Murder in
the park

>> A homeless man’s death
kills off a city experiment

by PATRICK LEJTENYI

The city-sanctioned squat that ended in a murder on the afternoon of Monday, August 12, was touted as either an interesting pilot project, a misguided attempt at tolerance or a bad idea from the start, depending on whom you ask. The police, the city and the media have come down hard on the itinerant residents of Viger Park after a 43-year-old man was beaten to death last week. After letting three distinct groups use the park as a home for the summer-gay prostitutes in the east, older homeless men in the centre, and young punk-types in the west-all were booted out in the early morning hours of Aug. 13. The rationale behind it was public security.

But if you ask the people who dealt with the reality of the situation on the ground, kicking the homeless there out was not only unfair, but unproductive. “You don’t evict everyone from a building where there has been a murder,” says Marianne Tonnelier, director of Cactus, a needle exchange and social service centre in Centre-sud. “Eviction is the easy option. [The authorities] think that because there are shelters, there’s an obligation to put them in dormitories where conditions aren’t really that good.”

The park was also an easy place to find Cactus clients. City officials say the park was called home by between 100 and 150 itinerants of all ages, some of whom, but certainly far from all, according to Tonnelier, were regular hard drug users. Now that the homeless have been scattered, it makes the interventions by social workers that much harder.

“There were people with problems,” Tonnelier says, “and street workers regularly went to see both the older men and the younger ones. It was a way both to help those groups and to promote tolerance between them. It was a way for us to have more influence, and to create an entente between the city, the police and the homeless groups. We felt that as long as they are there, we should at least make [living conditions] tolerable.”

Oasis dries up

City officials have long been aware of the tradition the concrete and brick park has held as an oasis of seclusion for some of the city’s homeless, and by and large it has been more or less peaceful. This summer, however, the park saw an influx of younger itinerants, some from small-town Quebec but others from out-of-province and the States. In response to the increase in numbers, the city implemented a hands-off policy towards the park in cooperation with the police, says mayoral aide Darren Becker.

“”The police, the administration and the borough council all agreed to this,” he says, “because it was a way for the community organizations to get to them.”

But the optimism didn’t last. “A man was killed in the central part in broad daylight, and there were other reports of violence,” says Becker. “The murder was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and the police closed the park for public security and for investigation purposes.” The police enforced a bylaw that forbade occupation of the park from between midnight and 6 a.m. Those who don’t respect the law will be fined $100 plus costs. Around 2 o’clock on the morning of Aug. 13, about 12 hours after the murder, public works officials carted off the couches and mattresses the young squatters set up along St-Denis, across from the Vidéotron building. All that remains now of a city experiment for the homeless is graffiti.

But whenever the city gets involved in anything, politics gets in the way. No sooner had the murder and eviction happened did Robert Laramée, the Team Bourque city councillor for St-Jacques and acting president of the Ville-Marie borough, which includes Viger Park, start accusing the city of neglect and starving the borough for funds. Late last week, Laramée called on the city to use some of the $3-million it recuperated from organized crime to help deal with its effects: namely, drug addiction and violence.

“We want the administration to use a portion of that money to invest in the city, to help victims of organized crime,” says Daniel St-Louis, Laramée’s communications director. “These problems are a fall-out of that kind of activity.” Laramée asked for about half-a-million dollars; on Monday night, the mayor turned him down.

Helping out or giving up?

Lack of resources is a chronic problem for street workers from the CLSCs, Cactus, Spectre de rue and L’Anonyme who work with the young and old at Viger Park. St-Louis says the borough-not the city-chipped in over $200,000 this year to social services because the city wouldn’t. Becker responds by saying that after the murder, Louise O’Sullivan Boyne, a member of the city’s executive council, met with members of street worker groups and formed a task force that, in conjunction with police, would ensure proper follow-up on questions of shelter, support, public security and other pilot projects designed for the homeless. “We won’t be abandoning these people,” he says.

But having sanctioned a makeshift home in the middle of the city, says Father Robert Warren, director of the Old Brewery Mission, the city already has. He was appalled by the appearance of the Viger Park squat because, to him, it appeared the city had given up on finding solutions to the homeless problem. Rather than working towards a solution, he says, the city has tacitly admitted that they are no longer willing or able to expand Montreal’s existing shelters.

“It’s quite clear to me that the situation was heading for trouble,” says Warren. “Why would the city stand by and watch it going on? Montreal should never do what Toronto has done, which has become so cash-strapped that they tolerate a tent city of the homeless right next to the Don Valley Parkway. It’s just wrong.”

While Warren recognizes that many homeless people prefer to sleep outside during the summer, he says that “The city shouldn’t normalize it, as you would with a so-called tolerance zone. It will eventually turn on you, which is what happened here.” Warren does admit that the issue of squats is extremely divisive among social workers, some of whom are opposed to them, such as himself, and those who are more sympathetic.

Marianne Tonnelier of Cactus, however, doesn’t say whether she condones them or not-that’s not her job. Rather, she would just like to ensure that her organization and others like it are taken seriously when discussing the problem. That, she says, didn’t happen when the cops kicked the squatters out.

“We were not alerted to the eviction,” she says. “We were led to believe that we had the same weight as other partners in the city, such as the police, who were to collaborate on finding solutions on how to improve the situation. I guess that was naïveté on our part.”

The homeless, young and old, have since moved on to another park, although street workers would not reveal its location. As for the murder, police have not released the victim’s name and, as of press time, have not yet made an arrest. “The investigation is ongoing,” says Constable Christian Émond. :