Patricia’s Struggle with Homelessness in Montreal

Patricia is a Montreal resident facing homelessness, due to the city’s shortage of social housing. After leaving her husband years ago, she turned to the Genesis Project in Côte-des-Neiges for support for her medication, food for her children, and housing. Despite her efforts, she continues to struggle to secure a permanent home.

“St. Mary’s Hospital, in the emergency. That’s where I go every night to sleep,” says Patricia with a heartfelt tone.

With moving day in Quebec here, Patricia and many others face challenges, including eviction and discrimination, in their search for stable housing.

Margaret van Nooten, a social rights worker at Project Genesis, highlights that people frequently face discrimination due to having children, their race, and their socioeconomic status, particularly if they are on welfare.

“Part of the problem is that before people sign a lease, they actually have very few protections. People do have the option of making a complaint with the Commission des Droits de la personne, but it has absolutely no enforcement mechanism. There’s absolutely nothing that compels a landlord to actually sign a lease with you if they try to discriminate against you,” adds Amy Darwish, coordinator at the Comité d’action de Parc-Extension.

“For this reason, and then with the context of a very bad housing crisis where the rents are very high, it creates a context where there’s a lot of impunity for landlords, where they figure that they can openly discriminate against people and suffer no consequences.”

“Low-income households and people out here, like me, need a low-income house to put my head under,” says Patricia.

“We see a lot of people, especially recent immigrants, who particularly struggle in the housing search. In a lot of instances, people are forced to make very difficult decisions. Either they end up having to share apartments with two or three other families, to rent rooms, or to pay exorbitant amounts for apartments as a way of being able to stay in the neighbourhood where their networks are, or they often end up having to move off the island where everything is more expensive and where they are alone,” adds Darwish.

“If you face homelessness, it’s hard to bounce back from that. If you end up being in shelters or on the street or having to couch-surf, or even if you squeeze together two families in an apartment, then you feel that you’re just living on somebody’s generosity and young people don’t have good conditions for schooling, so there’s a whole spiral of problems,” says van Nooten.

“I feel disappointed in the response of the city, of the province, and of Canada. I feel we can do so much better. We are not an impoverished country or province and we are failing people so bad with such terrible consequences.”