Cops and beggars

The Quebec government may just be
getting serious about the homeless,
but police have to play catch-up

TICKET TARGET: Asleep in Berri Square

It was a long time coming, and there’s a long road left to go, but the province’s homeless and social housing advocates are welcoming a new report delivered to the National Assembly last week. The report on homelessness, drawn up by the Commission de la santé et services sociaux, took about a year and a half from its first public consultation to its completion, but its scope is wide-ranging and its recommendations sound, to many, sensible.

Among them: the adoption and implementation of an inter-ministerial homeless policy as quickly as possible; more social housing and networks that support them; more and regular money for organizations that work with the homeless; and creating a better balance between catching the homeless in a never-ending judicial system loop and improving neighbourly relations. The commission also wants the Institut de la statistique du Québec to update its estimate of the number of homeless in the province. The current guess is around 30,000 for the province, with between two-thirds and three-quarters living in Montreal.

The commission’s overriding goal, says its president, West Island Liberal MNA Geoffrey Kelley, was “to find out what’s needed. There are a lot of questions relating to policy and funding.” The commission also wanted to find out which government department does what and how well. Kelley says the sheer scope of the problem is a major challenge, with at least 10 government departments and agencies holding a stake in the homeless issue. “We want to know how to better coordinate them.”

The report has generally been welcomed by the same activists who for years have urged the government to adopt a cohesive, comprehensive homeless policy. André Trépanier of the Réseau Solidarité Itinérance du Québec [RSIQ] calls the report “encouraging. It’s encouraging because it involved all four parties in the National Assembly [Liberal, PQ, ADQ and Québec Solidaire’s Amir Khadir], and they came up with a unanimous statement that homelessness needs to be addressed as soon as possible.” François Saillant of social housing group FRAPRU says the report is “very, very good. We see there is a necessity for a global policy, and not just an action plan.”

But for Bernard St-Jacques of the Réseau d’aide aux personnes seules et itinérants [RAPSIM], the report has a large hole about police relations with the homeless that needs to be addressed. And just days after the report was delivered, that hole was, coincidentally. The Commission des droits de la personne et des droits de la jeunesse [CDPDJQ] released a separate report on Tuesday, Nov. 10, that criticized the Montreal police for its profiling practices, including social profiling of marginalized youth. These same youths, says St-Jacques, are often also homeless, so the two commissions have some overlap.

“We’ve been waiting five years for the commission to address this reprehensible practice of the judicial system,” says St-Jacques. The main issue he says is the ticketting of homeless youth, who have little money and often less disposition to paying them. Eventually, the system catches up to them and the kids more often than not wind up in a detention centre. St-Jacques says the CDPDJQ report exposes a “negative aspect” of the “otherwise excellent” homeless report.

St-Jacques and Kelley are both in agreement that the current policy of ticketting homeless people of any age is counterproductive. But while Kelley doesn’t think the solution lies in a general amnesty for homeless people with outstanding tickets as St-Jacques does, he does say that police need to be better trained.