two fires that occurred on the camp site also forced the intervention of the Montreal firefighters. There are currently a few tents erected in around fifteen places on the site, which is approximately 3.5 kilometers long. (The Press)
According to Chantal Montmorency, general director of the Quebec Association of People Experiencing Homelessness: “these actions are far from solving the problems and aggravate the vulnerability of the people concerned by forcing individuals to constantly move, by breaking their support networks community, exacerbating mental and physical health problems, and further marginalizing already excluded populations, criminalizing their survival.”
Montmorency explains how this maneuver constitutes a violation of human rights, in particular the right to housing and dignity.
The dismantling of camps is also denounced as violations of the rights of the people concerned by the Office of the Federal Housing Defender, which instead recommends putting an end to forced evictions from camps and implementing alternatives developed following a real dialogue with the residents of the camps and thus know their needs as they identify them.
Moreover, on the X platform yesterday, the defender said she was concerned about the dismantling of Campement Notre-Dame and asked the Ministry of Transport and Sustainable Mobility and the City of Montreal not to dismantle it.
The roaming organizations asked the various authorities to immediately retract and not to dismantle. More broadly, they are asking for a moratorium on dismantling as well as technical support for all the people who live there for lack of alternative, that is to say waste collection, access to sanitary facilities as well as a SIM support to be able to heat safely.
Housing costs in Montreal on the rise
The increase in the number of people experiencing homelessness in Montreal is not a coincidence but is essentially due to the scarcity of housing and the dramatic increase in the cost of housing in recent years.
In Montreal, 17,000 households are practically on the street because their economic situation is precarious and they risk falling into homelessness at any moment, explained the mayor.
In the territory of Montreal, 142,645 households are renters, just like 373,000 households across Quebec. These households pay more than 30% of their income for housing with a median annual income of around $24,000. The lack of social housing aggravates this precariousness and contributes to the explosion of homelessness.
Social housing is a real structuring measure to combat the housing crisis, organizations defending the right to housing have recently reminded us. Associations defending the right to housing in Quebec are calling on the federal government to reserve land belonging to public institutions, or land bank sites, to meet the needs of low- and modest-income tenants who struggle to find housing. decently.
