Tent City Nation: Are Canada's homeless encampments here to stay?
No one wants to live through a Canadian winter in a tent. But encampments are a dangerous and miserable result of hard-to-solve problems.
Gatineau, Que. – In the parking lot of the Robert Guertin Centre, an arena that once
played host to the Gatineau Olympiques major junior hockey team, is a field of
red ice-fishing tents.
Canada’s
tent cities on the rise
Arranged in four neat rows and fenced around, the 48 tents are home to a community of homeless people enduring the snow, cold and freezing rain of winter in the National Capital Region. Eloe, a woman in her 30s with green hair, a septum ring, a leopard-print scarf and red bomber jacket, lives in a tent made from construction tarps, which forms part of a satellite community outside the fence.
Although camp life can be harsh, she says it
offers more freedom and security than a homeless shelter.
“It’s not easy living here, but it’s better
than the shelter because there’s more live-and-let-live,’” says Eloe, who has
been part of an encampment since May. “People have more privacy here and we
look after each other. It’s a family.”
The current encampment, a 40-minute walk from
Parliament Hill, was established in December when a local property developer,
the Devcore Group, donated the ice-fishing tents, each with a light, camp bed,
electric blanket and heater.
Devcore’s leaders decided to act after two
deaths at a nearby, makeshift encampment in a city park. Camp dwellers were
burning Purell hand sanitizer in metal buckets to stay warm and using candles
for light.
“We said, ‘This is crazy, we really have to do
something,’” said Jean-Pierre Poulin, the founder and CEO of Devcore and a
minority owner of the Ottawa Senators. Poulin and other company executives
visited the tent city and talked to camp dwellers about their needs.
Drawing on its local business contacts, Poulin
quickly raised $350,000 and received city approval to start Camp Guertin.
Contractors volunteered their time to build and wire it.
Poulin didn’t worry about what level of government was officially
responsible for homelessness. “At the end of the day, I realized it was
everybody’s responsibility and nobody’s responsibility. That’s the problem,” he
said.
At Camp Guertin, insulated fishing tents are
mounted on wooden pallets. A security guard controls who gets inside the fenced
area. Social services have been extended by local authorities. There’s a
bathroom, a large tent where campers socialize, and a warming hut through which
campers rotate on cold days.
To get through the worst nights, Eloe uses
chemical hand warmers inside her sleeping bags to generate heat. She often
wakes up to ice on the inside of her tent.
Eloe poses for a portrait outside of her tent Thursday, Jan. 25, 2024.
“Once I’m in my sleeping bag and under the
blankets, I don’t get out,” she says. “When you get up, you turn on your heater
and get dressed as quickly as possible. You survive.”
Eloe is part of the sad legion of Canadians
who are surviving this winter in tent cities, as homeless encampments have
become a feature of cities across the country.
In Halifax, a tent city has taken root in
Grand Parade, the park in front of city hall.
In Calgary, municipal “joint encampment teams”
responded to more than 6,000 calls from the public last year about issues at
local tent cities. People complained about trespassing, theft, noise, garbage
and discarded needles.
Edmonton cleared dozens of encampments in the
past two months as temperatures plunged to -40C. Vancouver, Prince George,
Calgary, Regina, Kingston and Montreal also conducted eviction operations
during the past year to remove encampments from downtown streets or beneath
bridges.
By the time Vancouver’s East Hastings Street encampment was cleared,
it had grown to hundreds of tents spread out across three city
blocks. Toronto, Ottawa, Hamilton, and Niagara Falls are among the cities
that have passed motions, declaring homelessness an emergency. All have tent
cities.
Federal housing advocate Marie-Josée Houle
calls the spread of encampments in Canada a human rights crisis. Her office
launched a formal review of the encampments last year and issued its final report in early
February.
Houle has called for a national plan to
address homeless encampments involving federal, provincial and municipal
governments.
“There are encampments across the country: in
rural regions, remote regions, and urban centres of all kinds,” Houle said in
an interview. “For me, it shows how far we are from recognizing the human right
to housing. It’s also a physical manifestation of exactly how broken our
housing system is.”
The nation’s encampments are the dangerous and
miserable result of a confluence of hard-to-solve problems.
Now it is tent cities themselves that have
become hard to solve and, as the country descends into the coldest days of
winter, they present civic leaders with difficult questions.
Should the camps be dismantled, or should
municipalities provide tent dwellers basic services to make them safer? Will
that encourage more to take root? Can the complex problems behind the
encampments be addressed?
Or are Canada’s new nylon shantytowns here to
stay?
At Bottom of Link: Interactive Tent City Map
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