‘Common game plan’ on homelessness needed for Quebec and Montreal: QS

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With the homelessness crisis showing no sign of improvement, Québec solidaire has called for elected officials to meet and hammer out new solutions to improve cohabitation issues in Montreal.

“We are very worried. There is a (provincewide) crisis of homelessness and Montreal is the centre of that crisis,” party co-spokesperson Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois told reporters Thursday morning while standing in Place Émilie-Gamelin — “the epicentre” of the problem, he said — in the Village district. “So we need all political parties from all levels of government to work together. We need a common game plan to fight homelessness, because right now everyone is doing something but it’s clearly not enough.”

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Québec solidaire is calling for a meeting to be held in Montreal between officials from the federal, provincial and municipal levels, along with front-line workers from community groups, the city’s transit agency and Montreal police officials.

The summit should be held “as soon as possible,” Nadeau-Dubois said, but QS officials didn’t suggest a deadline. The main goal should be to address irritants between unhoused people and people living in neighbourhoods, said Guillaume Cliche-Rivard, the QS critic for social services. Addressing the core causes of homelessness should still be prioritized, he said, but added that there needs to be more of an effort to provide resources to those who don’t have a home without disturbing social cohesion, as complaints of noise, violence and insalubrious conditions are being made across the city.

Nadeau-Dubois said it is high time for action, and a large part of solving the problem is to provide resources where people can go at all times of the day so they don’t have to resort to sitting or sleeping on a sidewalk. While there is an action plan already in place, it is clearly failing unhoused people, he said. La Presse reported Thursday the number of people without a fixed address who died in 2023 was 72, compared with roughly 20 each year from 2019 to 2021.

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“We really need to have that sit-down,” Cliche-Rivard said. “We’re not trying to lay blame; we’re hoping to find solutions.”

Nadeau-Dubois said that while the province and Montreal share responsibility for homelessness in the city, he doesn’t believe the different levels of government have ever sat down together to discuss the issues involved.

A perfect example of elected officials not understanding each other can be found in the borough of Mercier—Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, he said. Borough mayor Pierre Lessard-Blais recently requested that the Quebec Transport Ministry cede land on Notre-Dame St. in the east end, where a tent encampment has been set up. This, however, flies in the face of Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante’s policy of systematically breaking up encampments. The Transport Ministry would have to co-ordinate with the Health and Social Services Ministry on the matter.

“I’m convinced that the provincial government is well intentioned, and Plante is also well intentioned, and everyone is doing what they can, but clearly it’s not working,” Nadeau-Dubois said.

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Among the issues Cliche-Rivard would like to see discussed is a concrete provincewide policy on how to deal with tent encampments.

“Nobody dreams of living in tents,” he said. “But as long as we lack solutions and a complete game plan isn’t put forward, those people will have no choice but to stay in tents.”

Reached Thursday afternoon, Social Services Minister Lionel Carmant’s office said he is open to participating in such a forum.

“We are always happy to participate in these important events where all the actors involved in the fight against homelessness are together,” spokesperson Lambert Drainville wrote in a statement.

He added that there have already been several such meetings, including a Union des municipalités du Québec summit held last year in Quebec City, and Carmant plans to be at the third annual États généraux de l’itinérance at the end of next month, where more than 400 people working in the sector will meet.

Drainville said his ministry is currently working with the Municipal Affairs and Housing Ministry and the Société d’habitation du Québec to clarify the roles and responsibilities of each of the actors, in order to better implement the action plan on homelessness that was adopted in 2021.

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Speaking for the opposition Ensemble Montréal party, Benoit Langevin said a summit could be a good idea, but he questioned how useful it would be since solutions for cohabitation issues are already well known.

“It’s never a bad thing to continue talking about homelessness, but do we need another public consultation?” Langevin asked. “Let’s be honest: We don’t need another platform to discuss a phenomenon and a problem that we know the answers to. It’s a question of money at this point.

“The more people talk about this, the more we will be able to find solutions that are adapted to each borough and each sector of the island of Montreal, but at this point, what we need is investment.”

Langevin said the province seems to be coming forward with money to fund new spaces for the unhoused to live, but the Plante administration is dragging its feet in finding buildings that could serve as shelters.

The Gazette reached out to Plante’s office for comment Thursday, but did not receive a reply by publication time.

jmagder@postmedia.com

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