Homeless man dies in camp as Montreal deals with extreme cold

A 74-year-old homeless man died in Montreal Monday night as the city deals with extremely cold weather.

Montreal police officers say they responded to a call around 6 p.m. of a man subject to possible hypothermia. The man was living at a camp between Saint-Jacques Street and Highway 20, in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce.

Officers transported the man to hospital, where he was declared dead.

The file has been transferred to the coroner’s office.

Police say the senior had been living in a homeless camp for the last few years.

The extreme cold temperatures that have gripped the province are a particular risk for the homeless population.

Environment Canada says temperatures in Montreal hovered around -20 C Monday night, and the weather agency says the extreme cold will last until Wednesday.

“Unless something changes, unless our priorities as a society change, I find that we are very reactive,” said John Tessier, the centre coordinator at the Open Door shelter. “We know these things are inevitable under the current climate. Why not be proactive and now start working towards more social housing and more places for the unhoused to be and live a free life in their own space.”

Shelters and homeless advocates have been urging the government for additional support.

Those calls were magnified last winter when Raphael Napa André, an Innu man, froze to death in a portable toilet.

Montreal’s Indigenous community launched an overnight emergency shelter in his memory last February. Those tents are expected to remain open until March 31.

And last November, the body of 61-year-old Inuk elder Elisapee Pootoogook was discovered at a construction site near Cabot Square. Advocates believed Pootoogook was looking for a warm place to stay.

Tessier believes part of the solution begins with an increased focus on long-term housing programs for the homeless.

“Centers, while they’re helpful and necessary to meet the people that need the long-term housing, ultimately the goal should be getting people into a stable situation of their own and long-term housing. And there needs to be more space for this and more funding put into these types of solutions,” said Tessier.

“There are people who come in to eat, shower and change clothes, and just go on their way. Because they just don’t want to live in cots and cubicles or even in dormitory settings. They want to have their own place, even if that place is outside. People want to live free. I think it’s a natural human trait to want to yearn for freedom. And that’s what people want is freedom in their own space”

On Tuesday Opposition leader Dominique Anglade tweeted her disapproval of the provincial government’s plan to address the issue following the 74-year-old man’s death.

“Shelters are overwhelmed,” she wrote. “A homeless person was taken by the cold near my district. It’s incredibly sad. The government is waiting for it to be too late before reacting. Where’s the plan?”

Junior health Minister Lionel Carmant called the death a “tragic event.”

“I am thinking today of his loved ones and friends,” Carmant tweeted. “This is something that touches me deeply. The cold we’re dealing with the week is extreme.”

Montreal Mayor Valerie Plante urged the province to dedicate more funds to preventing homelessness year-round, not just when the temperature drops.

“This is a power and money that the provincial government has, but what we can do and what we have been doing is putting in money to buy land that is very expensive so that we can support the organizations that do social housing with the assistance, with the necessary assistance from the Quebec government,” said Plante.

“We have been fighting for a long time to get out of this seasonal logic of less resources for the homeless in the summer, but we do more in the winter because it’s cold. We need to do better, we need to have a long-term plan and that long-term plan is getting a roof over your head.”

Dr. Horacio Arruda, Quebec’s former director of public health who resigned on Monday night, had earlier that day asked homeless shelters to return to pre-pandemic capacity levels due to the cold.

That directive had been well received by the community, despite a recent spike in COVID-19 cases among Montreal’s homeless.

The shelters themselves are dealing with staff shortages due to the pandemic.

There were outbreaks in 27 Montreal homeless shelters between Dec. 26 and Jan. 1, with a total of 110 staff and clients testing positive during that time, according to the local health authority in the city’s south end.

“Right now all the organizations are stretched so thinly, between a lack of funding, between a lack of lack of space with COVID, staff falling sick, it’s just a perfect storm right now,” said Tessier. ‘It’s tragic what happened, but not unexpected.”