“What we would like is for the homeless to also go indoors,” Legault told a press conference ahead of the beginning of the curfew. “There are places set up for them. Especially with the cold, we would like them to be indoors, and there is enough room available.”

Almost immediately, a province-wide chorus of advocates for the unhoused argued this statement was incorrect. After the first night of the curfew, James Hughes, CEO of Old Brewery Mission, one of Montreal’s largest homeless shelters, told the media he’d had to post a “no vacancy” sign — and the same was true for shelters across the city.

The curfew went into effect on Saturday, Jan. 9, and by Monday morning, one unhoused man had already received a $1,550 ticket for being outdoors. Nobody on the street has that kind of money. Those who receive welfare get $726 per month, which goes quickly: even for people not struggling with a costly addiction, everything is more expensive when you have nothing. Yet there was nowhere for unhoused people to go as of 8 p.m. 

Which was apparently why Raphaël André chose to shelter in place in a chemical toilet. That toilet still sits at the corner of Milton and Parc Avenue, across the sidewalk from a lot that has been vacant for decades but whose Toronto landlords have installed tall fences and 24-hour video surveillance to prevent unhoused locals from sitting on its bare ground.

Following André’s death, Legault told a press conference, “I was moved, as is the case for everyone, by the death of Mr. André. This is not a normal situation in such a wealthy society as ours for anyone to die in a chemical toilet.” However, he refused to exempt unhoused people from the curfew, claiming, “If we change the rules and say that you can’t give a ticket to someone who is saying they’re homeless, you may have some people that will pretend to be homeless.”

The exemption of unhoused people from the curfew changed only some facets of their experiences. For one, not all police chose to abide by the judicial decision. To aid unhoused people out after curfew, staff of organizations offering food, shelter or harm reduction help gave authorization slips to their clients who could then show the document to police to prove they were unhoused and seeking some kind of service.

Alexandra Pontbriand is deputy director of Spectre de Rue, a harm-reduction and disease-prevention service operating a supervised drug consumption site at the north end of the Gay Village, immediately east of downtown Montreal. Her organization only has enough funding to operate between 8:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m., so she prepared authorization slips for those using her service to go to CACTUS, another supervised consumption site open at night. “We had papers we gave them saying we at Spectre de Rue confirmed this person is going to access health services under the curfew,” she recalls. “We could give those to people, but people were really afraid. People [told us] police tore up the authorizations we’d given them and gave them tickets or arrested them.” 

Jean-Marc, the Mohawk man who comforted Raphaël André’s niece on the morning of his death, said he heard even unhoused people with authorizations for work had them torn up by police. This concerned him, as he volunteers as a cook at both the Open Door and Resilience shelters. “If I had to work [after curfew],” he says, “I’d have somebody drive me back. That way, if I was with the director, there was no way I would get a ticket.”

Marie-Ève Grenier, a Spectre street worker who has held many roles in the organization, notes that even for those whose authorizations weren’t torn up, carrying a piece of paper formally identifying oneself as a drug user was complicated. “It was super stigmatizing to be out in the street,” Grenier recalls. “You show papers that you’re going to CACTUS? Well, clearly, you’ve got dope on you. It was frightening. People didn’t want to go out with their dope, get arrested and have their dope confiscated. Meanwhile, now the police know you’re someone who consumes injection drugs, and you’re stigmatized in that manner as well.”

The rise of the term “unhoused” to refer to people formerly known as “homeless” reflects an understanding that many people on the street indeed have some form of home. A tent in a tent city surrounded by trusted friends feels like home. The intensity with which dwellers in tent cities around Montreal have fought eviction since the pandemic hints at the extent to which these communities are home to their residents.

Many people on the street have always avoided shelters entirely, with good reason. Amanda Grenier, a professor of social work at the University of Toronto, studied Montreal’s Old Brewery Mission shelter for her 2022 book Late Life Homelessness: Experiences of Disadvantage and Unequal Aging. Particularly for aging people on the street, shelters are often unwelcoming. They are not designed to house people with mobility difficulties, and they offer little in the way of services designed to ease the lives of older people on the street. Moreover, shelters are frightening: Grenier notes that the constancy of violence on the street means many unhoused people expend significant daily effort attempting to avoid being victimized. Prior to the pandemic, shelters were widely regarded as easy places in which to get robbed or catch tuberculosis. But during the pandemic — and especially during the curfew — the option to avoid shelters evaporated. 

In the fall of 2020, the City of Montreal, in conjunction with provincial authorities and the Welcome Hall Mission, moved to convert the upscale Hotel Place Dupuis across from Place Émilie-Gamelin, a significant gathering place for unhoused people on the eastern edge of downtown Montreal, into a 24-hour, 380-bed shelter. It operated as such between Nov. 3, 2020, and June 30, 2021; most of that time was under the curfew. Rather than cramped dormitory housing, residents had individual rooms with individual bathrooms.

Yet a reality of street life is that most people who end up without a place to live do so because of addiction, mental illness or a combination of the two. This was true of Raphaël André. Born in the Innu Nation of Matimekush-Lac John in northwestern Quebec, André was proud of his ancestry but struggled with addiction to alcohol, which had fuelled a hard life of disturbing experiences. In 1988, when he was 18, he accidentally killed his brother-in-law in a drunken brawl and pleaded guilty to manslaughter, serving seven years in a penitentiary. 

Jonathan Lebire, director of frontline outreach organization Comm-Un, spent five years on the street in his teens and twenties. He insists it’s a fundamental mistake to try to tell people with these experiences not to drink or take drugs. Yet this is precisely the expectation of almost all Montreal shelters, including Hotel Place Dupuis when it was open. A ban on alcohol and drugs in shelters makes sense: alcohol, in particular, and stimulants like meth and crack, can fuel volatile and unpredictable behaviour, leading to violence. Allowing such substances into shelters immediately increases the demands on those running the shelters: there’s more need for security, and employees have to be trained to deal with drugs, alcohol and addiction. No shelter has extra money to invest in those expenses.