Planes, Trains and Automobiles: Homeless Cosby and Dog Lady

Yesterday an old homeless black man wearing an 80's Cosby-style sweater who was either drunk, high or has a serious speech impediment walked up to me, within 6 inches of my face, and muttered in a droning throaty slur, "Est-ce que vous voulez savoir quelque chose?"

The funny thing is that the sweater and the droning throaty slur really made me feel as though Bill Cosby had learned French, moved to Montreal, become homeless and had just asked me if I wanted to know something.

Without answering, I looked at him for a moment and then walked around him and laughed for a block and a half.

Two weeks ago today, I was walking on a street that had been closed for an art festival. I was admiring the works and enjoying the street activity when I noticed something strange out of the corner of my eye. An older homeless woman was squatting above some grates around a tree planted at side-walk level, holding on to the tree to help keep her balance as she urinated not just in public, but very publicly at 3 pm, on a Saturday during an art festival on a street that was packed full of pedestrians. She then participated in a match of wits with a local.

It went something like this, but in French:

Local man: What are you a dog?
Woman: You want me to be a dog don't you? You're a dog. What else can I do?

She then calmly put her old lady pad back on, pulled up her stretch pants and walked proudly to her pile-o'-junk in front of a closed store.

Montreal has a serious homelessness problem. New York, London, Paris and Toronto don't even come close to Montreal in this regard and are all much larger cities. Maybe the larger cities just pack up their homeless and haul them off to prison or the suburbs or something, but seriously you can't walk three blocks or into a metro station here without being accosted by someone for money, often quite aggressively. My experience in Toronto is that the homeless rarely approach or speak to people walking by and generally avoid tourist areas (I'm guessing the police are most likely to harass them in those areas). As a tourist in New York, London and Paris I rarely saw homeless people begging at all, my assumption is that in these much larger cities begging in tourist areas is not dealt with lightly.

I guess what it boils down to is that I'm both annoyed and saddened by the problem in this city. The older homeless seem to be universally and perpetually drunk, but there are also a lot of young people on the street many of whom seem to speak English. Something must attract them to Montreal. Maybe there is a lack of services here to actively get people off the street and off of alcohol and drugs. Maybe the programs which feed or clothe the homeless are so successful that they are actually attracting young people from other parts of the country to live on the streets here. Maybe homelessness support groups here believe that homelessness and begging are valid lifestyles and that drug and alcohol abuse are sad but inevitable and pressure the police and local governments to leave the homeless alone.

I'm not well educated on the topic but when it comes to homelessness I think there are probably four main factors involved in the histories of most homeless people: alcohol abuse, drug abuse, mental illness and physical/sexual/verbal abuse. Perhaps people who are more liberal than I am feel that you can't force a person to seek to improve their lives, but I really feel that programs that address those problems are needed. Feeding the homeless is necessary but if that is all that is done it only serves to keep people homeless indefinitely. If good programs existed and people continued to live on the street I can deal with that but not trying to help seems wrong to me. And though it may seem harsh, I don't think that public drunkenness, public drug or alcohol use or begging should be tolerated by the police. If I did any of those things I would get a ticket or be arrested. Is it fair that these things should be overlooked when done by the homeless?

Perhaps the people of Montreal don't mind the homelessness that pervades their city. Maybe they are willing to live with it. That is their choice. Personally, I don't like to be accosted by drunk people for money whenever I go somewhere or to be constantly unsure of my personal security after the sun goes down.

Maybe I'm a snob, or naive or even a bit conservative but I really don't think that tolerating the problem helps anyone.

Keep on Tranglin,
Anthony.