In Labrador, those who care for a town’s homeless population face backlash and criticism
HAPPY VALLEY-GOOSE BAY, NL – On a recent spring day in a sandy parking lot near a church in Labrador, Vanessa Hamel stopped mid-sentence to lean out of a food truck window and wave to an approaching group of people.
“What are you doing?” she sang to them laughing. They waved and smiled back.
She pulled her head back into the truck — the local Salvation Army for disaster relief — and began collecting bags of ham sandwiches, juices, and snacks to hand out to them. They are homeless and sometimes get a little extra, says Hamel, who works as a social worker at the church.
A church that offers food to those who cannot afford it is generally unremarkable. But in Happy Valley-Goose Bay, NL, it has become controversial. Hamel’s trusted clients include the homeless and transient who live along the forest trails that wind through town. Their numbers have risen from a few dozen to more than 80 in recent years. As governments and organizations scramble to find a way to house and care for them, the community has become divided over what will work and whether help is available at all. must be provided.
“We’ve been accused of enabling them,” Byron Kean, the church’s superintendent, said in an interview. He said some people yelled at them as they handed out meals. “There are individuals that will flip us the bird,” he said. “But if people need a meal, we’re going to provide a meal.”
Happy Valley-Goose Bay extends from the banks of the Churchill River, a great expanse of swirling water that bisects central Labrador. The city is home to about 8,000 people. On a recent spring Saturday, there were joggers, bikers, and people riding ATVs on the community’s vast trail network.
There is evidence of people living in the woods along the trails in some areas: crumpled sails, empty food and beer boxes, and extinguished fire pits. More and more young men live among them and they are more aggressive, Kean said. They steal from local stores, run onto the roads and break into people’s homes, he said.
Families have woken up to find strangers in their homes and garages “come to (them),” Kean said. “And that’s scary.”
As of 2021, the provincial government has assembled response teams consisting of representatives from the city, the RCMP and the region’s three indigenous groups. In March, the province earmarked $30 million for a new emergency shelter with 30 rooms, 20 transitional housing rooms and 20 affordable assisted living units. It would also offer addiction and mental health support, as well as cultural programming – many of the city’s homeless people come from Indigenous communities along Labrador’s north coast.
But even that plan is divisive. Happy Valley Goose Bay Mayor George Andrews said in a recent interview that he and other residents are concerned that the facility will only attract more people to live on the trails.
“The majority of whom and what we see that concerns us from a public safety perspective are not homeless,” he said. “It’s people who have come into our community for a short period of time to come to a hospital appointment, whatever, and they’ve decided to stay.”
Officials from the county’s housing corporation said on Saturday that housing construction is underway.
Andrews said the city’s concern is public safety. The city council asked for more police and removed public benches along the bike paths because people gathered around them. The RCMP added more patrols and the county allocated nearly $500,000 for the city to hire private security services. The guards will be partially deployed near a local school, where the mayor said people on the trails have exposed themselves to children.
Jeff Matthews is frustrated by the objections to the new housing facility and by what he says is a lack of empathy and understanding.
Matthews is the coordinator of the city’s Housing Hub, an accessible shelter run by the government of Nunatsiavut, the Inuit government of northern Labrador. The Hub can accommodate about 10 people, Matthews said. If there are more, the Newfoundland and Labrador Housing Corporation will place them in the nearby Labrador Inn.
“If you look at the fundamentals of human development, we need housing first and foremost. Housing, food, love,” he said in a recent interview. “There are a lot of broken pieces here. And I think the public really needs to understand the importance of educating themselves about what addiction is and what trauma is.
Matthews and Bill Dormody, who run the Labrador Inn, said people are accusing the inn’s staff of “enabling” the transient population. In contrast, Dormody said he and his staff house and care for people with complex mental health and addiction issues. They regularly intervene in suicide attempts, some of which still haunt them, Dormody said in an interview.
Two winters ago, two people died outside in the cold — a man outside the Hub and a woman outside the inn.
Matthews said many of the people who live at the Hub, the inn or the trails are descended from survivors of the county’s residential schools, the last of which closed only in 1980. Matthews is Inuk and his maternal grandparents are residential schools. school survivors, he said.
Inuit communities along Labrador’s northern coast – and across Canada – are plagued by housing shortages and overcrowding. Some transient and homeless people in Happy Valley-Goose Bay have left unsafe or nonexistent housing in those communities, he said.
And there are few services in northern Labrador. “We have a number of clients with mental health issues,” said Matthews. “It’s safer for them to be in a homeless environment in Goose Bay than to be in their home community with a home and without the mental health services.”
Back at the Salvation Army, Kean said the new housing facility would be a “right step” to address short-term needs and part of what is needed to find long-term solutions.
“But we need to somehow speed up the process a little bit to make sure no more lives are lost in Happy Valley-Goose Bay,” he said.
This report from The Canadian Press was first published on June 18, 2023.
