Nothing for granted

>> The director of the Old Brewery Mission says there is a lot to fear for the future

by ROBERT J. WARREN

In the April 26 issue of the Mirror, columnist Kristian Gravenor recounted his experiences undercover at the Old Brewery Mission. Robert J. Warren, the shelter's executive director, responds.

In his column in the Mirror, Kristian Gravenor refers to our second floor as consisting of "a series of small rooms with thin plastic mattresses on the floor." Fifty years ago, the Old Brewery Mission was the target of another journalist who came in, pretending to be a homeless man. The resulting article in the Gazette caused a certain amount of concern among the citizens of Montreal. Apparently, the tone of voice used by our staff was judged to be rough and our servings to be small and not very nourishing.

More recently, the Globe and Mail took a very different approach, declaring that the homeless people of Toronto were largely undeserving of the care they received or the spare change they received on street corners. The tone of the Globe series was snotty and superior and the homeless people described therein were largely unrecognizable to anybody who works with homeless people in Toronto--so we don't always relish the thought of a disguised journalist standing in the line-up outside the Mission. I found, however, that Gravenor's article was colourful and even instructive for those of us who've never lined up for a meal at the Mission. I thought I'd correct him on one point, however.

Our second floor consists, in fact, of three large dormitories with 153 overnight beds for our younger clients (under 50 years of age). With the exception of eight mattresses in our two Isolation Rooms, all of our beds are either single beds or bunk-beds with mattresses, fresh sheets and blankets. The three principal men's shelters in Montreal (the Old Brewery Mission, La Maison du Père and the Welcome Hall Mission) offering overnight accommodation to transient men all have raised beds with sheets and blankets as the standard offering.

This is not something we should take for granted. In other Canadian cities the mat on the floor has become the standard. I have had occasion to visit some of these shelters and have left the premises disagreeably moved by the disorganization of the accomodations, the smell of the buildings and the state of the kitchens and the food they served up. Many of these shelters enjoy a degree of municipal or provincial support that we in Montreal could only daydream about. Our bunk-beds at the Mission are, in fact, of our own design and construction (which makes us a little grumpy when a wandering reporter describes our accommodations as consisting of mattresses on the floor!).

We are on the very edge of a truly terrible Toronto-style crisis in Montreal, which we have managed to stave off because our old-fashioned private shelters are still reasonably viable. And yet the Old Brewery Mission has gone from 110 beds to 450 beds (overnight beds and resident beds, men and women) in slightly more than 10 years. We have been faced this winter with overflow crowds of between 30 and 40 men sleeping on chairs in our cafeteria. There's an awful lot to fear for the future.

Government and corporate indifference

The bright lights of Santé Quebec could decide to preside over the closure of even more psychiatric beds in Montreal, committing a further group of people to a cycle of homelessness and dependence on overnight shelter when what they really need is a hospital bed or supervised social housing. The City of Montreal could continue to maintain the naïve belief that its principal shelters (private charities in the case of the three men's shelters in Montreal) will always find enough donors to fund their programs and take care of their clients with only modest city support.

As well, the Old Brewery Mission relies on a collection of faithful individual donors and a few foundations. The corporate sponsorship of shelters dealing with adult male homelessness is very low--and this in an age when our governments are holding out the hope that business, shoulder-to-shoulder with private charity, will fill in the vacuum created by the neglect of health care and social services by organs of government.

I'd like to offer a note of appreciation to our front-desk staff at the Mission who come off rather well, I think, in Gravenor's article. As he is directed to the showers, the journalist is treated politely. As he is leaving the Mission, the staff member who unlocks the door for him calls him "Sir." We have a very difficult clientele at the Mission--frequently those who've been barred elsewhere or who've shown up too late at another shelter. Sometimes they're not at all sober, but it's cold outside and we know there's nowhere else for them to go. To strike the appropriate balance between being kind and maintaining good order in a very large group of homeless men who need to be fed, showered, interviewed, occasionally searched and finally bedded-down for the night is not always easy to do. It's a tough and indelicate place to work.

Many of our aggressive younger men are in the grips of their first frank psychosis. We do our best with them and we are conscious, with not a little bitterness, that we are doing somebody else's job--somebody who has training in the care of disturbed souls and minds but who was laid off in the last round of cuts. Our older guys who have fallen on hard times are not only the victims of alcohol dependence or psychiatric illness but also familial neglect and institutional neglect. They've spent their day being ignored on the streets, sometimes frankly insulted or even jostled out of the way. That they would have a decent bed to sleep in is the least we can do. And that a younger man in the employ of the Old Brewery Mission would address one of them as "Sir" is a small but nonetheless important formality.