Warming centre opening in Old Montreal building recently used as temporary city hall

The City of Montreal has created a new warming shelter in an Old Montreal building that recently was the workplace of municipal officials.

The Lucien-Saulnier building will provide 30 warm spaces for those in need as shelters in the area reach capacity. It will be open every night from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. “over the next few months.”

“It’s not a perfect situation because it’s last minute, but I think it was the right thing to do,” said Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante.

“We were able to work with the firefighter and to adapt the building to make it safe for the users, people that will come here, but also the people that will support those at the homeless community.”

Social workers and security guards will supervise the new warming shelter, the city says.

“This is an exceptional framework deployed by the city while waiting for a more suitable solution, supervised by the health network, in particular by social intervention resources,” the city said in a news release.

“So we’ll have a coordinator that is at the borough of Ville-Marie that is lending us one of its managers to manage and coordinate the operation. And it will be a mixture of security agents and the intervenants, the social workers from the ÉMMIS,” said Nadia Bastien, the deputy director general responsible for quality of life in Montreal.

The announcement comes days after a homeless man was found dead outside in a public square in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve.

The Lucien-Saulnier building acted as a temporary city hall from 2019 to this year while the main municipal edifice was being renovated.

“It’s like a humanitarian situation. The city doesn’t usually open shelters like that or centres like that, but we’ve decided that in the situation right now, we needed to make a gesture,” said Bastien.

The city also announced the downtown YMCA emergency shelter on Stanley Street will be operational beginning Saturday. It can accommodate 50 people.

A second warming centre, offering 50 spaces, will open at the J.-A.-DeSève building at UQAM – on Saturday and Sunday nights.

“Let’s not pretend that this is any kind of solution to the challenge that we’re facing with people who are experiencing homelessness. This is just a temporary thing that was put together at the very last minute,” said Sam Watts, the CEO and executive director of the Welcome Hall Mission.

Along with some skepticism of how it will be operated, the Plante administration admits they opened this warming centre despite opposition from the Quebec government.

“Though it was a spot that we offered the government, and for different reasons, they did say no, today we’re opening it saying, ‘well, we’ll open it anyway. And we’re going to send you the bill.’ Because it cannot be only Montrealers that pays for a responsibility that belongs to Quebec, which is homelessness, mental health, and drug use,” said Plante.

“Montrealers don’t want to see people sleeping in the street. That being said, 30 people is not what will save all the people or, make it an option for everybody living in the street right now because we know there’s a lot of people living under a tent.

“We’re really trying to be supportive and to offer one option in the long term, but their housing continues to be the real-will option for people living in the street.”